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These resources for Teaching and Learning with AI are designed to empower educators and students with the knowledge of generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) by providing a pragmatic overview of the inner workings of various Large Language Models (LLMs).
Learning Objectives
- Build foundational knowledge of how LLMs function and their role in transforming educational and professional landscapes.
- Learn to communicate effectively with various LLMs using tailored prompts and guidelines, and develop the skill to lead AI-enhanced dialogues by integrating personal expertise.
- Acquire strategies to use AI for crafting personalized teaching materials, creating low-stakes tests, and designing pedagogically sound syllabi.
- Explore how students can harness AI to augment their learning process, including understanding how to interact with AI tools responsibly and effectively.
- Develop an understanding of the ethical considerations in using AI within the classroom, ensuring academic integrity and proper data privacy practices.
Leveraging LLMs as Collaborative Partners
When faced with the abundance of new and constantly evolving AI tools, it can be overwhelming to determine how best to integrate them into the classroom setting. Generative AI LLMs such as ChatGPT and Copilot can be thought of as helpful assistants or collaborative partners in teaching and learning. These AI tools can aid instructors in tasks related to instructional development and preparation, allowing them to invest more in enhancing pedagogical approaches that support student learning.
By aligning the capabilities of AI with the goals and visions of instructors and students, the potential for AI to enrich the teaching and learning experience becomes clearer. Here are four areas of potential:
Diversify
AI possesses the capability to produce a wide range of examples, scenarios, case studies, questions, and activities. Students derive significant advantages from encountering diverse use cases when navigating new and intricate information. Generative AI tools (e.g. ChatGPT) support the generation of infinite variations to effectively fulfill course learning objectives.
Example Prompt: “Generate three diverse scenarios depicting interpersonal communication challenges in professional settings. Each scenario should highlight a different aspect of communication, such as active listening, nonverbal cues, or conflict resolution. Additionally, include discussion questions to prompt students to analyze and reflect on the communication dynamics portrayed in each scenario.”
Explain
AI is adept at generating targeted explanations, descriptions, comparisons, summaries, and instructions. Students typically grasp concepts more readily within familiar contexts, making tailored explanations and comparisons especially potent. Generative AI can be used to produce concise summaries and clarifying aids to help students broaden their scope of understanding.
Example Prompt: “Clarify ethos, pathos, and logos for an audience made up of college students with little to know background in rhetorical theory.”
Enrich
AI can adapt context, style, voice, format, and structure. Offering a broad range of information and examples fosters nuanced comprehension, inspires new ideas, and enhances classroom engagement. This might entail explaining a concept in the voice of a specific individual, translating a literary work into song lyrics, or visualizing data sets in multiple formats.
Example prompt: “Create a summary of Toni Morrison’s Beloved in the style and tone of a family-friendly stand-up comic.”
Review
AI can provide feedback, grammar/punctuation corrections, and assessments. Beyond aiding in content generation, tools like ChatGPT and Copilot can review writing and provide feedback, identify errors, and conduct evaluations. Simultaneously, AI can offer feedback on assessment questions or lecture notes and suggest improvements for teaching and learning specific concepts tailored to various learner levels.
Example Prompt: “Review the following lecture notes and offer suggestions on injecting questions or activities for engaging students with each other and with the content of the lecture: [copy and paste lecture notes]”
“Practical AI for Instructors and Students”
The videos below have been created by The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. As MSU Denver continues our integration of advanced AI tools, we will develop our own resources with specificity to our Roadrunner community. Until then, we will curate the best resources available for our purposes, doing so in collaboration with the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Design (check out the Ready site for more information), Information Technology Services, and others who are committed to using artificial intelligence ethically and responsibly. overview of how large language models work and explains how this latest generation of models has impacted how we work and how we learn. They also discuss the different types of large language models referenced in their five-part crash course, including LLMs from OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google.
Introduction to AI for Teachers and Students
Part 1 provides an overview of how large language models (LLMs) work and explains how this latest generation of models has impacted how we work and how we learn. They also discuss the different types of large language models referenced in their five-part crash course, including LLMs from OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google.
Large Language Models (LLMs)
Part 2 delivers a do a deep dive into a variety of large language models (LLMs) and discusses how to work effectively with each model – with examples, prompts, and guidelines.
Prompting AI
Part 3 discusses how to effectively prompt AI like Midjourney, ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing, as well as how to take the lead, weaving your own expertise into the interaction.
AI for Teachers
Part 4 covers how to use AI to make your teaching easier and more effective, and we show how to use specific prompts to develop personalized examples, explanations, and low-stakes tests and create a pedagogically sound syllabus.
AI for Students
Part 5 examines how students can use AI to improve their learning and include guidelines and tips for getting the most out of the interactions. The video provides example prompts, tips, and guidelines to help teachers communicate with students about the use of this tool.
Liking what you see?
Check out Prof. Ethan Mollick’s blog One Useful Thing, a great resource for those trying to understand the implications of AI for work, education, and life.
