What might ChatGPT mean for higher education?

welcome everybody Welcome To The Future Trends Forum I'm delighted to see so many of you here today we have a very very important and vital topic and a lot to discuss today we're going to be diving into one aspect of Automation and its impact on higher education we're going to be looking at the chat GPT technology which is just appeared now usually in the Forum we have one or two guests who are special experts in the topic but today we're putting together a kind of hive mind of everybody who's interested everybody who's practiced with it along with some people who are experts in different parts of it including digital writing writing pedagogy and artificial intelligence so what we'd like to do is to get you all thinking about this and one way to help think about it is to use a few resources we have in the bottom left of the screen you should see it kind of tan color box that says chat GPT or it says chat GPT resources that'll take you to a web page a blog post of mine which has a link to a few dozen articles podcasts and videos that may or may not be useful to you trying to think about this so and in the chat right now uh lee scouter Bessette just shared uh her zotero Library which is also available from that link there thank you for doing all that Lee John Hollenbeck asks if we could have just invited Chad GPT to be a guest well actually thought about that thought about doing that um it's pretty popular to use chat GPT just to give us some some fun feelings and in fact I asked chatgpt to describe the ideal video conversation and this is what it said the ideal video conversation will likely be one where all participants are able to clearly see and hear each other and are able to easily communicate and understand one another for all participants with everyone feeling comfortable and able to contribute to the discussion the conversation also likely to be productive with participants achieving their desired goals and outcomes from the conversation well thank you chat GPT I hope we'll strive to do just all of that so to begin with chat GPT was released about 10 days ago this is the latest version of a text chatbot created by openai if you haven't used it if you go to the links that we've provided you'll be able just to log in through various accounts and to start asking the chatbot questions and what's powerful about chat GPT is that it's able to draw on a greater library of text than ever before and seems to be more efficient and more convincing at least in making stuff up and in writing creating text than any chatbot technology has been yet this has triggered huge amounts of controversy around the world the people decrying it as the end of all uh possible writing prompts in higher education threatening jobs undoing writing as we know it there's a whole bunch of ideas here and today we'll be going through all of them Ricardo parita the session has started welcome I hope you can hear me so just to begin with I would like to ask each of you uh if you could just volunteer some of your impressions of actually using chatgpt if you have used it just either type it in the chat box or right click the raised hand and I'd be glad to bring it up on stage so you can describe it oh let me bring Brett Anders from the American University of Armenia and bring him up on stage it's probably a crazy time for you there Brent welcome sir hello yes uh so yeah it is 11 p.m here so it's a little bit oh you you look great sir you look great oh thank you um so yeah I wanted to volunteer I did a little experiment today uh dealing with uh chat GPT and that I I used to teach freshman seminar here at the University so I I told it I asked it I said hey write a narrative essay about a special event that occurred in your life right and then I was trying to think I wanted to be I wanted to make it as hard and specific as possible so I said make it from the Viewpoint of an Armenian make it from the Viewpoint of someone that was born in 2004 and make it to be an impactful event that changed your life and it had a you know major consequences so I waited it took about five seconds and it created 700 and I told it 750 words it wrote about 500 words and it gave me something that was really good uh very surprisingly it was like this would be passable and in my thoughts but then I thought you know here we also teach the seven step writing process because we're trying to get people to to to do it properly and so I said hey make me a rough draft of this so it made me another version that was a little bit rougher and then I asked it wait a second I'm going to need a uh an outline and it made me an outline so then I took this test a little bit further and then I I stapled all three of these together and I took it and I had two people that I didn't tell them this was from chat GPT I had three two people tested like evaluated I said could you uh could you grade this for me I just want to make sure that I'm grading it in the same way they graded it based off of the rubric and uh they scored it uh a minus B plus wow that's yeah that's sort of an interesting little test that I did there um again this is very interesting the capabilities and the level of what it did and as far as what it was it was a pretty good story about uh an Armenian who uh became a refugee because the area is in dispute which happens a lot in this country so they have to leave uh their area and then they were in a refugee camp and they so they gained a greater appreciation for everything and now that they're going uh you know now that they're in a university they so it was like this very interesting personal story that seems very believable on a lot of levels and it felt emotional again narrative first person so uh it was definitely worthwhile so there's a lot of power here can I just ask you a couple of quick questions about that sure so for you this was actually a pretty easy process to go through you simply type you type in your prompts and it comes back an answer in a few seconds and and you iterated that you you got one output and then you'd ask it to develop it further um on the back end uh this is this is a tool that is using a tremendous amount of digital texts uh so to to create this it had to draw on various posts articles ebooks written about Armenians including our meetings of the 21st Century yes so it uses um I I watched one video talking about this and they said that it has a library of over one billion words um it's uh again this is taken from pre-2022 so this is all up till 2021 so nothing you know very current uh so that would be one way to to manipulate the prompt is by asking it something modern as far as if you're once we get to talking about pedagogy and trying to prevent it from prevent a student from using it um but yeah and that's the other part is that the iterative process so it can remember what you just put in so that's why I was able to have it make a draft and then I was able to make it do an outline as well because it can remember what it just did which is fascinating fascinating Brent Brent uh we have another volunteer can I keep you up on stage for a minute sure okay well hang on a second we have uh Rob Fentress from Virginia Tech let me see if I can get him uh to join us hey hello Rob hey how you doing good good to see you yeah um I'm excited to join in this conversation because uh I've been using chat GPT extensively since it came out and um it it boggles the mind if you have not tried it already you need to do so soon um I am already using it to uh to increase my productivity tremendously I've created lots of content uh in my subject domain which is very specialized uh web accessibility used to create documentation for poorly documented software um and I am even interested in actually using it as an instructional tool itself because basically when you ask it a question all right uh you know it does a pretty darn good job to start with but if you know if you push it it will say things that are wrong and and things that aren't always obviously wrong but that are subtly wrong so if what you're trying to do for your students is get them to think critically and determine whether they really are understanding the content then if you have them work and use chat GPT and have a conversation about the material that you're covering and part of the assignment is for them to interact with it and say no no chat DPT you're subtly wrong here uh you need to expand more uh and so forth I think that's really genuine learning so you know if people think about the negative effects um but I mean it's incredible but of course you need to enjoy it while you can because I think we're doomed I mean it is that powerful that we we have not solved the AI alignment problem and you know it's obviously not you know it's not uh sentient maybe I don't know probably not sentient but it is powerful enough and they have not solved the ability to restrict it I mean you can get around all of its restrictions uh with certain hacks and it could be used for great harm and the next version GPT 4 which this is 3.5 GPT 4 is supposed to be 500 times more parameters than GPT three that's the rumor anyway so maybe you're a trillion parameters um Rob two two quick questions first did you say the AI or the AL alignment problem uh AI alignment so basically the idea that you know we have certain things that we want the AI to do we're training it with that in mind um but uh there are all sorts of ways that that can go wrong um and we have not come up with really robust solutions for that and the uh actually the person at openai AI the company that's responsible for chat GPT I read I listened to an interview with them uh just yesterday where they talked about you know like what are the dangers they had written a paper about this in academic paper where they basically said you know here's all these problems we're not close to solving them you know he tried to put some positive gloss on it but frankly his his more scary uh concerns were much more convincing to me than the very limited uh optimism I'm an optimistic person as regards to AI but I'm changing my mind yeah you brought up a great Point as far as the critical thinking aspect because it does like to sort of fill things in sometimes and there might be some partial truths but it sort of decides to put things together if they're not 100 percent true so that critical thinking aspect is really important so I wrote an article about how to use chat GPT in higher education just in in general instructing it and uh one of the things that I did is in writing the article I asked GPT to to to write the article for me right and it did and I asked it specifically one of the prompts was how could I prevent a student from just using it to sort of cheat right and so it gave me all these great things and one of the things that said is that oh well you can use plagiarism detection software to check your chat GPT that a student might turn in to check it to see if it's plagiarized well I tried the the you know the one that I had it do for me I ran it across four different plagiarism detection softwares and all of them came back as far as saying no there's 100 original but it's really it's like using a calculator you know I mean on some levels yes everybody is going to be using this and that's going to be that's not the skill that we're going to be wanting people to learn we're going to be wanting people to learn how to use chat GPT to write essays for you which is its own skill and that's the skill we're gonna have to start um starts teaching I think rob you you mentioned an example of that uh a few minutes ago you mentioned the idea of having a having students use GPT to create something and then discussing its flaws in class I'm reminded of he slips my mind right now there's a historian who had a clever final project for students which they had to create a hoax and they had to make it look as convincing as possible and they would publish it to the web I don't know if the stirring's a bell for any idea some of you might remember it I was very controversial but the students had to basically Master primary source material to make like a fake ship in the American Civil War or uh Benjamin Franklin's lost uh beer recipe and that kind of thing um and the trick was they had to make it convincing so they had to clearly know the content but then to criticize these to to discern the flaw you'd have to be able to have that level of critical thinking because that's something I'm not saying discuss it in class I'm saying discuss it with with chat gbt have a conversation with it where you try to refine what it's provided you you know uh and then you can share that you know like in a forum or whatever and then yeah you could have a you know talk about it I'm just saying yeah processing going back and forth with it is going to be very informative yeah I mean and that's just it like it's kind of scary because one of the other tests that I did is I'm writing this other book dealing with consumer psychology so I like I took one of the paragraphs and I gave it to to chat GPT I said what do you think about my my paragraph and chat vpt look at it and it it gave me like excellent feedback like this is the type of feedback that I would give to a student something that got me thinking wow I could use chat GPT to provide feedback to my students so and just like what you're saying I could cut out the middleman and say hey before you know create your essay and then have chat GPT check it to give you feedback and then show it to me or some process thereof where before it even and gets to me they can go through and do several practice essays on their own with chat GPT and then now we're going to do this assignment so there's so many different levels and possibilities and I mean if you use for instruction as well so I'm giving a workshop um coming up and uh I you know I always get stressed out about things like that and I tend to obsess over details I don't know how to get started get writer's block and so I've got a you know a synopsis of the workshop just you know just brief description for the catalog and the title and I said okay I'm going to be giving this one hour Workshop here's the title here's the description write an outline for me of my presentation and it did with like it's been 10 minutes on this five minutes on this bullet points and it's just it's stunning so it's it's using all the workshops descriptions that you and I and others have put up on the web and uh and and com and extended them very very nicely uh hang on one second friends uh I just want to bring up a third person who's had a hand raised has been very patient um and uh this is Phil um oops hang on one second I'll actually press the correct button uh this is phillipa lingard who is the founder of Vic and let's see if we can see if we can bring him up there we go hello Phil oh Phil maybe having a connection problem hi Phil can you sit here us yes I can see you I can see myself thanks no I just wanted to Echo something which uh Brett said that Chad GPT does make mistakes and um it was I I was reading um Charlie Cohen's um blog yeah GPT about the philosopher lock and the answer came back completely incorrect and the reason is that lock and hops are always compared and contrasted with each other and it it actually described the position of Hobbs uh being the position of lock so um it isn't there yet it does make mistakes um my concern is that what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be launching a 100 online Masters course and of course that chat gbt is completely changed the um whole landscape when it comes to assessment and uh and how they are going to be uh replying um my thoughts are I mean I'm very fortunate in this and that the the Masters program is designed for practitioners is that I really am going to need to design the assessment questions to be deeply personal hmm um now it's great where I'm taking entrepreneurs and people in their 30s who are mid-career um and and and the whole the whole objective of the course is all right apply this to your work environment but obviously in a more traditional higher education environment where particularly if the bachelor's level where students are absorbing and learning then the assessment challenge becomes very interesting and I don't know what your thoughts are on that it does yeah I would totally agree that the more personal that it can be made then the greater the ability for the that individual having having to actually write it right but again it's that aspect of there's still a component of chat GPT that I'll still be able to use no matter what the prompt is yeah because yeah because in essence what I'm doing is I'm using it as an an added tool so you could give me 50 prompts and I could use you know 50 different things to put into that group and it's going to give me something now I still need to use exactly what you were saying before as far as critical thinking to then review it and to say well no that's not quite right but this is an overall building block that I can take in enhance to make it that much better the other big problem that currently again it's developing they said there's going to be an update to a chat GPT Before Christmas Even but currently it has a huge problem trying to do in-text citations right I was able to get it to give me references at the very end so it kind of did that okay on a small thing but in-text citations well it won't do it at all make sure to check those citations because I've seen that they're actually totally made up all right these two were right I gave it a simple thing of of a compare contrast essay of American speeches so it was able to do that record but again it was just two things so yeah understood about the plagiarism engine not spotting it yeah well actually I read something that they're actually working on uh that they're working on um basically watermarking of the text somehow which is interesting I'm not quite sure how that would work but even if it does I would imagine if a plagiarism detection software can identify some pattern that reveals that could also you know somebody could redo it so that it doesn't do that so you know now we're getting into to some of this aspect right and I've tried playing Devil's Advocate with this thing because they in reality on some levels if we're looking at it through the lens of cheating right nothing nothing new has happened nothing has happened because I could before this I could go to my buddy pay him 50 bucks and he could write it for me right so that's my chat gbt before this I could uh there's plenty there's multiple AIS that already exist so I could just give it hey here's here's an essay can you plagiarize this for me sure here's a new version that's been paraphrased that won't be detected by plagiarism software because the AI made a new version of it so but what we're talking about here with chat GPT is that right now at least it's completely free and it's easy to use I don't need to know code I just put it in a text box and it magically creates it because I'm just asking it normal human question of hey write me an essay about democracy uh you know that's something that happened within the last five years uh in China boom and it'll do it instantly and then so that's trading but if we can use it properly as a tool then we can advance all of it I need to I need to pause just for a quick question um the the chat box is on fire there is an incredible amount of stuff in chat let me let me just ask chat people is it okay if I copy and paste this to a Blog tomorrow I'll anonymize everybody remove everybody's name just just let me know in the chat uh if you're not using the chat never mind um sorry Brent please please go on or I'm sorry I think it was Rob who started to speak yeah um I mean where was Robinson yeah can I just throw in this um is this going to revive the Vivo in other words the the um assessment is going to be done by effectively interview yeah the oral oral interview yeah yeah I mean that's that's one aspect that's one possibility uh because I in talking to some instructors here at this University we talked about how there needs to be more being done in class right as far as we're actively doing things we're we're engaging we're writing in class but and I agree with that on some level but it made me when I even when I was talking about that it made me think of my my time when I I had to take uh the GRE right and when I did that it was so artificial I had to go into a special locked room there was a guard watching me I couldn't use Microsoft Word I had to use a blank basis basically text entry that wasn't connected to the internet and I did horrible and guess what I think I'm a great writer I get A's in my classes but I wasn't able to write like I usually write so if we make an artificial thing of well you can't use the internet to write because you might use chat GPT but now we're kind of changing things and making it artificial because the other big thing that I come come back with and again I'm always playing with Devil's Advocate right because there's so many instances right now where a student graduates they go to their workplace the workplace says hey I need you to write this report for me and I need to do tomorrow or in two days what are you talking about this should take a week all my assignments took a week oh well you don't know how to use uh AI to make this faster so companies and businesses are requiring their employees to use AI so if we in education or in Academia aren't teaching the students how to use a how to have ai literacy to create documents properly they still need to have that knowledge but if they're not using it to enhance their capabilities to make things faster to have more output then they're going to be suffering when they get out into the real world where it's a requirement to be able to have that skill and friend I did remember what I was going to responding I'm just going to say you had mentioned um the the fact that it's free and I think that is that is an essential component because I'd read about chat gpt3 and I was like very intrigued and I wanted to do it but you know it costs money and I was like well it sounds like there's the learning curve there and you know so I held off but the fact that this is free has it it makes it so much more fluid you can just play around and it'll be interesting to see once once it costs money but I mean I don't care how much it is I I'll so so I had the exact same thought and I I because the thing is like I've been trying to see like okay because I'm trying to I I'm the I'm also the director dealing with the center for teach and learning here at this University so I'm always trying to help the instructors so I wanted to show them I'm like hey this is how a student can use AI right now to create things before chat GPT right and it was somewhat difficult because you had to like find certain places and then it was limited or you could pay 20 bucks and then you could get more you know so that's there is some limitations with it it's still available you can find it but with chat GPT man it's so easy so there was this other thing that I checked on because I was trying to find out well how much would it cost you know like because they are going to eventually try to make money off of it because right now five or one million people have used it since since Monday by Monday a million people so now at least five million people have used it right so in order to do this it's burning up through servers luckily this is funded of course by Elon Musk as well as connection with Microsoft but they did some calculation that it cost about four cents for every single entry that gets done right so every prompt four cents that's right I thought that was for conversation yeah so so I mean the thing is it could be relatively cheap and think about hey if you were to offer this and just make it like a simple app on your phone where oh yeah subscription costs you five bucks uh a month I think they'd be raking in the money especially with students that want to be able to quickly answer questions I think this is going to be a gigantic Money Maker the other thing that I wanted to quickly add is so a question was asked to Google because they had an open call here recently saying hey are you worried about chat GPT competing with you because some people are saying that this is the new Google right because I can ask it anything so Google responded with something very interesting they said no we're not worried we have multiple AIS that can do exactly what chat GPT can do right now right the reason that they haven't released anything is because they're very much worried as far as their image because there are some issues with chat GPT and giving slightly false information so they want to make sure to iron that out a bit more to limit liability before they start to release things just like this the future is very wide open for them there's an interesting Chrome plug-in I've been using um which uh basically accesses chat GPT and adds it to your Google results in parallel to Google results it's very interesting to just to run that and to compare how they work uh friends we have a another person who wants to join us this is a wonderful writer John Warner and we bring him up on stage and see if we can find him on the screen I think this is the maximum we've ever done it one time so hold on hello John good afternoon hello to everybody good to see you sir good to see you where are you today I'm at home in uh Charleston South Carolina area all right all right well stay warm um what do you what do you think about this now you've written a whole series of good articles and a bunch of tweet storms um called you've called uh uh Chachi PT uh a tool that lays bare the paucity of a lot of writing instructions especially in K-12 uh where where do you stand now is is this the apocalypse or is this actually a good step in progress no I I've seen it from the beginning as an opportunity to re-examine the values we attach to the things we ask students to do in school context as the discussion has been about so far um you know I am uh I'm not in the academy so some of the concerns of folks in here are are very different than mine um you know as I listen I think there's a number of different things we're talking about here we're talking about using AI as a skill that students should have and be able to do which is absolutely a fact right we we should be doing this we are talking about using writing as a tool of assessment in order to demonstrate learning as a kind of certification um feature of Education um we are talking about well and where my focus is as somebody as a teacher of writing right and somebody who's primarily concerned with teaching students to write um one of the things I don't want us to lose sight of is a couple things one is particularly when we we start thinking about the academic dishonesty angle if you give students something worth doing they will do it the challenge we've given ourselves in uh K-12 and higher ed is much of the stuff we ask students to do doesn't seem worth doing or the shortcut to the grade is more desirable rather than the long trip through learning and chechi PT you know exposes some of the kind of rote assessments you might have in an English or history class in K-12 or even even college for that matter as an empty exercise in assembling syntax as opposed to a work of thinking and Analysis which is what we think we're asking them to do when we assign these things um it should kill things like the admissions essays to colleges which the chat gbt can turn out in infinite numbers uh almost instantly and and personalizing we were you were talking about how you can get it to personalize you can say like yeah I I only have one parent or I come from this background or I had cancer when I was a child and it'll do that with absolute facility with perfect syntax that will check the box of admissions offices but one of the things that that um so what I come down to and I think all those things are important and they should all be talked about and they should be talked about at the level of values which for me is what do we want students to learn and why do we want them to learn that as opposed to why do we want them to prove a sort of fidelity to um what I lectured about or what we think is important to this sort of stuff is to not miss the aspect of using writing to learn um one of my mantras that I use in in all my books and talks and all that kind of stuff is writing is thinking writing is both the expression of an idea and the exploration of an idea the act of writing causes the writer to process the material both consciously and subconsciously and I swear to God even sometimes unconsciously stuff will come to me I have no idea where it came from I didn't even know I knew it and it rises up and it winds up on the page and that is the kind of um ability that makes us human that is the kind of activity that makes us human that's the kind of experience that makes us human and while I am like everybody else messing around with uh chat GPT like how can I get all this stuff I have to do that I don't want to do to do it for me and it does an okay job um but ultimately what I realized when I was trying to experiment with it it's actually me denying myself an important part of my own thinking process about the stuff that I'm involved in um it is a great shortcut to content um to to a product uh it may be a shortcut I asked it I um I still occasionally write humor pieces for my old employer mcsweeney's and I uh I gave it a prompt to to write a a speech um by Jordan Peterson explaining the importance of stuffing live weasels down your pants and um it gave me a um it gave me like a decent start and it gave me a little bit of um a little bit of primer around the the way he speaks and his rhythms and his word choice um but ultimately I tried to prompt it with three or four other additive elements and it didn't help at all it was really like okay I need to take this and I put it to one side and I open my uh word processing program and I just started typing my own thing it was it was generative But ultimately in the final version 10 15 of its language wound up but so it became a kind of brainstorming tool not a great writing tool for something that actually does ultimately require a kind of inspiration or intuition and that kind of stuff um so I just like to remind people that like writing is yes it's a skill that we demonstrate through making products but it's also at a living um experience that at least for me is part of what reminds me that I'm human it helps me process the world and chat GPT cannot do that it's purely a syntax machine it's a syntax generation um matching machine so when it can do well on our prompts sometimes I think we want to think about our prompts but also I think we want to think about the process what are we valuing when we assign that and how can if if we still value that prompt what can we assess that will um make a put a sort of broader wrap our arms around a broader part of the student's experience in creating that artifact John sounds like a kind of decamiliarization of writing you know making us rethink what we do with writing in class especially in high school yeah I mean the the tragedy of what we've done in writing sort of like eighth grade on although now it's even in grade school is really I I mean it's really bad um you know and I've been shouting about this stuff for for quite a long time now and uh why they can't write came out uh over four years ago at this point um and now chat GPT I I can't tell you how many emails and calls and stuff I've gotten we're awesome people like oh yeah this is a problem simply because a machine can do it and they're worried about cheating and assessment and this kind of stuff but it was always a problem and the problem was it made students uh not practice thinking through writing it made them primarily my biggest worry as a writing teacher it made them hate writing particularly in school contexts and they're utterly uninterested in a course that was never like their favorite first year writing is never going to be anybody that can't wait to take that but they were actively repelled by their first year writing course which is the the terrible outcome friends I'm conscious of time I'm also conscious of the fact that um this is a mantle right now um and I'm going to try and clear the decks a bit and uh and uh go for some greater gender representation I'm Gonna Knock a couple of you a couple of you off right now but I can bring bring you back up but hang on just a second and I'll make some room for this um and let me first of all welcome Dr Jess Stahl who is coming to us from the Northwest Commission on colleges and uh hello hello Jess hello thank you so much yes so I'm affiliated with the Northwest Commission on colleges and universities which is an Institutional accreditor so thank you for adding me to the panel here I think I'd just like to jump in and say that really chat GPT isn't giving us any new information about the need that we need to modernize higher education but it is probably taking away the delusion that those changes are still optional uh or that they could occur over a longer timeline than maybe one to two years so I think we've seen this Evolution from the idea of a sage on the stage to then being a guide on the side and I would say that Chachi PT is a fantastic guide on the side so that's probably once again out and so I think where we are now is more needing to focus on building strong relationships like mentoring relationships professional relationship with Learners and providing them with access to valuable networks valuable resources that they can access only within academic institutions so what that looks like will probably be different for all of the different institutions but I would encourage all institutions to be really thinking about where the value in higher education lies at this point I think this is really kind of holding up a mirror to that but there's value in higher ed for the institution because they charge tuition so there's a financial value there's a value for faculty and staff because they're paid by those institutions so they've got that Financial value what is the value being provided to students because that's actually now the the currency of the realm for higher education moving forward Jess that's a that's a fantastic Point um I I'm you know you're coming from an accredited agency um what um as an accreditor I mean how do you think this is this might play out over the next few years I mean we'll be in that sense of urgency will you see that will you try to help value more Innovation uh more highly or will uh will you actually look for people for institutions who are implementing social response to chat gbt and curricula or in pedagogy so I think that accreditors are always looking for Innovation and in particular we're looking for Innovation that eliminates Equity gaps um and in student achievement and outcomes for all students so I think that will continue to be a focus I think the tools like chat gbt do have some limitations in that area they exhibit the bias that is inherent in our societies because the data that they're trained on is us right so whatever is present in society is going to be present Within These tools it looks like open AI has tried to build in some filtering and sort of some guardrails and and guidelines so that they could minimize some of the some of those effects but I think that there are clever ways that you can prompt this tool that many people have demonstrated already online where you can still kind of get around that you could you could for example get Chachi BT to express racism or tell you things that it that it shouldn't tell you and you can see where openai has even sort of tried to build in some guardrails around that if you ask those questions directly it won't answer them or we'll kind of go around them or tell you it can't answer that type of question but for example if you were to tell it to tell you a story about a person who had certain traits or to answer me in an aggressive style that it would do that right so so there are you know ways that it can be manipulated so I think that accreditors will always be really sensitive to how these tools are being used for education and you know how is Ed Tech showing up you know in the curriculum and how that's utilized um and I think that certainly eliminating Equity gapses is is always going to be at the heart of accreditation ah thank you thank you Jessica that's that's a great answer I know you're on the spot and this is something which is happening much faster than accreditation does um but that gives us a great preview of what to look for yeah our University is actually going through accreditation right now so we started to do self-study and then we're going to have visitors uh coming here later this year or later next year um and that's one of the big things that we're trying to push is to see what's going to happen within the next few years how do we need to change the skills that we're teaching students so that when they graduate they'll be that much more successful and I think being able to use tools like you know chat GPT or just AI in general that's the big push now is AI literacy and the problem that I keep running into as I try to push right is our students they're already using AI like that's happening that's already that's been happening for a couple years already so if the faculty doesn't have proper AI literacy they're never going to be able to address this with a student so it can't be this thing of because I've been reviewing sort of the academic Integrity policies right we can't just make a block blanket statement of saying no you can't use AI because that's that would be completely self-defeating in fact you know grammarly is AI right of course we're not going to say you can't use grammarly you can't use word Word Microsoft Word has built-in AI more and more things will have these components built in we have to understand how to properly use them and then properly motivate the students to go through it in the proper way so they're not doing academic dishonesty and they're actually learning the process having the fundamentals so that they can then use these in the proper way so it's not a crutch but it's an additional tool to be able to do more Brent I understand that's that's what you would like to see um and I agree personally I'm just thinking that we should also expect to see people trying to block this we saw this for a long time with Wikipedia and we still do you know attempts to block Wi-Fi from classrooms for example used to happen I could imagine calls for this occurring at the Enterprise level um but I I I wanted to make sure we had room for everyone's questions and uh and fenzi coming to her from the University of Maine want to join us so let's bring in on us up on stage hello and greetings hello um yeah and and thanks with my my uh question and comment really kind of fits in with what Jess and Ander were just saying about let's let's focus on the students not let's not look at this from The Faculty perspective of oh no what do I do about this but how does this help the students instead of how is this harming the students and so my my plan right away is to is to have my students try this out and say what can you do with it see if you can figure out its limitations see if you can figure out its strengths and then let's think about well okay what is it not doing really well what is it doing really well and how could it help you as a learner and you know just as I've been kind of playing around and having conversations with it you know I'm kind of learning you know about how I would use it and how I wouldn't use it and I I think I think it's important to not forget the Learner in all of this absolutely and what do you uh what do you teach in or what are you studying uh I did teach educational technology perfect perfect excellent it seems like we have a lot of pedagogical approaches that we've discussed so far from uh rethinking student work to give students something worth doing uh to have chat generate stuff for students to discuss to use uh chat gbt for feedback to assign deeply personal pieces to turn to oral assignments or oral assessments and to teach AI literacy these are whole stereo is there anything else that instructors should be thinking about doing at the classroom level okay the the only thing I'd like to to add here is John I thought you you gave a great thing as far as helping helping us think about it as far as what is someone losing when they don't write things out right because having worked with a lot of different students man I have so many students and we've seen this trend line going like this constantly going up here with our undergraduate students and working right now we're seeing lots of undergraduate students that are working full-time full-time and still going for College full-time so that's a major problem so the number one thing on their mind of course they want to get that degree which they shouldn't be thinking that they should be thinking I want to get an education but they're thinking I want that degree and they're trying to think what can I do to save myself time that's the main thing that's leading everything unfortunately right thing on learning this so every every single thing they're going to be trying to use whatever mechanism whatever tool is out there to save them time chat GPT is going to be a major factors one of one of the uh main points I make and why they can't write which I intended to be a book of writing pedagogy but soon became a book there were over half of it was an analysis of the systems in which student writing happens is that the the greatest constraint when it comes to helping students learn to write is not that we don't know how to teach them it's not that students don't want to write it's not the effort it's not that stuff it's it's purely one of resources time um and what you're speaking to there is student time right the the amount of time they have available to dedicate to their studies but also instructor time um if if uh one thing we know about teaching writing is that one-on-one attention Works um if you ever if Google um John McPhee uh and learning to write yes and you'll come up with a half a dozen essays by its former students about how he taught writing which is basically a one-on-one tutorial now we maybe can't achieve that but if um if you give me a maximum of 45 students in the semester three sections of 15. I will have them on a trajectory to becoming self-regulating writers no problem I never had those conditions in the entirety of my career the few students I ever had was 65 United semesters of over 180 students so when you cannot do the work that we know works there's not a lot we can do about it it's not necessarily that we don't know what to do about these things it's that that we are so resource constrained around reacting to them that it becomes a bit of a you know a bit of a whack-a-mole around this is where the the part of my French the cop comes in where we start policing student behavior and we start blocking them off from websites and we say don't use Wikipedia and put a spy cam on their laptops um because we can't actually have a relationship with them either we choose that and resource it or we go down the the big black spiral hole to the bottom I I hope we don't do that and you know what you're saying John is is being echoed in the chat too about a lot of people talking about individualizing instruction and who has time for that and what how could chat GPT be used as an extra set of hands in the classroom to you know provide some of that one-on-one assistance to students and you know uh Karen mentioned too about you know neurodiverse individuals how this might be a tool to help them and you know my my uh population that I teach are non traditional Learners and you know Brent you mentioned people who are working full-time and this is exactly what I plan to do with them is to help them figure out how does this tool help you not to save time so much but how to help you learn better because you know as John said the goal of of your degree is not just to get the degree the goal is to actually learn yeah yeah what I would say to faculty and and here I certainly don't represent an accrediting agency but just really just myself as a person but what I what I would say to faculty is that most of what you do probably in your day-to-day is really emerging as not that valuable oh probably almost all of it will need to change and in fact your your role is going to be strongly questioned so if you're looking at what you should be doing differently in your role I think really at the end of the day you're looking at answering the question what can you do better than the most advanced technology and it won't be imparting facts and it won't be presenting curriculum and it won't be evaluating learning and it won't be preventing cheating and all those things it's not going to be that what it is going to be is how human and important and valuable can you make your relationships with the Learners so that you are doing that skill better than an advanced technology like chat GPT that can mimic a very fake relationship it could mimic and people will anthropomorphize this technology so they will feel a relationship to it because when you ask it to answer in the style of someone you're actually asking it to take on a personality and it does that and when you say write me a story about somebody in the very specific details you're actually asking it to do what we would call empathizing taking on the perspective of another and it actually does that really well and it actually reflects and expresses that back really well possibly better than many people do so it's really going to be the strength of your relational interpersonal skills with Learners that you're going to have the human advantage and right now if your relationships are not genuine meaningful deep and helpful to students then that's you know you're not going to be able to compete in that Arena either and that's one of the few human things that you'll have left us really like this Advantage so that would be my advice to faculty is to think about how you're building those relationships and then for institutions I would say what type of human social networks that are very rewarding and professional networks are very rewarding that you're providing for students and what kind of resources do you have at your campus or in your online programs that Learners couldn't access elsewhere because there are sort of these economies of scale and things that you can provide at the scale of a learning institution that they couldn't get elsewhere and that also is valuable just so you know Jess you have a big fan club in the chat um and uh uh and I'm including me um that was an incredible incredible response uh however I just have to put up one problem it is 257 eastern time that means we have only three minutes left of our session together so let me put to you two questions first can we continue this topic in a following session either next Thursday or the Thursday after um please in the in the chat let me know and the four of you on stage would that be good do you think sure that'd be fantastic and the second question is I'm not ending things just just hang on a second uh there are 22 questions in our list right now that we haven't had a chance to get to uh those who put them forward can I copy and post them to the blog again uh without you know anonymizing them without you just let me know in the chat or direct message me um because uh these are great um I'm just I'm just wild how far we've come in just about 52 minutes um just let me just ask John and uh Brent and especially Ann and any responses to just throwing down the gauntlet um we have to repaint everything in higher ed because a lot of it isn't going to be useful anymore yeah no I I want to Echo some of that because one of the things that I say here at this University and again I get a lot of faces right is what I tell my students is hey there is no information you don't need information from me on how to do this if there's millions of YouTube videos there's millions of web pages that tell you how to do it so you don't need me for that all I'm here to do is to answer questions or to make it more relevant right to make it that's part of my my aspect of what I'm doing is I'm trying to motivate you and in motivating you by giving you the relevancy I'm helping you to understand I'm giving you an opportunity to use those skills to actually have Satisfaction by seeing that oh I'm gaining the skill and I can use it and I can express it and I'm becoming that much more effective and capable for when I move on from the University right so I totally believe that I totally agree that we're there to help clarify to answer questions to motivate to give them an opportunity to use that skill again that relationship aspect I think is is right on for sure what Jess was was saying too about breaking what's happening in higher ed because who was higher ed designed for and the systems that we have now work for those people only and if we really want to make higher ed more Equitable we have to break down what what we're doing and really make the best use of of what faculty are there for I've been uh echoing everything else I've been ready for this for literally years I've been mystified because I'm not a real academic and I've never sort of been inculcated into the system I've been mystified why more of higher education is not attuned to student learning for the entirety of my time intersecting with these institutions it's about credentialing and signaling and all those things that we're aware of that the institutions also do but I've been ready for it for a long time and that's why I'm excited for the appearance of this kind of Technology because it forces us to confront these things and talk about what we value and um look at the things that the areas where we're constrained and hopefully start to put resources into those Learners who would benefit for more resources rather than um the continuing um constraints and limits we put on the students who probably need the most help in terms of accessing that learning well said uh and that's a great moment to end on I think um just just the four of you Brent John uh Jess and thank you for joining us um on this rolling panel um and uh and all the other panelists and uh who have been on and also all the great questions thank you so much this has been an extraordinary session uh one that I think has covered a lot of ground and one that we haven't finished so I'm going to uh see about redoing this or resuming this next week or the week after um I will share everybody's um uh comments on my blog post coming up along with the uh entire uh recording that'll be up shortly um let me just uh quickly wrap this up with um the points coming up for our our next sessions if you'd like to continue talking about this right now uh over the next week please you know head to Twitter um where I am use the hashtag ftte or to my blog brianalexander.org I'm going to add a couple others to this list uh next time if you'd like to look into our previous sessions on pedagogy of writing on on plagiarism and honesty on technology in general just go to tinyurl.com fdfarchive we have sessions coming up just go to form.futureeducation.us to see those and if any of you have projects that you'd like to share including using chat GPT please shoot me a note I'd be glad to share them with this awesome Community thank you all for a fantastic session my mind is spinning this has been terrific I love the way that we've brought our Collective mind to bear on this fast-moving and important subject if I don't talk to you all for the next few days have a great end of semester have a great holiday if you're celebrating have great down time in general um above all be safe and take care and we'll see you next time online thanks everybody bye bye

Channel: Bryan Alexander

Views: 46,841

Keywords: FTTE, chatbot, higher education, pedagogy, writing, college essay, AI, ChatGPT

Id: Bz7aW6vStBw

Length: 57min 53sec (3473 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 15 2022