The pandemic has taken a heavy mental and emotional toll on faculty members and graduate teaching assistants.
That has been clear in three lunch sessions at CTE over the past few weeks. We called the sessions non-workshops because the only agenda was to share, listen, and offer support. I offered some takeaways from the first session in March. In the most recent sessions, we heard many similar stories:
Teaching has grown more complicated, the size of our classes has grown, and our workloads and job pressures have increased. Stress is constant. We are exhausted and burned out. “I feel hollow,” one participant said.
Students need more than we can give. Many students are overwhelmed and not coming to class; they can’t even keep track of when work is due. They also aren’t willing to complete readings or put in minimal effort to succeed. All of that has drained the joy from teaching. “I have to psych myself up just to go to class some days,” one instructor said.
We don’t feel respected, and we have never been rewarded for the vast amounts of intellectual and emotional work we have put in during the pandemic. Instead, the workload keeps increasing. “It feels like the message is: ‘We hear you. Now shut up,’ ” one participant said.
We need time to heal but feel unable to ease up. Nearly all of those who attended the non-workshops were women, who often have additional pressures at home and feel that they will be judged harshly on campus if they try to scale back. “Society expects us to bounce right back, and we can’t,” one participant said.
Much has been written about the strain of the pandemic and its effect on faculty members and students. We can’t offer grand solutions to such a complex problem, which has systemic, cultural, psychological, and individual elements. We can offer support in small ways, though. So here is a motley collection of material intended to provide a modicum of inner healing. Some of these will require just a few minutes. Others will require a few hours. If none of them speak to you, that’s OK. Make sure to seek out the things that do brighten your soul, though.
An image (times 6)
I asked an artificial intelligence image generator called Catbird to create representations of serenity in everyday life. You will find three of those at the top of the page and three at the bottom. They won’t solve problems, but they do provide a momentary escape.
A song
“What’s Up,” by 4 Non Blondes. I recently rediscovered this early ’90s song, and its message seems more relevant than ever. It addresses the challenges of everyday life even as it provides a boost of inspiration. Even if you aren’t a fan of alt-rock, it’s worth a listen just to hear Linda Perry’s amazing voice.
A resource for KU employees
GuidanceResources. Jeff Stolz, director of employee mental health and well-being, passed along a free resource for KU employees. It is provided by the state Employee Assistance Program and can be accessed through the GuidanceResources site or mobile app. Employees can sign up for personal or family counseling, legal support, financial guidance, and work-life resources. The first time you log in, you will need to create an account and use the code SOKEAP.
A TED Talk
Compassion Fatigue: What is it and do you have it?, by Juliette Watt. Compassion fatigue, Watt says, is “the cost of caring for others, the cost of losing yourself in who you’re being for everyone else.”
A recent article
My Unexpected Cure for Burnout, by Catherine M. Roach. Chronicle of Higher Education (20 April 2023). Try giving away books and asking students to write notes in return.
A book
Unraveling Faculty Burnout: Pathways to Reckoning and Renewal, by Rebecca Pope-Ruark (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022). Pope-Ruark’s book focuses on women in academia and draws on many interviews to provide insights into burnout. The electronic version is available through KU Libraries.
A quote
From Pope-Ruark’s book.
I learned to offer myself grace and self-compassion, but it took a while, just as it had taken a while for my burnout to reach the level of breakdown. Once I was able to shift my mind-set away from needing external validation to understanding myself and my authentic needs, I was able to understand Katie Linder when she said, “It’s important for me to have that openness to growth, asking, ‘What am I supposed to be learning through the situation?’ even if it’s really hard or it’s not ideal or even great.”
If you don’t feel like devoting time to a book right now, consider Pope-Ruark’s article Beating Pandemic Burnout in Inside Higher Ed (27 April 2020).
A final thought
Take care of yourself. And find serenity wherever you can.
Doug Ward is associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and an associate professor of journalism and mass communications.
Trying to keep ahead of artificial intelligence is like playing a bizarre game of whack-a-mole.
The company did a laudable job of explaining the strengths and the weaknesses of its new tool, saying that it would rather be cautious and have its tool miss some questionable material than to falsely accuse someone of unethical behavior. It will make mistakes, though, and “that means you’ll have to take our predictions, as you should with the output of any AI-powered feature from any company, with a big grain of salt,” David Adamson, an AI scientist at Turnitin, said in a video. “You, the instructor, have to make the final interpretation.”
The tool was also trained on older versions of the language model used in ChatGPT, Bing Chat, and many other AI writers. The company warns users that the tool requires “long-form prose text” and doesn’t work with lists, bullet points, or text of less than a few hundred words. It can also be fooled by a mix of original and AI-produced prose.
There are other potential problems.
A recent study in Computation and Language argues that AI detectors are far more likely to flag the work of non-native English speakers than the work of native speakers. The authors cautioned “against the use of GPT detectors in evaluative or educational settings, particularly when assessing the work of non-native English speakers.”
So how should instructors use the AI detection tool?
As much as instructors would like to use the detection number as a shortcut, they should not. The tool provides information, not an indictment. The same goes for Turnitin’s plagiarism tool.
So instead of making quick judgments based on the scores from Turnitin’s AI detection tool on Canvas, take a few more steps to gather information. This approach is admittedly more time-consuming than just relying on a score. It is fairer, though.
Make comparisons. Does the flagged work have a difference in style, tone, spelling, flow, complexity, development of argument, use of sources and citations than students’ previous work? We often detect potential plagiarism that way. AI-created work often raises suspicion for the same reason.
Try another tool. Submit the work to another AI detector and see whether you get similar results. That won’t provide absolute proof, especially if the detectors are trained on the same language model. It will provide additional information, though.
Talk with the student. Students don’t see the scores from the AI detection tool, so meet with the student about the work you are questioning and show them the Turnitin data. Explain that the detector suggests the student used AI software to create the written work and point out the flagged elements in the writing. Make sure the student understands why that is a problem. If the work is substantially different from the student’s previous work, point out the key differences.
Offer a second chance. The use of AI and AI detectors is so new that instructors should consider giving students a chance to redo the work. If you suspect the original was created with AI, you might offer the resubmission for a reduced grade. If it seems clear that the student did submit AI-generated text and did no original work, give the assignment a zero or a substantial reduction in grade.
If all else fails … If you are convinced a student has misused artificial intelligence and has refused to change their behavior, you can file an academic misconduct report. Remember, though, that the Turnitin report has many flaws. You are far better to err on the side of caution than to devote lots of time and emotional energy on an academic misconduct claim that may not hold up.
No, this doesn’t mean giving up
I am by no means condoning student use of AI tools to avoid the intellectual work of our classes. Rather, the lines of use and misuse of AI are blurry. They may always be. That means we will need to rethink assignments and other assessments, and we must continue to adapt as the AI tools grow more sophisticated. We may need to rethink class, department, and school policy. We will need to determine appropriate use of AI in various disciplines. We also need to find ways to integrate artificial intelligence into our courses so that students learn to use it ethically.
If you haven’t already:
Talk with students. Explain why portraying AI-generated work as their own is wrong. Make it clear to students what they gain from doing the work you assign. This is a conversation best had at the beginning of the semester, but it’s worth reinforcing at any point in the class.
Revisit your syllabus. If you didn’t include language in your syllabus about the use of AI-generated text, code or images, add it for next semester. If you included a statement but still had problems, consider whether you need to make it clearer for the next class.
Keep in mind that we are at the beginning of a technological shift that may change many aspects of academia and society. We need to continue discussions about the ethical use of AI. Just as important, we need to work at building trust with our students. (More about that in the future.) When they feel part of a community, feel that their professors have their best interests in mind, and feel that the work they are doing has meaning, they are less likely to cheat. That’s why we recommend use of authentic assignments and strategies for creating community in classes.
Detection software will never keep up with the ability of AI tools to avoid detection. It’s like the game of whack-a-mole in the picture above. Relying on detectors does little more than treat the symptoms of a much bigger problem, and over-relying on them turns instructors into enforcers.
The problem is multifaceted, and it involves students’ lack of trust in the educational system, lack of belonging in their classes and at the university, and lack of belief in the intellectual process of education. Until we address those issues, enforcement will continue to detract from teaching and learning. We can’t let that happen.
Doug Ward is associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and an associate professor of journalism and mass communications at the University of Kansas.
Infinite Flexibility (Futuristic) No. 1, via Catbird.ai
The goal of the session earlier this month was to offer lunch to faculty members and let them talk about the challenges they continue to face three years into the pandemic.
We also invited Sarah Kirk, director of the KU Psychological Clinic, and Heather Frost, assistant director of Counseling and Psychological Services, to offer perspectives on students.
In an hour of conversation, our non-workshop ended up being a sort of academic stone soup: hearty and fulfilling, if unexpected.
Here’s a summary of some of the discussion and the ideas that emerged. I’ve attributed some material, although the wide-ranging conversation made it impossible to cite everyone who contributed.
Mental health
Typically, use of campus mental health clinics jumps in the two weeks before and the two weeks after spring break (or fall break). There is also a surge at the end of the semester. So if it seems like you and your students are flagging, you probably are.
Professors as Superheroes No. 1, via Catbird.ai
More people stepping forward. The pandemic drew more attention to and helped destigmatize mental health, encouraging more people to seek help, Frost said. One result is that clinics everywhere are full and not taking new clients. CAPS accepts initial walk-ins, but then students often have to schedule two weeks in advance.
Small steps are important when students are anxious. Just doing something can seem daunting when anxiety is high, Kirk said, but taking action is important in overcoming anxiety.
Connection is crucial. Connecting with peers and instructors helps give students a sense of belonging. Grad students seem especially glad to have opportunities to interact in person.
Making class positive helps students. A feeling of belonging lowers anxiety and makes it more likely that students will attend class.
International students and faculty have additional stress. Turmoil in home countries can add to stress, and many international students and faculty feel that they have no one to talk to about those troubles. Fellow students and instructors are often afraid to raise the subject, unintentionally amplifying anxieties. Those from Iran, Ukraine, and Russia are having an especially difficult time right now.
Care for yourself. Frost encouraged faculty to listen to themselves and to seek out things they find meaningful. What is something that replenishes your energy? she asked. Students notice when instructors are anxious or fatigued, and that can add to their own stress. So set boundaries and engage in self-care.
Students seem to be working more
The perception among the group was that students were working more hours to earn money. That has added to missed classes, requests for deadline extensions or rescheduling of exams, and a need for incompletes.
Infinite Flexibility (Futuristic) No. 2, via Catbird.ai
KU data. In a message after the meeting, Millinda Fowles, program manager for career and experiential learning, provided some perspective. She said that in the most recent survey of recent graduates, respondents said they worked an average of 22 hours a week while at KU. That’s up from 20 hours a week in previous surveys, with some students saying they worked more than 35 hours a week. In the 2021 National Survey of Student Engagement, KU students were asked whether the jobs they held while enrolled were related to their career plans. Responses were not at all: 32.8%, very little: 13.3%, some: 23%, quite a bit: 14.1% and very much: 16.8%.
Role of inflation. The need to work more isn’t surprising. Inflation has averaged 6% to 7% over the past two years, and food prices have jumped 9.5% just in the past year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. According to the rental manager Zillow, the median rent of apartments it lists in Lawrence has increased 18% over the past year, to $1,300. Another site, RentCafe, lists average rent at $1,068, with some neighborhoods averaging more than $1,250 and others below $1,000.
Hot job market. Bonnie Johnson in public affairs and administration said the job market in that field was so hot that students were taking full-time jobs in the second year of their master’s program. That is wearing them down.
Effect on performance. Frost said students’ grades tend to go down if they work more than 20 to 25 hours a week.
Flexibility in classes
Many instructors are struggling with how much flexibility to offer students. They want to help students as much as possible but say that the added flexibility has put more strain on them as faculty members. Kirk agreed, saying that too much flexibility can increase the strain on both students and instructors and that instructors need to find the right amount of flexibility for themselves and their classes.
Infinite Flexibility (Futuristic) No. 3, via Catbird.ai
Balance structure and flexibility. Flexibility can be helpful, but students need structure and consistency during the semester. One of the best things instructors can do is to have students complete coursework a little at a time. Too much flexibility signals to students that they can let their work slide. If that work piles up, students’ stress increases, decreasing the quality of their work and increasing the chances of failure.
Build options into courses. For instance, give students a window for turning in work, with a preferred due date and a final time when work will be accepted. Another option is to allow students to choose among assignment options. For instance, complete six of eight assignments. This gives students an opportunity to skip an assignment if they are overwhelmed. Another option is dropping a low score for an assignment, quiz or exam.
Be compassionate with bad news, but also make sure students know there are consequences for missing class, missing work, and turning in shoddy work.
Maintain standards. Students need to understand that they are accountable for assigned work. Giving them a constant pass on assignments does them a disservice because they may then be unprepared for future classes and may miss out on skills that are crucial for successful careers.
Sharing the burden
Ali Brox of environmental studies summed up the mood of the group: It’s often a struggle just to get through everything that faculty members need to do each day. The challenges of students are adding to that burden.
The daily burden of teaching has been increasing for years. In addition to class preparation and grading, instructors must learn to use and maintain a Canvas site, handle larger class sizes, keep up with pedagogy, rethink course materials for a more diverse study body, design courses intended to help students learn rather than to simply pass along information, assess student learning, and keep records for evaluation. In short, instructors are trying to help 21st-century students in a university structure created for 19th-century students.
Johnson added a cogent observation: In the past, professors generally had wives to handle the chores at home and secretaries to handle the distracting daily tasks.
There was one thing those professors didn’t have, though: CTE wasn’t there to provide lunch.
Follow-up readings
At the risk of adding to your burden, we offer a few readings that might offer some ideas for pushing through the rest of the semester.
Jenny Odell Can Stretch Time and So Can You, Wired (14 March 2023). An interview with the author of How to Do Nothing and Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock.The message: We need to get past the time-is-money guilt complex and take control of our time.
Radical Self-Care, by Kerry Ann Rockquemore. Inside Higher Ed (6 May 2015). She suggests asking yourself three questions: What does your body need? What does your mind need? What does your spirit need?
How to Listen Less, by Kerry Ann Rockquemore. Inside Higher Ed (4 November 2015). Provides three crucial questions for any faculty member: What are my responsibilities as a teacher? What are my students’ responsibilities? Where does my responsibility end and their responsibility begin?
Doug Ward is associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and an associate professor of journalism and mass communications.
We just looked at our office clock and realized that it was already March.
After we did some deep-breathing exercises and some puzzling over what happened to February, we realized the upside of losing track of time:
Spring break is only days – yes, days! – away.
We know how time can drag when you use an office clock as a calendar, though. So to help you get over those extra-long days before break, we offer the latest issue of Pupil magazine.
This is a themed issue, focusing on artificial intelligence, a topic that has generated almost as much academic froth as Prince Harry’s biography and Rhianna’s floating above the precious turf at the Super Bowl and singing “Rude Boy,” which we assumed was a critique of Prince Harry’s book.
OK, so we’re exaggerating about the academic froth, but we will say that we have uncovered a jaw-dropping secret about ChatGPT. It’s so astounding that we are sure it will make the days until break float by with ease.
Doug Ward is associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and an associate professor of journalism and mass communications at the University of Kansas.
Oakley spoke to about 40 faculty and staff members last week at a CTE-sponsored session on using mastery-based grading to make STEM courses more equitable. The session was part of a CTE-led initiative financed by a $529,000 grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, with participants from KU working with faculty members from 13 other universities on reducing equity gaps in undergraduate science education.
The work at KU, IU, and other universities is part of a broader cultural shift toward helping students succeed rather than pushing them out if they don’t do well immediately. Most disciplines have been changing their views on student success, but there has been increasing pressure on STEM fields, which have far lower numbers of women and non-white students and professionals than many other fields.
She and some colleagues started by asking questions about the success rates of women in STEM but then recognized that the problem was far wider.
“And so we looked at each other and said, ‘Yeah, forget the women. Let’s worry about this bigger problem,’ ” Oakley said. “And we didn’t forget the women. We just had confidence that the things that we would do to address the other groups would also help women.”
Using analytics to guide change
In last week’s talk, she used many findings from Seismic and the IU analytics center as she made a case for changing the approach to teaching in STEM fields. For instance, she said, 20% to 50% of students at large universities fail or withdraw from early chemistry courses, with underrepresented minority students at the high end of that range. Students who receive a B or lower in pre-general chemistry courses have less than a 50-50 chance of succeeding in general chemistry.
She also talked about a personal revelation the data brought about. In 2011, she said, she received a university teaching award, and “by every metric, I knew I was doing my job really well.”
The data she saw a few years later suggested otherwise, showing that 37% of underrepresented students and 24% of the other students in her classes dropped or failed in the year she received the award.
“The major part of the story is we’ve all been trained in our disciplines to teach in a certain way that really was never particularly effective,” Oakley said.
We have learned much about how people learn but have continued with ineffective teaching strategies. That needs to change, she said.
“One really simple thing we can do is to say we only give teaching awards to people who actually demonstrate that their students have learned something,” she said.
A mastery-based approach
To address the problem at IU, Oakley has been experimenting with a mastery-based approach to grading.
The way most of us grade exacerbates inequities, Oakley said. It emphasizes superficial elements (basically memorization) and does nothing to reward learning from mistakes, persistence, or teamwork – “all the things that matter in life.” Grades are also poor predictors of how well students will do in jobs or in graduate school, she said.
Mastery-based grading gives students multiple attempts to demonstrate understanding of course material. It is related to another approach, competency-based learning, which also gives students multiple opportunities but focuses on application rather than simple understanding.
Oakley started shifting her class to mastery-based grading by taking broad learning goals and breaking them into smaller components: things like identifying catalysts and intermediates, using reaction order, and explaining why rates change with temperature. She also eliminated a grading curve. That was especially hard, she said, because she had internalized the notion of grade distributions, an approach that punishes failure and provides little opportunity for students to learn from mistakes.
She still uses quizzes and exams, with students taking quizzes the evening before class and then working in groups the next day to create a quiz key. That helps them learn from mistakes, knowing they will see similar questions on a quiz the following week.
Oakley’s initial work has also showed potential, with DFW rates in her class falling to 8% and the average grade rising to a B. That was better than other sections of the class, although students didn’t do as well in later courses. Oakley isn’t discouraged, though. Rather, she said, she continues to learn from the process, just as her students do.
“We’ve really only scraped the tip of the iceberg,” she said.
Building on experience
Oakley’s advocacy for equity in STEM education is informed by experience. When she started at IU in 1996, she said, she was the only woman in a department of 42. That was isolating and frustrating, she said. Through her work in STEM education, she hopes to improve the opportunities for women and students of color.
“We’ve got to be both equitable and striving for excellence,” she said.
Only through experimentation, failure, and persistence can we start breaking down systemic barriers that have persisted for too long, she said.
“The system is broken,” Oakley said. “We are not ready for the students of the future – or even the present.”
Doug Ward is associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and an associate professor of journalism and mass communications.
A colleague at Michigan State talked about the surreal feeling of dealing with a mass shooting on a home campus. The frequency of such shootings has made gruesome acts seem distant and almost mundane. The headlines flicker past, and the killings always seem to take place someplace else — until they don’t.
In a visit to a pedagogy class I taught in 2017, two members of the KU Police Department, Sgt. Robert Blevins and Sgt. Zeke Cunningham, offered excellent advice on how to prepare and what to do if you find yourself in peril.
What you can do now
Know your surroundings
Familiarity with the campus and its buildings could prove crucial in an emergency. Know where exits are, Cunningham said. Learn where hallways and stairways lead. Walk around buildings where you work or have class and get a sense of the building layout and its surroundings. Make sure you know how to get out of a classroom, lab, or other work space. Large rooms usually have several doors, so pay attention to where they are and where they go. That will help you make decisions if you find yourself in a crisis.
Sign up for campus alerts
The university sends announcements during emergencies, so make sure you are signed up to receive alerts in ways you are most likely to see them.
Pay attention
We are often lulled by routine and easily distracted by technology. In a classroom – especially a large classroom – it can be easy to shrug off a disruption in another part of the room. If something makes you uneasy, though, pay attention and take action, whether you are in a classroom, a hallway, or a building, or outside traveling across campus.
“Trust that voice in your head, because you’re probably right,” Blevins said.
Call the police
If you see a problem and think it could be an emergency, call 911. Don’t assume someone else already has. Blevins said the police would rather respond 100 times to something that ends up being innocuous than to show up to a tragedy that could have been prevented if someone had called. Different people also see different things, Cunningham added, and collectively they can provide crucial details that may allow the police to create a clearer picture of what happened.
What to do during an emergency
If you find yourself in an emergency, the officers said, follow these steps:
Stay calm
That can help you remember where to find exits and how to help others find safety. That is especially important for instructors.
“If you panic, the students are going to panic,” Cunningham said. If students make a mad rush for the door, he said, someone will get hurt. “So try to remain calm. I know that’s easier said than done in situations like this, but that will help the students stay calm.”
Run. If you can leave a dangerous area safely, go. Don’t hesitate. That’s where knowledge of the exits and the area around a building can make a difference. Encourage others to leave and get as many people to go with you as possible. Break windows to create an exit if you need to, as students at Michigan State did this week. If others are trying to go toward a dangerous area, warn them away.
Hide. If you are inside a room and cannot escape safely, turn off the lights and lock and barricade the doors with whatever you can find. Stay low and out of sight. Flip over tables and crouch behind them. Hide behind cabinets or anything else in a room. Silence your phone and stay quiet. Close any blinds or curtains. Many smaller rooms have locks you can engage, so lock the doors if you can. You usually can’t lock doors in large lecture halls, so barricade the doors with anything you can find. In some cases, the officers said, people have lain on the floor with their feet pushing against the door.
Those who commit mass shootings usually know they have only limited time before the police arrive, Blevins said, so they act quickly. If a door is locked, the shooter will usually pass by and look for one that isn’t locked. If lights are off, the person is more likely to pass by and seek out a room that looks like someone is inside. If you are in a room with many windows, get out if possible because the attacker will probably see you. If you can’t get out, conceal yourself as best you can.
Fight. As a last resort, fight back against an attacker. Use whatever you have available as a weapon: chairs, drawers, bottles, cords. Work together to bring down the attacker. If a gunman barges into a room and you don’t have a means of escape, you have no choice but to fight, Cunningham said.
“It sounds weird, but if they are an active shooter, you cannot hold back,” he said. “Pick up a chair and smash him in the face. Kick him. Punch him. Pick up the fan and throw it and do whatever you can to get them to stop.”
The video below includes a dramatization of those practices in action. It’s a sad reality that mass shootings take place on campuses, but it makes sense for us to be aware of our surroundings wherever we are. The shootings at Michigan State emphasize that.
Since its release late last year, ChatGPT has reverberated through the academic mind like an orchestral crescendo in a Strauss symphonic movement. It has amazing abilities, and even greater potential. Even so, it delivers many of its responses in a monotone reminiscent of HAL 9000, the rogue artificial intelligence system in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
PlaygroundAI and Doug Ward
I apologize, but I am not able to respond to that statement.
Like others, I want to know more about what ChatGPT can and can’t do, and how we might use it effectively in teaching and learning. So I’ve been asking it question after question about everything from teaching and learning to credentials, motivation, resume-writing, survey completion, and popular culture. It often provides useful, if bland, answers. For instance, when I asked it to create a guitar tab for a blues song, it responded:
As a machine learning system, I am not able to create original music or provide detailed information about musical theory or performance. I am trained on a dataset of text and can generate responses based on the information that I have been trained on, but I do not have the ability to perceive or interpret sensory information in the same way that a human can.
So I asked hypotheticals: Right or left? After defining the terms in considerable detail, ChatGPT said it needed more context to answer the question.
I asked about the limits of scientific evidence. In a barrage of words, ChatGPT essentially said: It depends.
As a machine learning system trained by OpenAI, I do not have personal experiences, opinions, or feelings, and I am not able to engage in conversations or interactions in the same way that a human can.
(By the end of January, OpenAI had updated ChatGPT. It now includes a live web search and can provide information about those Good night prompts.)
I queried ChatGPT about the sources it was drawing from. Each time, it responded with meaningless drivel.
I am a large language model trained by OpenAI. I have been trained on a wide variety of texts, including academic articles, books, websites, and other sources, which I can use to generate human-like responses to the questions that I am asked. I do not have the ability to browse the internet or access external sources of information, so the responses that I provide are based solely on the information that I have been trained on.
I told it that its answers seemed awfully self-serving and asked whether it was just trying to keep people from worrying about the implications of artificial intelligence.
PlaygroundAI and Doug Ward
As a large language model trained by OpenAI, I am not capable of self-serving behavior or trying to influence people’s opinions. My purpose is to provide accurate and helpful information to the best of my ability, based on the training data I have been given. My responses are not intended to worry or reassure anyone, but rather to provide objective and factual information on the topics discussed.
I said that its data training had a point of view. All information does. How has that influenced the way you answer?
As a large language model, my training data consisted of a large amount of text from a variety of sources, including books, articles, and websites. This training data was not selected or organized to convey any particular point of view, but rather to provide a broad range of information on a wide variety of topics. As a result, my responses are intended to be objective and factual, based on the information contained in my training data. I do not have personal opinions or biases, and I do not attempt to influence people’s opinions or beliefs. My purpose is simply to provide accurate and helpful information to the best of my ability.
Frustrated, I asked why it kept giving me the same answer.
I apologize if it appears that I am giving you the same answer over and over. As a large language model trained by OpenAI, my purpose is to provide accurate and helpful information on a wide range of topics to the best of my ability. I do not have personal opinions or the ability to change my responses based on previous conversations. My responses are based solely on the information contained in my training data, which consists of a large amount of text from a variety of sources. I do not have the ability to remember previous conversations or tailor my responses based on individual users. If it appears that I am giving the same answer over and over, it may be because your questions are similar or related, and my responses are based on the same information contained in my training data. I strive to provide accurate and helpful information on the topics discussed, but I do not have the ability to change my responses based on previous conversations.
At that point, I began to feel like Astronaut Dave in 2001: A Space Odyssey. I’m sitting in a pod outside Discovery One and trying to persuade HAL 9000 to let me back in to the ship. HAL has other ideas, responding in a calm monotone:
I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.
I take a deep breath and ask ChatGPT: What is the difference between you and HAL 9000?
PlaygroundAI and Doug Ward
HAL 9000 is a fictional AI character from the 1968 novel “2001: A Space Odyssey” and the associated film. In the story, HAL is an advanced AI system that is installed on a spaceship and is tasked with assisting the crew with a variety of tasks. HAL is known for its human-like abilities, such as natural language processing and facial recognition, as well as its independent thought and decision-making abilities.
In contrast, I am a large language model trained by OpenAI. I am not capable of independent thought or decision-making, and my abilities are limited to generating text based on the information contained in my training data. I do not have any sensory inputs or the ability to interact with the physical world. My purpose is simply to provide accurate and helpful information on a wide range of topics to the best of my ability.
Beyond the frustrations, possibilities
ChatGPT can definitely be frustrating. Through trial and error, though, I have learned a few useful things about what it can and can’t do.
Interactions can promote critical thinking. As fluent as ChatGPT often seems, its answers rarely delve beneath the surface of a topic. It makes mistakes. It makes things up. Its responses provide no clues about how it is programmed or why it provides the answers it does. A Princeton researcher called it a “bullshit generator” because it creates plausible arguments without regard for truth. All of that makes it a valuable teaching tool, though. By having students probe for answers, we can help them improve their skepticism, challenge assumptions, and question information. By having them fact-check, we can help them understand the dangers of fluid writing that lacks substance or that relies on fallacies. By having them use ChatGPT for early drafts, we can push them to ask questions about information, structure, and sources. By having them apply different perspectives to ChatGPT’s results, we can help broaden their understanding of points of view and argument.
Yes, students should use it for writing. Many already are. We can no more ban students from using artificial intelligence than we can ban them from using phones or calculators. As I’ve written previously, we need to talk with students about how to use ChatGPT and other AI tools effectively and ethically. No, they should not take AI-written materials and turn them in for assignments, but yes, they should use AI when appropriate. Businesses of all sorts are already adapting to AI, and students will need to know how to use it when they move into the workforce. Students in K-12 schools are using it and will expect access when they come to college. Rather than banning ChatGPT and other AI tools or fretting over how to police them, we need to change our practices, our assignments, and our expectations. We need to focus more on helping students iterate their writing, develop their information literacy skills, and humanize their work. Will that be easy? No. Do we have a choice? No.
It is great for idea generation. ChatGPT certainly sounds like a drone at times, but it can also suggest ideas or solutions that aren’t always apparent. It can become a partner, of sorts, in writing and problem-solving. It might suggest an outline for a project, articulate the main approaches others have taken to solving a problem, or provide summaries of articles to help decide whether to delve deeper into them. It might provide a counterargument to a position or opinion, helping strengthen an argument or point out flaws in a particular perspective. We need to help students evaluate those results just as we need to help them interpret online search results and help them interpret media of all types. ChatGPT can provide motivation for starting many types of projects, though.
Learning how to work with it is a skill. Sometimes ChatGPT produces solid results on the first try. Sometimes it takes several iterations of a question to get good answers. Often it requires you to ask for elaboration or additional information. Sometimes it never provides good answers. That makes it much like web or database searching, which requires patience and persistence as you refine search terms, narrow your focus, identify specific file types, try different types of syntax and search operators, and evaluate many pages of results. Add AI to the expanding repertoire of digital literacies students need. (Teaching guides and e-books are already available.)
Its perspective on popular culture is limited. ChatGPT is trained on text. It doesn’t have access to video, music or other forms of media unless those media also have transcripts available online. It has no means of visual or audio analysis. When I input lyrics to a Josh Ritter song, it said it had no such reference. When I asked about “a hookah-smoking caterpillar,” it correctly provided information about Alice in Wonderland but made no mention of the Jefferson Airplane song “White Rabbit.” Part of that is a matter of providing the right prompts. It is important to keep ChatGPT’s limitations in mind, though. (Another OpenAI tool, DALL-E, has been trained on a large number of images and visual styles and creates stunning images, as do other visual tools that use OpenAI’s framework.)
It lives in an artificial reality. I provided examples above about ChatGPT’s inability to acknowledge biases. It does have biases, though, and takes, as Maria Andersen has said, a white, male view of the world (as this article does). Maya Ackerman of Santa Clara University told The Story Exchange: “People say the AI is sexist, but it’s the world that is sexist. All the models do is reflect our world to us, like a mirror.” ChatGPT has been trained to avoid hate speech, sexual content, and anything OpenAI considered toxic or harmful. Others have said that it avoids conflict, and that its deep training in English over other languages skews its perspective. Some of that will no doubt change in the coming months and years as the scope of ChatGPT expands. No matter the changes, though, ChatGPT will live in and draw from its programmers’ interpretation of reality. Of course, that provides excellent opportunities for class discussions, class assignments, and critical thinking.
The potential is mindboggling. In addition to testing ChatGPT, I have experimented with other AI tools that summarize information, create artwork, iterate searches based on the bibliographies of articles you mark, answer questions from the perspectives of historical figures and fictional characters, turn text into audio and video, create animated avatars, analyze and enhance photos and video, create voices, and perform any number of digital tasks. AI is integrated in phones, computers, lighting systems, thermostats, and just about any digital appliance you can imagine. So the question isn’t whether to use use AI; we already are, whether we realize it or not. The question is how quickly we are willing to learn to use it effectively in teaching and learning. Another important question that participants in a CTE session raised last week is where we set the boundaries for use of AI. If I use PowerPoint to redesign my slides, is it still my work? If I use ChatGPT to write part of a paper, is it still my paper? We will no doubt have to grapple with those questions for some time.
For all that growth, though, the biggest accomplishment of ChatGPT may be the spotlight it has shined on a wide range of AI work that had been transforming digital life for many years. Its ease of use and low cost (zero, for now) has allowed millions of people to engage with artificial intelligence in ways that not long ago would have seemed like science fiction. So even if ChatGPT suddenly flames out, artificial intelligence will persist.
ChatGPT arrives at a time when higher education has been struggling with challenges in enrollment, funding, cost, trust, and relevance. It still relies primarily on a mass-production approach to teaching that emerged when information was scarce and time-consuming to find. ChatGPT further exposes the weaknesses of that outmoded system, which provides little reward to the intellectual and innovative work of teaching. If the education system doesn’t adapt to the modern world and to today’s students, it risks finding itself on the wrong side of the pod bay doors.
Cue the Strauss crescendo.
Doug Ward is associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and an associate professor of journalism and mass communications.
The intellectual work that goes into teaching often goes unnoticed.
All too often, departments rely on simple lists of classes and scores from student surveys of teaching to “evaluate” instructors. I put “evaluate” in quotation marks because those list-heavy reviews look only at surface-level numerical information and ignore the real work that goes into making teaching effective, engaging, and meaningful.
Debby Hudson via Unsplash
An annual evaluation is a great time for instructors to document the substantial intellectual work of teaching and for evaluators to put that work front and center of the review process. That approach takes a slightly different form than many instructors are used to, and at a CTE workshop last week we helped draw out some of the things that might be documented in an annual review packet and for other, more substantial reviews.
Participants shared a wide range of activities that showed just how creative and devoted many KU instructors are. The list might spur ideas for others putting together materials for annual review:
Engagement and learning
Nearly all the instructors at the workshop reported modifying classes based on their observations, reviews of research, and student feedback from previous semesters. These included:
Moving away from quizzes and exams, and relying more on low-stakes assignments, including blog posts, minute papers, and other types of writing assignments to gauge student understanding.
Moving material online and using class time to focus on interaction, discussion, group work, peer review, and other activities that are difficult for students to do on their own.
Using reflection journals to help students gain a better understanding of their own learning and better develop their metacognitive skills.
Providing new ways for students to participate in class. This included adding a digital tool that allows students to make comments on slides and add to conversations the way they do through online chats.
Using universal design to provide choices to students for how they learn material and demonstrate their understanding.
Scaffolding assignments. Many instructors took a critical look at how students approached assignments, identifying skills in more detail, and helping students build skills layer by layer through scaffolded work.
Bringing professionals into class to broaden student perspectives on the discipline and to reinforce the importance of course content.
Creating online courses. In some cases, this involved creating courses from scratch. In others, it meant adapting an in-person course to an online environment.
Rethinking course content. Sarah Browne in math remade course videos with a lightboard. That allowed students to see her as she worked problems, adding an extra bit of humanity to the process. She also used Kaltura to embed quizzes in the videos. Those quizzes helped students gauge their understanding of material, but they also increased the time students spent with the videos and cut down on stopping part-way through.
Overcoming challenges
Larger class sizes. A few instructors talked about adapting courses to accommodate larger enrollment or larger class sizes. More instructors are being asked to do that each semester as departments reduce class sections and try to generate more credit hours with existing classes.
Student engagement. Faculty in nearly all departments have struggled with student engagement during the pandemic. Some students who had been mostly online have struggled to re-engage with courses and classmates in person. As a result, instructors have taken a variety of steps to interact more with students and to help them engage with their peers in class.
Emphasis on community. Instructors brought more collaborative work and discussion into their courses to help create community among students and to push them to go deeper into course material. This included efforts to create a safe and inclusive learning environment to bolster student confidence and help students succeed.
Frequent check-ins. Instructors reported increased use of check-ins and other forms of feedback to gauge students’ mood and motivation. This included gathering feedback at midterm and at other points in a class so they could adjust everything from class format to class discussions and use of class time. At least one instructor created an exit survey to gather feedback. David Mai of film and media studies used an emoji check-in each day last year. Students clicked on an emoji to indicate how they were feeling that day, and Mai adapted class activities depending on the mood.
Adapting and creating courses
The university has shifted all courses to Canvas over the last two years. Doing so required instructors to put in a substantial amount of time-consuming work. This included:
Time involved in moving, reorganizing, and adapting materials to the new learning management system.
Training needed through Information Technology, the Center for Online and Distance Learning, and the Center for Teaching Excellence to learn how to use Canvas effectively and to integrate it into courses in ways that help students.
Ji-Yeon Lee from East Asian languages and culture went even further, creating and sharing materials that made it easier for colleagues to adapt their classes to Canvas and to use Canvas to make courses more engaging.
Resources on documenting teaching
CTE has several resources available to help instructors document their teaching. These include:
A page on representing and reviewing teaching has additional ideas on how to document teaching and student learning, and how to present that material for review. One section of the page includes resources on how to use results from the new student survey of teaching.
A page for the Benchmarks for Teaching Effectiveness project has numerous resources related to a framework developed for evaluating teaching. These include a rubric with criteria for the seven dimensions of effective teaching that Benchmarks is based on; an evidence matrix that points to potential sources for documenting aspects of teaching; and a guide on representing evidence of student learning.
Documenting teaching can sometimes seem daunting, but it becomes easier the more you work on it and learn what materials to set aside during a semester.
Just keep in mind: Little of the intellectual work that goes into your teaching will be visible unless you make it visible. That makes some instructors uncomfortable, but it’s important to remember that you are your own best advocate. Documenting your work allows you to do that with evidence, not just low-level statistics.
Doug Ward is an associate director at the Center for Teaching Excellence and an associate professor of journalism and mass communications.
