Artificial intelligence is changing the game for all professions, including teaching.
Understanding it is only the first step; success in the new reality also will require trying to keep pace with AI’s rapid evolution and the ability to keep an open mind about its presence on the field of play.
How can humans collaborate with AI rather than being replaced by AI?
Teachers ready to dive in can take the plunge this June.
Cindy York, an associate professor in the Department of Educational Technology, Research and Assessment, will teach ETT 530 this summer to provide teachers a better understanding of the concepts of AI and to put the tools in their hands so that they know how to use them.
York knows the topic is a hot one, especially with new platforms arriving daily that can facilitate quick-and-easy fraud – and with the commonly accepted knowledge that “kids are accessing these on their own because their teachers haven’t figured out yet how to use them.”
“Everywhere I’ve been going lately, at all the conferences I’ve been attending, ChatGPT has been coming up. People have already started presenting on it,” says York, a former elementary school teacher who joined NIU in 2011, “but there have been very few professional development opportunities for teachers on how to integrate these tools in a way that promotes the active learning of the students or the engagement of the students.”
Fear was apparent during those conferences.
Will AI destroy the practice of teaching and learning? How can we trust our students to not simply input the assignment instructions into Chat GPT, which then will generate essays for them to submit?
“I have the philosophy that our students – in-service and pre-service teachers – need to learn how to embrace the tool because our students in middle school are using them now. They might be using them to cheat, or attempting to cheat, and what the students are getting out of it might not actually be what they think they’re getting out of it,” she says.
“So, let’s embrace AI. Let’s figure out how to work with it and not be afraid of it,” she adds.
“When you’re talking about math, it’s being compared to the calculator. Everybody was afraid of the calculator at first, and then everybody was afraid of the graphing calculator. But if you can teach what’s underlying the AI, just like you teach the underlying math ideas behind what the calculator is doing, then the AI is just making idea-generation faster.”
Platforms on the syllabus include:
- Chatbot: ChatGPT, Cleverbot, Kuki, Replika, Bing, Jasper, YouChat
- Art and Image Creators: Dall-E, Midjourney, Craiyon, Stable Diffusion
- Music Creators: Avia, Amper Music, Soundful, Ecrett Music, Soundraw, Boomy
- Voiceovers: Clipchamp, Synthesys, Murf, Listnr, Play.ht, Respeecher, Speechelo
But practicing and having fun with these apps is just the beginning, York says.
“If you think of the field that I’m currently in – instructional technology – the technology changes every day. You have new, free tools out there on the internet, so it’s not about knowing that one specific tool. It’s about understanding the concept of what these tools are doing and knowing how to adapt,” she says. “It’s also about evaluating what tool you’re going to use in a particular situation, whether you’re teaching or something else.”
Exploring AI is akin to problem-solving, she says, or getting tossed in the pool without knowing how to swim.
Think about being “handed a whiteboard and told, ‘Here. Figure out how to use this,’ ” York says.
“This is the same thing, except that we’re more familiar with the whiteboard because we’ve had chalkboards and we can see the evolution,” she adds. “A lot of people aren’t familiar with what’s going on behind AI, but once that’s explained and broken down, I think it’ll just be like any other technology, even if the capabilities are a bit stronger.”
Practice in a relaxed environment should further that comfort.
“I find that if teachers have time to ‘play’ with a tool, and it becomes more familiar to them they’re more apt to use it in the classroom,” she says. “Teachers don’t have time to play with the tools, or time to learn to tools, so that’s a big barrier to technology integration.”
Next, the professor says, is acceptance of the inevitable.
“AI is going to transform education, because if you have a tool that you can just put the question into and get an answer, whether the answer is right or not, it’s going to transform the way we’re educating,” York says.
“It’s just as important as learning any other technology, like when we went 1:1 with iPads or laptops. This is going to be a critical piece of what all our students – current and future – are using, so let’s teach them how to use it correctly.”
Defining the benefits to education “is hard to say because it’s so new,” York says, although she can envision the upsides.
One is the need for the human to persistently interact with the AI to teach it and to help it grow, often through “many, many iterations for the tool to get it right.”
“We’re learning in a new way,” York says. “We may have changed the definition of active learning or engaged learning because it’s like they’re talking to another person, even though it’s an artificial person, and so they’re engaged in a different way.”
York expects that students who love the ETT 530 course will want to enroll this fall in ETT 555, which will entail project-based learning where students, either individually or in groups, devise a problem and then collaborate with AI to solve it.
Projects must match their current workplaces, she adds. Teachers will solve problems in education; people from industry will solve problems from industry.
“Summer is such a short time – only eight weeks – and there is so much to learn,” York says. “This is about being able to move beyond and do something a lot bigger than they were able to do in the summer.”
Collaboration is key, she says, as is moving past the anxiety that AI will replace humans.
“Not at this juncture,” says York, who recently scolded her chatbot as “a liar” for providing her with bad information while her repeated “No, you’re wrong” retorts eventually helped it to learn and improve its accuracy.
“I can’t say what’s going to happen in 20 to 30 years from now, but what it is producing now is not replacing humans,” she adds.
“Will it make some jobs different? Yes, because it processes the thinking faster, and because it can think faster than humans, some of those more menial jobs that it can also do might disappear. But you still have to have the people who are feeding the AI the prompts and who are trying to get the prompts right and then crafting the final results to meet their needs.”
For more information, or to enroll, contact Academic Program Advisor Judy Puskar at 815-753-6085 or jpuskar@niu.edu.
