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Our most recent research into the working lives of faculty gave us some interesting takeaways about higher education’s relationship with AI. While every faculty member’s thoughts about AI differ and no two experiences are the same, the general trend we’ve seen is that faculty have moved from fear to acceptance. A good deal of faculty were initially concerned about AI’s arrival on campus. This concern was amplified by a perceived rise in AI-enabled cheating and plagiarism among students. Despite that, many faculty have come to accept that AI is here to stay. Some have developed working strategies to ensure that they and their students know the boundaries of AI usage in the classroom.
Early-adopting educators aren’t just navigating around AI. They have embraced and integrated it into their working lives. Some have learned to use AI tools to save time and make their working lives easier. In fact, over half of instructors reported that they wanted to use AI for administrative tasks and 10% were already doing so. (Find the highlights here.) As more faculty are seeing the potential in AI, that number has likely risen. So, in what ways are faculty already using AI to lighten the load of professional life? Here are three use-cases we learned about from education professionals:
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AI to jumpstart ideas and conversations
“Give me a list of 10 German pop songs that contain irregular verbs.”
“Summarize the five most contentious legal battles happening in U.S. media law today.”
“Create a set of flashcards that review the diagnostic procedure and standard treatment protocol for asthma.”
The possibilities (and the prompts!) are endless. AI is well-placed to assist with idea generation, conversation-starters and lesson materials for educators on any topic. It’s worth noting that AI tends to prove most helpful as a starting point for teaching and learning fodder, rather than for providing fully-baked responses and ideas. Those who expect the latter may be disappointed, as the quality of AI results can vary widely depending on the topic. Educators can and should, of course, always be the final determinants and reviewers of the accuracy of anything shared in class.
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AI to differentiate instruction
Faculty have told us that they spend a hefty proportion (around 28%) of their time on course preparation. Differentiating instruction for the various learning styles and levels in any given class constitutes a big part of that prep work. A particular lesson may land well with a struggling student, but might feel monotonous for an advanced student who has already mastered the material. To that end, some faculty are using AI to readily differentiate lesson plans. For example, an English literature instructor might enter a prompt like, “I need two versions of a lesson plan about ‘The Canterbury Tales;’ one for fluent English speakers and one for emergent English speakers.” This simple step can save faculty hours of manual lesson plan differentiation.
An instructor in Kansas shared with Cengage their plans to let AI help in this area, “I plan to use AI to evaluate students’ knowledge levels and learning abilities and create personalized training content. For example, AI will assess all the students at the beginning of the semester and divide them into ‘math-strong’ and ‘math-weak’ groups based on their mathematical aptitude, and then automatically assign math-related materials, readings and lecture notes to help the ‘math-weak’ students.”
When used in this way, AI can be a powerful tool that gives students of all backgrounds an equal edge in understanding and retaining difficult information.
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AI to provide feedback
Reviewing the work of dozens or hundreds of students and finding common threads and weak spots is tedious work, and seems an obvious area for a little algorithmic assistance.
Again, faculty should remain in control of the feedback they provide to students. After all, students fully expect faculty members to review and critique their work authentically. However, using AI to more deeply understand areas where a student’s logic may be consistently flawed, or types of work on which they repeatedly make mistakes, can be a game-changer, both for educators and students.
An instructor in Iowa told Cengage, “I don’t want to automate my feedback completely, but having AI suggest areas of exigence in students’ work, or supply me with feedback options based on my own past feedback, could be useful.”
Some faculty may even choose to have students ask AI for feedback themselves as part of a critical thinking or review exercise. Ethan and Lilach Mollick of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania share in an Harvard Business Publishing Education article, “Though AI-generated feedback cannot replicate the grounded knowledge that teachers have about their students, it can be given quickly and at scale and it can help students consider their work from an outside perspective. Students can then evaluate the feedback, decide what they want to incorporate, and continue to iterate on their drafts.”
AI is not a “fix-all” for the administrative side of higher education. However, many faculty members are gaining an advantage and getting some time back by using it as something of a virtual assistant.
Are you using AI in the classroom?
In a future piece, we’ll share 3 more ways in which faculty are using AI to make their working lives easier. In the meantime, you can fully explore our research here:
The post Three Ways Faculty Are Using AI to Lighten Their Professional Load appeared first on The Cengage Blog.
Reading Time: 4 minutesOur most recent research into the working lives of faculty gave us some interesting takeaways about higher education’s relationship with AI. While every faculty member’s thoughts about AI differ and no two experiences are the same, the general trend we’ve seen is that faculty have moved from fear to acceptance. A good deal of faculty […]
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