Using GenAI as a Teacher

Educator Uses

GenAI can be used by educators to help them design and develop their courses. Ethan Mollick, an Associate Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania who studies the impact of GenAI in education has written this highly readable article Using AI to make teaching easier & more impactful where he suggests five (5) ways in which educators may use GenAI in their work.

Here are some broad categories where generative AI may be useful to you as an instructor:

• Syllabus: Tell the GenAI (ChatGPT would be a good choice for this one) some parameters for your course’s pedagogy (e.g., I would like to scaffold all assignments and ensure there are opportunities for peer learning). Then ask the GenAI to take you through the steps of creating a syllabus that matches this pedagogy, requesting your input to customize the syllabus to your class context along the way.
• Lesson Plan: You can ask the GenAI (e.g., ChatGPT) to create a lesson plan to help teach a concept using specified pedagogy. You can also simply ask the GenAI for an idea for a class activity to suit your audience and the learning objective. It can inspire some new learning activities in your class.
• Examples: One of the most challenging aspects of teaching is to find good examples of a concept. You can ask the GenAI (ChatGPT would be a good one to use here) to generate a few examples of a concept you plan to use in class. These examples can be used in your lecture, or they can be used to help learners gain an understanding of the concept through Inductive Learning (where you give learners a few examples and ask them to extract the commonalities to define that concept). Or, consider asking the GenAI to create three examples of essays (simulated sample student work): one that is excellent, one where the student is developing, and one that is sub-standard. Then give these examples to students and ask them to create a rubric to assess the work based on what they observe about these three examples. This will help students understand what excellent work looks-like. It also doesn’t require you to approach past students who created substandard work and ask them to share their essays for this assignment…
• Quiz or Problem Sets: You can ask the GenAI to generate a few problem sets or quiz questions – complete with solutions and answer keys – to help learners practice applying a concept they recently learned.
• Rubric: You can ask the GenAI (e.g., ChatGPT) to help you create a rubric that can be used to assess an assignment using criteria you specify and suggesting others.
• Images: To support your slides and text, ask an GenAI image generator (e.g., DALL-E) to create original artwork. If you teach a topic where the illustration can help students understand (e.g., how an enzyme binds to a substrate), consider using the image to increase understanding, not just to make the slide more visually interesting.
• Translation: Certain GenAI tools, like Power Point Live, can live transcribe a lecture in a variety of languages, helping learners who are not native English speakers to follow a lecture more easily.
• Brainstorming Class Activities and Assessments: Confronted with the challenge of generative AI you may be looking for new ways to teach a concept or skill, or new ways to assess a learning outcome. Generative AI can provide customized suggestions for interactive and engaging classroom activities (e.g. suggest six different interactive ways I could teach an auto-ethnographic research method to a third year, online class of 60 students in Sociology), as well as assessments that either incorporate generative AI or make generative AI less likely to be used.
• Generating  Explanations:  It can be challenging sometimes to describe a concept at many different levels of complexity. Some courses – especially those with no prerequisites – may have a range of experience and abilities in the class. Using generative AI tools you can quickly develop (and then check for accuracy) multiple explanations for a course concept. You could even have these explanations be written in unique and memorable ways – like, explain the carbon cycle in a limerick or describe the Canadian political parties as characters on the Simpsons.
• Perspective: Generative AI tools like ChatGPT can take on different personas by prompting – for instance, you could ask the tool to “pretend you are a heart surgeon” or “act like you are the Prime Minister”. In assigning this persona, the generative AI tool will produce text written as if from that position. This kind of role can be useful in inviting unique perspectives into a class discussion, or providing a provocative counter point.

The more specific the prompt given to the GenAI in these requests (e.g., specifying the audience, learning outcomes, pedagogy, etc.), the better the output. However, expect that in nearly all cases, the GenAI will be used as a “brainstorming tool” that may inspire your own work but will likely not be specific enough to be used as is.

Faculty Focus published a wonderful article, which includes specific prompts, that educators may use to help them in their work.

Attributions