Written by: Tiffany N Halfacre, DHSc, MSMS
Online education has presented many opportunities but also challenges to the educator. With technology at our fingertips, we can reach students where they are, allowing accessibility to those we previously couldn’t reach. With that, there is always the challenge of providing enough content to drive learning outside of assigning a discussion board assignment or textbook reading assignment. With my current position, I balance teaching some courses in the virtual setting via video conferencing live with teaching similar content to students in the asynchronous online environment. As you can imagine, the need for quality faculty-added content has grown with the offerings of online courses. Over the years, I have tried a variety of approaches, including recording lectures with video capture software, making documents with practice questions, and adding flow charts and diagrams I have made along the way to help student understanding.
One of my biggest challenges has been freeing up the time to create.
Over the years, balancing four days of synchronous instruction, multiple online courses with significant discussion and content requirements, and required meetings and other academic obligations has become a big challenge. Creating polished videos and individually reviewing and giving feedback to any of those practice worksheets and materials created to reinforce content when each of the classes may have 30 students in them can be overwhelming, not to mention, I am not trained in media design to really add the “wow!” factor into any videos created. It would seem I had reached my limit on what meaningful things I can provide to supplement my online classroom and bridge that gap.
Until now…
In the past two years, I admit I have been hesitant to embrace anything artificial intelligence (AI) related. The challenges with Academic Integrity with generative AI were things I felt strongly about combatting and as someone who serves as the science faculty representative on the college AI committee, I was determined to establish guidelines and policies on as we grow within a 21st century educational environment where AI is dominating conversations on campuses. With that, I decided to challenge myself and do some research with my course with ethical use of AI to create supplemental content for a course. I was approved to pilot this in one section of one of my courses, with the caveat that my previous faculty-added content remained and students were informed that AI was used to develop the materials. Using the input in AI, I put in notes about what I wanted to achieve along with my lecture outlines. I was pleasantly surprised at the outcome! For each unit, I was able to develop a short “explainer” video for the learning outcomes and a practice quiz. The practice quiz gave immediate feedback for both correct and incorrect selections; no need for me to follow up to provide that! In some weeks, I opted to include a concept map or infographic generated from my lecture note content as well. Visually, the videos and graphics were appealing and professional looking. During creation, I was able to complete other tasks once I put everything into the prompt and chose what items I wanted generated.
Since this was a pilot, student feedback was solicited using both Likert scale questions and open-ended response options. The survey for feedback was divided into three sections: Section 1 had students assess their experience with the “traditional” faculty added content, Section 2 assessed experiences with the AI content, and Section 3 compared the two. This was delivered via a learning management system after the midterm and then again after the final exam. The end of the survey allowed students to type in feedback. Here are some samples from students concerning what they would like to see in terms of using AI in education based on the small sample size that participated in this pilot:
“I think it may be more effective to streamline the content by choosing one primary format or clearly integrating the AI-assisted resources into required assignments, so they feel more purposeful. This could help reduce confusion and allow students to focus their time more efficiently while still benefiting from the additional learning tools. Overall, while the AI-assisted content has potential, simplifying its use in the course could improve the learning experience and reduce unnecessary workload.
“I appreciate the instant feedback. There’s no waiting and wondering and then to be given the chance to correct your mistakes right away and as many times as you want, allows for repetition which helps the information stick.”
In addition to written feedback, when asked scaled questions from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree: For the question “AI-assisted content felt more ‘tailored’ to my needs” student responses varied from “Neutral” to “Agree” with some students noting they “Strongly Agree” with the preference to use the AI content in their learning. In contrast, other students noted they “Agree” or “Strongly Agree” with using the traditional content over the AI based materials.
Overall, this was a great learning experience for me as someone who is trying to branch out into using AI ethically and in meaningful ways to help students. As the results were mixed, the next goal is to obtain IRB approval to do this at a larger scale within other courses to get a better understanding of student’s perception and satisfaction of using AI content. As this was largely a study on such use and satisfaction, no data were obtained on student performance for those using AI content vs. traditional, though this was suggested as a future avenue for study within my college.
As I was very resistant to AI, I hope this inspires similar minds to give these types of methods a try. As we have seen, AI is integrated into many fields now, including healthcare and education and an understanding of how and where it is used and how we can harness it’s power for good will be needed in the coming months and years.