Upcoming Events
Mathematics & Statistics Colloquium
Tuesday, February 17, 1:30pm-2:30pm in 209 Luther Bonney Hall (Portland Campus)
Dr. Ashanthi Maxworth on Generative AI in Teaching
Controlled experimentation with generative AI in engineering education
“In the era of generative AI, educators are struggling to identify the ways and means of integrating it into classrooms. Although some educators strictly oppose the use of AI in the classroom, the majority are trying to incorporate it since we can no longer pretend that it does not exist. In this presentation, I present how I incorporate generative AI in my classes.
I teach a senior course on communication theory. This course is based on signal processing and probability theory. In this course, one assignment is based on AI. In this assignment, students are asked to choose two questions they did poorly on in their in-class paper-based exam. Then they work with a generative AI platform such as ChatGPT to arrive at the correct answer. In other words, in this assignment, ChatGPT is their study-buddy. Then they submit a video presentation explaining what they did and what ChatGPT (or the generative AI partner) did. In this assignment, I tell them clearly, “As a human peer, this AI student is also learning. Hence, it will make mistakes.” In this assignment, they get credit for the process of explaining how they arrived at the answer and not whether they arrived at the correct answer or not.
In the feedback collected from the students after this assignment, many students indicated the advantage of using an artificial buddy instead of a human buddy was that the artificial buddy was very knowledgeable, hence, they did not have to “carry” the buddy. The drawback was that the artificial buddy was so eager to arrive at the answer without going step by step; hence, the learning experience was slightly difficult. Overall, they found the assignment was different from an ordinary assignment, and they enjoyed the process. In the next iterations of this course, I would like them to present live in class instead of submitting a video presentation.”