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Entry tags:
Teaching + AI
I recently had to submit an undergraduate teaching report, and I thought I'd share some of it in case anyone is interested in challenges relating to student preparedness after the pandemic and the opportunities presented by AI technologies.
Please comment on students’ skill levels and preparation levels for your courses post-pandemic.
The undergraduate students in my literature classes are, for the most part, wonderful. They’re sweet and talented kids who mean well, and they’re doing their best. Unfortunately, they have a lot of trouble reading.
What I mean by “they have trouble reading” is that they struggle to complete even short and simple assignments based on reading comprehension. When I ask them to read textual passages out loud during class, they stumble over sentences with more than one clause. In addition, the level of their vocabulary is far from where I’d like it to be. Their media literacy skills are also surprisingly low, and they have trouble distinguishing tone, humor, and irony, even when the context is explained. I understand that literary analysis is a skill that requires time, care, and attention to develop, but most of my students seem to be operating at a middle-school reading level.
I’m mildly dyslexic, so I have a lot of sympathy for people who have trouble reading. That being said, it’s almost as if everyone is mildly dyslexic now. It’s not that they’re lazy, or bad students – it’s just that they seem to have trouble reading. There are exceptions, of course, but this is true across an extremely diverse range of undergraduates from a variety of backgrounds.
It’s not my place to try to understand where this is coming from, but it’s a trend I’ve noticed developing over the past several years. Since it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, I’ve actually been doing a lot of experimenting with AI tools to help make reading and writing easier for students.
Please comment on whether – and, if so, how – AI has had an impact on your teaching. Are there particular ways you have found AI useful or challenging in the teaching mission?
I was extremely annoyed when I first noticed that students were submitting papers written with heavy assistance from ChatGPT and Sudowrite in Fall 2022, and I still feel hurt and betrayed when someone submits an assignment that they clearly played no part in creating. Once you know what the text generated by LLM programs looks like, it’s very easy to identify. I have a standard email that I send to students who submit machine-generated work, along with a standard guide for how I identify machine-generated writing. I don’t have the time or resources to challenge students, but hopefully I can help them be more aware of what they’re doing.
Although I have no patience for plagiarized assignments, AI tools do have their uses. Since I teach classes about reading and writing, I feel that it’s part of my job to connect students with tools that make reading and writing easier. Over the course of the semester, I use classroom technology to give live demonstrations of various writing assistance tools and speech-to-text apps, as well as programs that work directly with PDF files to summarize text and “translate” it into more accessible formats. The goal is to make reading and writing easier and more enjoyable with fewer barriers.
While I understand that “learning styles” aren’t real in any meaningful sense, it’s good to have variety, and I’ve found that many students respond well to visualizations. One fun category of classroom discussion that never fails to be engaging involves playing with machine-generated images produced by a variety of models. So, for example, I’ll pull up a site like NightCafe or DreamStudio and ask students to give me textual prompts to describe characters, settings, and scenes from the stories we read. Sometimes we’ll experiment with music, voice, and video generators as well. This technology is currently in an interesting place. It’s sophisticated enough to be fun to look at (or listen to), but it’s still janky enough to be amusing and nonthreatening.
In any case, if ChatGPT and its ilk can adequately summarize data and generate passable nonfiction writing in the time it takes to snap your fingers, it’s important to teach students about both the potential and the limitations of these technologies while empowering them with concrete demonstrations of what they can bring to their work as individual human beings.
Please comment on students’ skill levels and preparation levels for your courses post-pandemic.
The undergraduate students in my literature classes are, for the most part, wonderful. They’re sweet and talented kids who mean well, and they’re doing their best. Unfortunately, they have a lot of trouble reading.
What I mean by “they have trouble reading” is that they struggle to complete even short and simple assignments based on reading comprehension. When I ask them to read textual passages out loud during class, they stumble over sentences with more than one clause. In addition, the level of their vocabulary is far from where I’d like it to be. Their media literacy skills are also surprisingly low, and they have trouble distinguishing tone, humor, and irony, even when the context is explained. I understand that literary analysis is a skill that requires time, care, and attention to develop, but most of my students seem to be operating at a middle-school reading level.
I’m mildly dyslexic, so I have a lot of sympathy for people who have trouble reading. That being said, it’s almost as if everyone is mildly dyslexic now. It’s not that they’re lazy, or bad students – it’s just that they seem to have trouble reading. There are exceptions, of course, but this is true across an extremely diverse range of undergraduates from a variety of backgrounds.
It’s not my place to try to understand where this is coming from, but it’s a trend I’ve noticed developing over the past several years. Since it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, I’ve actually been doing a lot of experimenting with AI tools to help make reading and writing easier for students.
Please comment on whether – and, if so, how – AI has had an impact on your teaching. Are there particular ways you have found AI useful or challenging in the teaching mission?
I was extremely annoyed when I first noticed that students were submitting papers written with heavy assistance from ChatGPT and Sudowrite in Fall 2022, and I still feel hurt and betrayed when someone submits an assignment that they clearly played no part in creating. Once you know what the text generated by LLM programs looks like, it’s very easy to identify. I have a standard email that I send to students who submit machine-generated work, along with a standard guide for how I identify machine-generated writing. I don’t have the time or resources to challenge students, but hopefully I can help them be more aware of what they’re doing.
Although I have no patience for plagiarized assignments, AI tools do have their uses. Since I teach classes about reading and writing, I feel that it’s part of my job to connect students with tools that make reading and writing easier. Over the course of the semester, I use classroom technology to give live demonstrations of various writing assistance tools and speech-to-text apps, as well as programs that work directly with PDF files to summarize text and “translate” it into more accessible formats. The goal is to make reading and writing easier and more enjoyable with fewer barriers.
While I understand that “learning styles” aren’t real in any meaningful sense, it’s good to have variety, and I’ve found that many students respond well to visualizations. One fun category of classroom discussion that never fails to be engaging involves playing with machine-generated images produced by a variety of models. So, for example, I’ll pull up a site like NightCafe or DreamStudio and ask students to give me textual prompts to describe characters, settings, and scenes from the stories we read. Sometimes we’ll experiment with music, voice, and video generators as well. This technology is currently in an interesting place. It’s sophisticated enough to be fun to look at (or listen to), but it’s still janky enough to be amusing and nonthreatening.
In any case, if ChatGPT and its ilk can adequately summarize data and generate passable nonfiction writing in the time it takes to snap your fingers, it’s important to teach students about both the potential and the limitations of these technologies while empowering them with concrete demonstrations of what they can bring to their work as individual human beings.
no subject
It’s true. It’s so true. I don’t want to be condescending. I don’t think people should have to “learn by osmosis.” And honestly, as a lazy and complacent PC user, there’s a lot about iOS and Linux systems that I don’t understand. It took me two solid years of using Photoshop every day before I figured out some of its most basic functions.
But I sometimes I wonder how you can be a senior in college and not understand the concept of “folders” or “email attachments.” If this didn’t cause problems, I wouldn’t care. But, as you can imagine, it causes problems.
Anyway... There are definitely better ways to teach History, I agree. But man. Being familiar with names and dates is also important. In every single one of my classes, I have to teach the Pacific War from scratch, and it’s exhausting. Even if you don’t learn anything else about the twentieth century, I feel like you should probably know what Hiroshima is and the year that happened by the time you graduate from high school.
I mean, a lot of my students aren’t American, but still. World War II is a big deal. It makes me wonder what other basic history they’re missing.
no subject
ahem. special interests.
(I will admit, I am a medieval history major and I am abysmal at, like, anything post 1600 unless it's Regency in which case I have Opinions, but even I manage to know major dates for many wars and significant events.)
no subject
I'm trying to learn more about medieval European architecture, but every book I pick up that isn't a super-specific academic monograph (about, like, the cornices of a single cathedral in Germany) reads like a list of names and dates completely devoid of cultural context. There's no way that a non-specialist like me can actually learn or remember anything from that sort of presentation.
If you've ever gone off on the recent resurgence of fascination with the Roman Empire, I'd love to read your thoughts. I'd love to read your thoughts on historical Neoclassicism too! No pressure to dig up links to old blog entries, but I thought I'd ask in case you have a dedicated tag.
...lmao at my assumption that of course you'd have a dedicated tag for Neoclassicism. Bunch of nerds down here in this comment section smh.
no subject
My bookshelf might have something for the architecture. I'll take a look!