In a recent webinar we taught to faculty members in STEM and other disciplines, these questions about AI showed up in the Chat:
How do we survive in this AI era of teaching? What should I do when most students taking my course use AI to carry out their assignments? How can teachers make learning more engaging and effective while encouraging independent, critical, and creative thinking and intelligible writing in an era when students are increasingly dependent on AI tools and social media?
Answers given to these and other questions teachers often ask when they first learn about AI and its astounding capabilities are often versions of “Ban student use of AI!!!” That solution has several serious flaws, which we will begin our response by addressing.
Banning AI would be as ineffective, unpopular, and unenforceable as previous attempts to ban powerful time-saving technology that can solve complex mathematics and science and logic problems and write accurately and clearly on almost any given topic. It took very little time for teachers to adopt calculators and computers for six-digit multiplication, long division, and other common time-consuming academic and professional tasks, and the takeover of many more complex tasks by AI is already well under way. Attempts to reverse that trend by banning AI will be as futile as those previous banning efforts.
Banning AI would also be a violation of the responsibility of all teachers to give their students a solid preparation for their future academic and professional challenges. Dr. Felder taught chemical engineering courses before he retired from his active faculty position. Many assigned problems in those courses could each take an hour or more for most students to solve, and many assignments required such problems to teach the skills the students would need in the courses that followed and the tasks many of them would have after graduating. Banning AI from courses would be a severe disservice to them and all other students heading for any skilled profession. Their instructors’ responsibilities include teaching them how to use AI effectively, carefully checking AI-generated information, and when necessary finding and verifying references for it.
But if banning AI is not the answer to Q1, what is the answer? It is that within a few years nearly all your students will regularly use AI for their assignments and later in their careers. Teach them how to use AI effectively and pitfalls they should avoid. Make them aware that chatbots have access to an incredible volume of information including much that is incorrect, and the bots sometimes report such information in their responses to prompts. They sometimes cite non-existing references for the information. Teach the students to fact-check information they get from AI and to document their checking in the assignments they turn in.
We also need to make sure our students understand that it’s a bad idea to use AI to solve problems without thoroughly understanding the solutions and then being able to use the same methods to solve similar problems. Why? Because their examinations will contain different problems and they may not or will not be allowed to access AI to solve all of them, and their course grades will be determined much more by their exam grades than their assignment grades. In addition, they should be made aware that if on their future jobs they use AI to solve an important problem and the solution turns out to be incorrect and possibly extremely expensive or harmful or disastrous, blaming the chatbot will almost certainly not help them avoid the consequences to them of the mistake. In short, encourage them to use AI but always make sure they understand and are skeptical about the information it provides.
