Artificial Intelligence tools and higher education: what should teachers do and think about?

Description

Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools have been taking up many headlines since the company OpenAI released a free version of their chat tool, ChatGPT, in November 2022. The tools produce clear, coherent text in response to user prompts. Many teachers are concerned that these tools will be used by students to take shortcuts in their learning and cheat on assessments, because we (teachers) won’t be able to tell that the work is not their own. In this presentation, I will explain why I think that this is not the main challenge we face with these tools. We should certainly regularly review our summative assessment tasks and criteria, and to ensure that students are using all the tools available, including AI, to demonstrate their high-level thinking and capabilities.

Of course we always need to manage assessment to ensure that it is fair, reliable, and valid, and sometimes that will mean removing access to AI tools, as we remove access to other resources in examination halls. We will consider this, but these are not new concerns. What is new is to ensure that our use of AI tools is equitable, ethical and focused on educational purpose, and I will present some of the principal considerations and possible solutions in the presentation.

Period	2023 Aug 24
Held at	Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Sweden
Degree of Recognition	Regional