As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to evolve at an unprecedented pace, it’s becoming increasingly important for educators to stay informed about the latest developments. Whether you are beginning to explore AI or you are already integrating it into your teaching, understanding the most recent trends and tools can greatly enhance your approach to education. This post will break down essential things you need to know if you’re new to AI, tips for those already experienced, highlight some AI updates, and how to stay updated on all things AI at UW-Whitewater. 

3 Tips if You Are New to AI:

1. AI is a Tool, Not a Replacement: AI has the potential to enhance your teaching methods, not replace them. It is able to automate repetitive tasks, offer personalized learning experiences, and provide insights based on data, allowing you to focus more on student engagement and instruction. It does not replace teaching, creating, or learning.

2. Start Small and Be Patient: Begin with simple AI tools like AI-driven chatbots for answering common student questions. These can help you get comfortable with AI without feeling overwhelmed. Popular AI scholar Prof. Ethan Mollick states that becoming proficient with AI platforms like ChatGPT takes approximately 10 hours. If you find that prompts you are trying aren’t working, keep trying! And reach out to the LTC for help. 

3. Ethical Considerations are Crucial: As you explore AI, it’s essential to be aware of the ethical implications, including data privacy, bias in AI algorithms, and the impact on student learning. AI platforms are businesses, and in the end, are looking for ways to monetize their products, which includes gathering user data to train models, fine tune responses, and improve model output. Always be cautious of sharing private information.

3 Tips if You Are Experienced With AI:

1. Evaluate AI Effectiveness Regularly: Continuously assess the effectiveness of the AI tools and strategies you are using. Collect feedback from students and analyze how these tools are impacting learning outcomes. Be prepared to adjust, remove, or replace tools if they’re not meeting your goals or if better alternatives become available.

2. Balance AI and Human Interaction: While AI can greatly enhance efficiency and provide valuable insights, it’s important to maintain a balance between AI and human interaction. Ensure that AI tools complement rather than replace personal engagement, and continue be open and transparent with students about how AI is used in your course.

3. Understand Pay-to-Play Models’ Effect on Student Equity: As AI tools advance, premium features will become part of a subscription model, often times a repeated monthly fee. While some students may be readily able to cover this cost, other students may struggle to maintain access, or may even be limited by the system they are using; for example, tablets or other mobile devices versus laptops. Ensure that AI tools you are using are accessible to all students. 

3 Ways to Stay Updated on AI 

1. Attend or watch a recording of an LTC workshop: Workshops are a great way to meet other instructors with similar AI interests and stay on top of the best AI practices. The LTC developed an AI Workshop Series that is meant to meet individuals wherever they are on their AI journey; workshops are interrelated, not serial, so sign up for as many or as few as you are interested in! New for this semester, AI sessions will include a brief time for participants to ask questions and provide insights, as part of the LTC’s bid to build an AI Community of Practice. 

2. Subscribe to the LTC Blog: The LTC is committed to providing accurate, timely information that affects instructors, students, and the campus community. The blog is often the first place that new information is posted, including updates to previously held workshops. Make sure to subscribe! 

3. Utilize Campus Resources: There are an endless number of professional development resources available to instructors but the LTC curated a list of campus resources:
   1. LinkedIn Learning built an AI Learning Path that develops user’s skills for understanding and apply AI to their work. 
   2. The EDUCAUSE Showcase Series just released AI…Friend or Foe?, which focuses on a deep dive of AI policy, objectives and frameworks. 
   3. EDUCAUSE maintains and AI Community Group where instructors, instructional designers, researchers, or just those curious about AI can post questions and discuss. 

Have a different AI question or looking a one-on-one discussion? Email the LTC!

While students and instructors may have enjoyed a summer break, AI certainly did not take time off! It continues to advance rapidly, with innovations like AI-powered podcasts leading the charge. As these developments unfold, higher education remains deeply invested in the intersection of AI use and academic integrity. While AI has the potential to support and enhance learning, it also presents the risk of being misused as a shortcut in the educational process. The challenge of accurately detecting AI-generated content is growing, prompting educators to rethink traditional assignments. To maintain academic rigor, courses may need to evolve, incorporating tasks that are less easily completed by AI and more focused on critical thinking and original analysis. The post serves an introductory guide to detection but also offers insights into how to prevent AI misuse. 

To begin the discussion surrounding appropriate AI use in the classroom, the LTC has built a set of recommendations, outlined below. These recommendations serve as a guideline for open and transparent communication about AI and are not exhaustive; your course policies should suit your teaching!  

• Plainly stating how AI may be used and expressly state this position in your syllabus.
  • AI statements are part of the required UW-Whitewater Syllabus Language 
  • Check out the AI Syllabus Language KB for examples 
• Provide context for your decision; providing an explanation as to why you do or do not feel AI is appropriate for your course will help students to understand why using it or not using it is a part of the learning process.
• Explain how you grade and what is considered cheating or misuse in your course 
• Ensuring students know how to provide documentary evidence of their work; having copies of outlines, rough drafts, or methodology statements.

Instructors have detection tools at their disposal to identify students that may have inappropriately used AI to generate text for an assignment or failed to cite AI as part of their creative process. While detection tools may seem like an easy solution to the improper use of AI, detection tools come with their own misuse concerns. 

• Detection software is more likely to flag authentic student content as AI generated when the student may be a non-native English speaker or have a disability.
• Grammar and spell check programs are AI; hence, they can trigger a detector even if the ideas and content were genuinely created. 
• As AI technology continues to evolve, detection software will remain behind the improvement cycles of generative AI. It has already become more difficult to detect AI generated text through use of “humanizing” applications; software that is able to make writing appear less generic and formulaic, typical indicators of AI. 

UW-Whitewater instructors have access to AI detection through Turnitin, which can be integrated with Canvas. A few tips to use the Turnitin detector successfully: 

• Only long format prose can be submitted for detection. Bullet points, incomplete sentences, or short paragraph answers cannot be evaluated. 
• Detection is only available in English. 
• The AI indicator is located inside the Similarity Report in Turnitin. Students are not able to see the AI indicator, even if you allow students to view their Similarity Score immediately after submission. 
• If the document was evaluated successfully, the AI indicator box will be blue. If it is red, the submission was not able to be evaluated. If it is grey, there was an error with the document, such as incorrect file type, size, or over 15,000 words. 
• The AI indicator displays a score between 0 and 100. The displayed percentage indicates the amount of qualifying text in the submission that was determined to be generated by AI. Not all text within a submission can be considered; i.e., a bulleted list. Hence, a score of 100% does not mean the document was 100% AI generated, but rather, 100% of the highlighted text was likely to be AI generated.
  • There is no target score; always use the indicator percentage as a starting point for a discussion with the student. 
• Turnitin is capable of false positives. In company provided documentation, the error rate has been reported as 1%. In practice, the error rate has been reported as high as 4%.

Given the limitations of Turnitin, instructors may opt to run student submissions through a third-party detection service. This requires several careful considerations: 

• As per UW-System legal, students must be informed of their instructor’s intent to use a third-party detector and given the chance to provide explicit consent. Doing otherwise may consitute a FERPA violation.  
• The LTC and ITS cannot provide support for individual or department purchased detection tools. 

In short, AI detection remains a nuanced conversation that requires open communication between instructors and students with expectations clearly defined. The LTC welcomes questions, ideas, and concerns about AI; we are here to help! 

Looking for more? Join the LTC for a series of workshops on AI! Or browse our summaries from past events.