I carve out one hour every Wednesday morning to catch up on the latest research and news on educational technology and pedagogy (my Educational Wednesdays). Whenever possible, I use this time to log in and experience the technology first hand.
ChatGPT has popped up in many of my circles, between fellow instructional designers and technologists, faculty and graduate student instructors, and even my friends and family. Artificial intelligence (AI) and generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) have been around for a long time — think spelling and grammar checks and the suggested words on your smartphone while texting. But now, engineers have pulled back the curtain and are letting users directly interact with the underlying AI language mode.
This week, I decided to dive in and see what it’s all about. I started a conversation with ChatGPT with a question that has been on the top of my mind recently. “Could you share some research that support the effectiveness of inclusive teaching practices in higher ed?”
While this is a great start, did you notice how ChatGPT mentioned research and studies but didn’t share any links to them? So I asked ChatGPT a follow up question: “Can you include links to these publications?” And it did not disappoint.
ChatGPT aims to sound like a casual human conversation, but the company behind ChatGPT (OpenAI) acknowledges that sometimes ChatGPT’s say things that are nonsensical and incorrect. As I read through people’s experiences and analysis of using ChatGPT, a few key limitations came up over and over again:
It is not trained on any data after 2021, so it is not privy to current events or more recent content.
While it is great at finding information for you, it can get some of the details wrong. Always check the details and primary sources!
It is not always easy to get the primary sources where the information was originally found to double check accuracy.
Next, I decided to ask ChatGPT a more nuanced question to see how it would respond: “Is teaching with ChatGPT inclusive?”
There is still a lot I don’t know about ChatGPT —or how it will shape the educational landscape. Carving out the intentional time to have a conversation with the new AI tool was important to see for myself what it is doing and its potential. AI is not going to replace knowledge workers anytime soon — it still gets a lot of details wrong and is only a starting point. However, it does not seem to provide an amazing starting point that human can correct, decipher, analyze, and iterate on to find the information you need or produce higher quality writing.
While I was exploring AI tools, I couldn’t help but also check out the AI generative art tool DALL·E. The image at the beginning of this post was actually produced by DALL·E, although it also didn’t get it quite right at first. Here is my first attempt to ask DALL·E to generate an image of a cartoon cat speaking to a robot.
With a little more iterative details, I was able to retrieve the image (which is shared at the start of this post). And yes, I did ask ChatGPT “What are some quick ways to make teaching inclusive without adding a lot of work on the instructor?”. It’s a good list, but notice that it doesn’t take in mention class size, types of discipline, school grade, or course format (seminar, discussion sections, labs, etc).
Special thanks to Nate Jacobs for your contributions to this article!
Additional Readings and Resources
Teaching and Learning with Artificial Intelligence Apps, from University of Calgary’s Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning.
Thinking about including AI in your class, check out the guiding questions to help you with conversations with your students around generative AI and adapting assignments.
Educator Considerations for ChatGPT
OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT shares information about their AI engine and considerations to help educators start to think about the use of AI engine in education.
4 Steps to Help You Plan for ChatGPT in Your Classroom, from The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Instructional designer and technology-enabled teaching expert, Flower Darby discusses why instructors should get to know AI, even if they don’t plan to use it in their teaching. Her considerations include that ChatGPT is here to stay (think smartphone uses) and helping students understand ethnical uses of AI to help them with their learning.
ChatGPT by Open AI
Try ChatGPT yourself! It is free to create an account, however you might not be able to log in and use ChatGPT if too many people are signed in and using the system. Previous ChatGPT conversations are automatically saved with the option for you to delete them.
Poe, available on iOS devices (iPhone, iPads)
A more user friendly way to get instant answers and have back and forth conversations with AI. Poe is powered by OpenAI and Anthropic.
Getting the best out of AI by Thomas Garbelotti, HumTech
A thoughtful blog post, by our colleagues at HumTech, with insights on how ChatGPT can be used to elevate the quality of the learning process.
What’s all the buzz about ChatGPT? CEILS Ed Talk (45 mins video)
Jess Gregg shows snippets of her conversations with ChatGPT and offers inflections points in higher education, such as academic integrity and how to prepare students to critically use these tools for the future.
EDUCAUSE Quick Poll Results: Did ChatGPT Write This Report?
EDUCAUSE polled faculty, administrative staff, and instructional support staff in January 2023 to get a pulse of the community’s feelings on ChatGPT. The results showed that most people are familiar or have heard of ChatGPT and some are quite optimistic about the tool.
AI Articles on ChatGPT and Education, curated by instructional designer, Dr. Heather M. Brown
(It might take the page a while to load).
ChatGPT: A Must See Before the Semester Begins, by Cynthia Alby
An honest look at ChatGPT by a Professor of Teaching Education at Georgia College, Cynthia offers insights on using tools like ChatGPT to push students to different methods of developing foundational knowledge, while letting the AI do the heavy lifting.