AI in Higher Education: Benefits, Best Practices, and What’s to Come

With the entrance of generative AI, the classroom has become like the Wild West. Educators and students alike are forging new paths, not knowing where they might lead. There are so many things to consider: concerns with equality, access, bias, verification, truth, honesty, plagiarism, and cheating all within the academic process. Intertwined within academia we must also consider new opportunities to help students learn, to prepare students for life after college, and to ease the burden for educators.

AI has been built into educational tools for years, but generative AI is a lot more powerful. The most impacted community, other than creatives, has been educators and students. Now’s a good time to discuss the risks and concerns, and the ways AI is helping educators and students. Let’s think collaboratively as educators to get the most out of generative AI in the future.

The Benefits of Generative AI

A lot of attention has been given to the risks and drawbacks of AI but AI also offers benefits that can support educators and students from day one.

Offer instant feedback

One of the benefits of generative AI is the opportunity to give students instant feedback at scale. Students who receive immediate feedback have been shown to perform two standard deviations higher than their peers. This is how generative AI can be pulled into the classroom right away to support teaching and learning.

Boost equity

Generative AI can be a great equity booster. Students who have social anxiety or who aren’t comfortable asking questions in class now have a means to ask time and time again, within a safe and enclosed community. They can even have AI quiz them to make sure they really know the material. As we continue to learn AI’s applications in the classroom, this is something we can optimize for.

Focus on the things that are uniquely human

If you ask anyone about the most significant moments in their education, the human connection will almost always play a large part. That’s something AI can’t replace. Now we can figure out how to foster more of those moments by assigning straightforward tasks to AI, so educators have more time to focus on the things that are uniquely human. For example, can we program AI to give feedback on the fundamentals of your discipline, and use it to support grading on things that don’t require subject matter expertise? Have ChatGPT work on agendas for meetings, on conference sessions, and webinars. Let AI do what it’s good at so you can go back to connecting with the students.

AI best practices in the classroom

With AI getting more and more clever as time goes on, we need to think strategically about how best to incorporate it into our courses.

Build motivation

You need to tell students not only the what, but the why around your guidelines for using generative AI. Give them buy-in into the purpose of your course and the role AI plays in it. If they feel a sense of autonomy and purpose, the likelihood they will go to GPT to do their assignments diminish. You create an environment of intrinsic rewards, rather than punishment-based AI policy, where students want to succeed.

Teach students to evaluate sources

Generative AI is an excellent tool for brainstorming and generating ideas, but students must learn to fact-check its content. Train students to use multiple resources to verify what they see, and to identify what resources are trustworthy. This can start at the beginning of the term: provide students with a bank of resources specific to your discipline that they can use for fact-checking. Make it an assignment by giving students a prompt to feed to GPT, have them produce a result, and then have them fact-check it. You’ll be showing students how to use AI successfully and growing their critical thinking skills.

Model using AI responsibly

What are the responsibilities of an instructor when using AI? The answer is by modeling for students the standards and expectations you hold for them and holding yourself to them, as well. Make sure you are extremely clear with your AI policy, then demonstrate appropriate use. If you’re okay with students brainstorming thesis statements but not directly pasting content from ChatGPT, you can follow those same rules. If you want students to be forthcoming about using AI, show them how to do it. For example, if you develop a prompt with the help of generative AI, be transparent about your use – say, “ChatGPT helped me develop this prompt, and I reviewed it for accuracy.” As you model ethical and responsible use of AI, you set boundaries that your students can follow.

What’s next with AI in Higher Education?

So where are we going next with AI? We hope that it will open doors to do things the education community has been wanting to do for a long time, by helping us scale and giving us more time to focus on the things we value most. AI will certainly enable a lot more personalization for students. We also foresee a lot more investment into soft skills, and into careers and roles that require human interaction – social work, crisis intervention, teaching – things that AI can’t replicate. As AI continues to be fine-tuned, we’re also expecting to see highly specialized tools developed per discipline. If we let AI take care of students’ most basic educational needs, then schools will be able to dedicate themselves to the flourishing of project-based learning, experiential education, and the development of skills and knowledge that will last students a lifetime.

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