AI 101 for Teachers: Transforming Learning with AI

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foreign

hi welcome to session three of the AI

101 for teachers professional learning

series

in this session we are traveling to the

Wharton School at the University of

Pennsylvania to chat with Dr Ethan

Mullick a professor who teaches

Innovation and Entrepreneurship and Dr

lilac Mullick who works on interactive

pedagogy and AI research

they will help us explore how AI can be

combined with pedagogy to enhance

student learning

let's go meet the Molex

hi I'm Ethan Malek a professor at

Wharton who has been working on how we

democratize access to education through

tools like games and interactive tools

and AI

Nami and I'm director of pedagogy of

Wharton interactive and I've been

working at the intersection of AI and

education helping to democratize

education for everyone through effective

pedagogically sound use of AI and we

have been working together on the future

of education for a while thinking about

how to make education more interactive

to work at scale and with the Advent of

generative AI we've had a powerful new

tool that can really help in the

classroom but also carries some risks

today we'd like to talk a little bit

about the classroom use of AI upside to

the downside to give you some examples

to work with the first we like to start

with our three guiding principles the

first is that AI is undetectable there

are AI tools detection tools but they

are not effective the second principle

is that AI is ubiquitous it's everywhere

169 countries have access to Bing chat

and you and your students have access to

the most powerful AI available

the third principle is that AI is

transformative it will transform how we

live how we work and how we teach and

learn

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not going away but this is probably the

worst AI you're ever going to use so if

this feels disruptive now I kind of have

bad news which is that there isn't a

reason to suspect that AI development

will not continue and I think people

worry a lot about like the far future or

who knows how far it is where AI is

smarter than humans but even over the

next couple years even of the fact of

this Academic Year I would expect AI to

continue to improve five times ten times

we have no idea but if you're not

already thinking about these systems

what they mean for Education what they

mean for you what they mean for your

students careers I think we have to

think about it because these systems are

not going to disappear let me make the

very pragmatic case for why you might

want to do this for the first part of

the pragmatic case is your students will

be using this anyway so you have to come

to speed I don't think everybody wants

to be dragged along this technology no

one asked for education to be massively

disrupted but it is and unfortunately

we've got to figure out a way to get

around that all your homework

assignments can be done by AI now so you

have to think about that and then I

think the second thing is the pragmatic

argument about how AI can make your life

easier as a teacher if you put the hours

down you get them back later and if

you've worked on a number of prompts to

help make lives easier for teachers

yeah so one thing you can do prompts

like give me a lesson hook prompts like

create a lesson plan

um or Create a quiz for me so starting

to work with your material and the

different models can get you give you a

really good sense of how the AI Works

what is good at what it what it's not

good at and so and save you time in the

end right so that's where I would be my

push to teachers is a you have to and B

you're going to want to

I think the other important thing is

just to try it they're very simple to

use they're very intuitive because

they're conversational uh you can

continue a conversation it feels fairly

natural and I think the the key really

is experimentation see how it works with

you see how it works within your context

within your topic that you teach our

rule of thumb is you need about 10 hours

playing with AI to get what it's good

and what its limitations are so I would

actually start by suggesting that this

that the teacher throw their own

assignments into the AI and see what

kind of results they get back I would

think about asking them uh to ask their

students to create an assignment using

Ai and then critique that assignment

potentially even in class to see for the

students can get a sense of what the

gaps and abilities of AI are I have a

little bit of Freedom as an instructor

because I'm teaching college and MBA

students entrepreneurship so I have a

lot of I have points I want them to make

but they also are building things and

doing things and ai's absolutely

transformed how that works so

um my assignments now literally call for

students to do at least one impossible

thing in class if you can't code you

have to write working programs if you

have never if you can't do design work

you have to create a full graphic design

working prototypes that's literally that

part of the class so where it used to be

right up write a little bit of an essay

do a prototype on paper now you have to

create a full working product every

assignment that they turn in has to be

critiqued by at least five famous

entrepreneurs through history and they

use AI to invoke those there's a

pedagogical reason too which is that

entrepreneurs tend to be overconfident

so you want feedback from different

sources so to me it is let me teach 10

times more than I did I used to teach

Advanced intermediate entrepreneurship

course I can now in the intermediate or

basic course get all the way past the

advanced material and further so I think

we're going to see that shake out more

in the future but some of this is about

powering a past what we could do before

and I think that's exciting as well

apart from student tutors as AI

assignments teachers can certainly use

AI coaches and AI assistants to help

students prepare for discussions help

students outline help students do

research help students get feedback on

assignments and just help students

develop explanations I think there are

Myriad of approaches that are

pedagogically sound

that teachers can assign to students and

watch their work and ask for the back

and forth interaction to really see that

students are paying attention to and

focusing on the material

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teacher's perspective so because of the

ubiquity of AI you've got some choices

to make in terms of your AI policies in

your class so do you want to permit AI

do you want to forbid AI how are you

going to enforce these sets of things

we're going to assume that you want to

use AI to some extent and we'll dive

into a little bit of the details here so

as a instructor you should know a few

things one is there's obviously ongoing

ethical debates about Ai and those are

complicated debates there are debates

over whether or not the AI is trained on

the right kind of data about the biases

AI might have about the use of AI and

the outcomes for student learning and

it's worth acknowledging these sets of

things but this tool is out there and it

is worth thinking about how you want to

use it if you decide that that is okay

and how you want to communicate that

information beyond the initial ethical

concerns there's also concerns about how

AI actually works so the large language

models that power today's AI don't

actually have knowledge of the world

they're predicting the next word they're

predicting the right kinds of sentences

or information to give out and as a

result they make stuff up they would

call hallucinate so there are often

errors or mistakes now it's not always

clear those errors or mistakes are worse

than the errors and mistakes humans

would make but you need to be aware that

there's going to be those kind of errors

and mistakes and then finally you need

to think about as a instructor how

you're going to be using AI to Aid

learning which means being really clear

about what you want to accomplish with

an AI tool they can be boost for student

learning but ai's many possible uses in

classroom so do you want to use them to

have students generate ideas which I do

in my classes and we get better project

ideas as a result do you want them to

use them as tutors to explain Concepts

to them they don't understand do you

want these students to get feedback from

AI by asking it for questions about work

that they're doing do you want to be a

writing companion do you wanted to

explain why quiz answers might be right

or wrong and then once you've decided

what to do as an instructor you need to

decide what you're going to tell your

students

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AI detectors don't work they just don't

work you shouldn't use them and it's

worse than them not working because they

have a high false positive rate that

means they flag things as AI written

that aren't AI written and that

disproportionately falls on people whose

English is a second language this is

just not something that we can do and I

think trying to close the barn door here

after it's been opened and try and

detect AI is not the future for

responsibility in classrooms the the

other thing to note too is that students

were using shortcuts in the past it's

not that they weren't using Google it's

so that they weren't using you know

other students essays this was happening

in the past but this is a major

disruption and I think it does call for

a rethinking of how we do essays so

thinking a little bit more about the

learning goal for an essay or the

learning goal for any assignments

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one of the things that we're noticing as

we watch teachers do this is they all

feel an obligation to talk about Ai and

dive deep into the ethical implications

of AI and so on I think that's important

but I don't think it needs to be the

theme of every class I don't think every

class needs to be a discussion about AI

just like every class that uses

computers doesn't need to be a

discussion about computers I think it's

important to have that conversation and

right now we're all just reacting so

it's not clear who's supposed to have

that so I totally get teachers wanting

to have ai discussions but it's even

harder to come up to speed not just on

the use of AI but how it works it's you

know standards it's ethical implications

so I think teachers should feel a little

bit of um okayness with experimenting

with AI without having to make it the

subject of class

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first is as Ethan mentioned that AI can

fabricate that means that any output

that the AI gives a student may be made

up it may be mistaken it may be very

subtly mistaken and so students should

be responsible for their own work they

should at the very least check sources

check any number check any facts that

the AI gives them and check them with

credible sources the second principle is

that the AI is not a person it's easy to

imbue the AI with a personality or to

feel like you're talking to a person but

it's not a person and it doesn't know

you the third principle is really to

give it a lot of context the AI doesn't

know you it doesn't know your context or

your experience or your expertise the

more context you give it the more useful

it'll be for you and the fourth

principle is that you're in charge not

only should you evaluate and interrogate

its output but if it's leading you in a

conversation that is no longer useful to

to you or if it's stuck in a loop or if

you'd like to change the direction of

the conversation you should ask feel

free to take charge

thank you

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so when we talk about Ai and these

generative AI Solutions we tend to talk

about large language models and there's

actually only a few large-scale general

purpose large language models there is

the models created by openai which are

GPT 3.5 or gbt4 gbd 3.5 is the free

version that you get through uh through

chat CBT and gbt4 is either through the

page chat gbt or through Microsoft Bing

in creative mode and when we talk about

specialized apps almost all of them are

using one of these models and providing

prompts and other information on top of

it I generally think instructors should

get familiar with the models themselves

because those are the models that are

actually producing the answers and you

can manipulate them directly that way

and learn how they work so if you're

trying to buy an off-the-shelf solution

they're almost only using one of these

existing models and then providing some

sort of wrapper or other information on

top of it and it's often cheaper and

more effective and gives you more

control to use the foundation models

yourself but that's a choice you get to

make so when develop helping the prompt

we really and for all of our prompts we

really look at the science of learning

and try to combine that with the power

of the AI so for instance a good tutor

pushes you for information uh it doesn't

just hand it to you a good tutor finds

out what you know and builds on that

prior knowledge

a good tutor will also find out a little

bit about you a good tutor also knows

that you need lots and varied kinds of

examples and analogies and a good tutor

knows that the way that you show

evidence of Mastery is by being able to

explain something in your own words to

someone else and give an example of it

which is exactly these are exactly the

steps and the kinds of questions that we

use in the tutor prompt but you'll

notice when you look at our prompts that

they do things like provide context to

the AI as Leo has discussed already the

idea that it it asks you who you are and

we tell the AI who it is it's an

instructor with this kind of setting

you'll notice that it also tells it

exactly the scientific framework to use

this idea of context matters we provide

controls we ask it to go step by step

through sets of questions to ask

sometimes not in these prompts we

provide examples of good output and then

we test it a lot you can't do prompting

without testing and that's one of the

great things about testing your

expertise it's cheap to do and so you

get to experiment a lot and that makes

for good prompts and and we should also

say we tested not just on one model but

on several models so for instance these

two prompts we just worked with chat

gpt4 they also work with Bing Bing will

react a little bit differently and it

will um because it's connected to the

internet it will also look up citations

sometimes they're the right citations

sometimes they're not but that is

available it may or may not work with

some of the other models so you really

have to test it I think as an instructor

before you give it to your students in

the context of the topic that you're

teaching to see how it works so this is

all very theoretical but I think

important so let's let's get practical

let's talk about some examples of what

AI can do and again this isn't a

monolithical thing a AI has many

possible uses as we said it was

transformative earlier so we're going to

show you a couple of prompts that we've

created and those will be available to

you as well to work with and these are

just examples of the ways AI classroom

use can work so the first one we want to

show you is a prompt that I believe you

created that talks about uh feedback

that gives proper feedback and

one of the really interesting things

about the AI side of things is a more

sophisticated prompt that takes into

account some of the principles we were

talking about earlier will result in

better outcomes so students will often

ask for writing advice from an AI even

if you tell them not to do it but

they're going to ask for it in a way

that's fairly unsophisticated and is

going to give them fairly generic

sounding work and possibly more mistakes

if you give a more elaborate prompt you

can get more elaborate answers so in

this case could you explain what this

prompt does the feedback prompt yes so

we combine the principles of good

feedback which is feedback that takes

into account your prior knowledge or

what you already know from the student

perspective takes into account who you

are your learning level what grade

you're in uh whether you're in college

or you're a professional and it also

takes into account uh the idea that you

want to respond to this feedback so it

is going to be actionable it's going to

be balanced it's going to tell you

what's wrong and what you can improve on

and what you're doing well and it's

going to keep working with you but like

any good tutor or coach it won't

actually give you the answer it'll push

you in that direction ask you to explain

ask you to construct your own knowledge

and so you can see the prompt hopefully

on the screen here uh and uh as a place

to work from you don't need to take this

as an absolute answer this is something

you can play with but let's see it in

action so let's get started using this

prompt it says that it's a teaching

assistant because that's the

instructions we gave it and it asks us

for our grade level and subject we're

studying what should we say so I think

we're studying Macbeth and we're in 12th

grade in 12th grade okay great

okay and so we've told the AI as

information it's feeding it into the

logic that it's using here and it's

asking us about a specific assignment

um and it's asking if we have a rubric

or other information to work with or

what we're hoping to achieve with uh

with as much of Rage as possible I don't

have a huge amount here so I'll say I

have to write an analysis of Macbeth

it is graded

based on

writing style and depth of content

and you'll see what it's going is it's

asking us questions soliciting

information from us which makes it a

kind of a good prompt that you might

hand a student better than one that is

just they're just developing themselves

and it's asking about Specific

Instructions and as gets to share the

assignment uh here is what I have

written so far

and I have asked the AI to generate a

Macbeth essay so here we go I'm just

pasting that in

and we'll see what it says here and

you'll notice it's it's it's working on

the information it's saying it's taking

time to carefully read through it that's

a bit of an illusion it's obviously not

taking any extra time but uh it's

responding in this method and you'll see

it's giving a set of strengths and

weaknesses what's great about again

using a tutor that you've built or a

mentor that you built is that it can

give you the kind of feedback that's

educationally valuable that ties into

pedagogy rather than just students

asking make this essay better a nice

example of AI working in your favor uh

as an educator and not necessarily

working against you and undermining the

points you're making

so you'll notice at the End by the way

it gives a question that you for the

student's answer so how do you plan to

revise your analysis give me a plan on

specific changes you're going to make

again the kind of thing we would do as

an instructor in our classroom

soliciting changes or differences so I

think you can start to see why a uh tool

like this can be really useful when

properly applied now let's also talk

about one other potential use for ai ai

as a tutor what are some of the

advantages of disadvantage of that

approach so an advantage of this

approach is that you're getting students

to actually pay attention to the

material you're getting them to read

over the rubric to read over the purpose

of the essay and the audience and to

really think through it a disadvantage

is that you you certainly can ask the AI

to do it for you but if you work with it

and if you're given guidelines to work

with it it's one way to get feedback

that you would then have to evaluate

something else that a teacher could do

is to ask for the interaction and ask

for a reflection about the interactions

what about this feedback was good what

about this feedback was not as good and

again it's a higher order level thinking

about your essay and and your process

excellent and so I want to show you one

other example where the AI acts as a

direct instructor and we have a prompt

for that as well there are risks

associated with asking the AI to be a

direct instructor which is that

hallucination risk it doesn't know your

pedagogy your your your perspective but

I find in my classrooms that students

are increasingly using the AI as a

method of learning so they don't raise

their hands as much I'm going to ask

them why they're like well I'd rather

not show my evenings in class I could

ask the AI to explain like I'm five so

they're already engaging this Behavior

so something like a tutor both does a

useful thing of showing you what the

future of AI education might look like

uh like the way Khan Academy is building

AI interactive tutors to work and it

also might be a tool your students can

use to achieve more in class but you

should caveat that with the knowledge

that AI tutors are not 100 there yet but

let's let's use an example here so this

tutor is again trying to take the right

kind of format it says hello there I'm

your AI tutor and I'm excited to work

with you today what do we want to learn

about today

opportunity cost the concept from

economics let's see what happens

okay so we're telling the AI where the

opportunity cost it's saying it is a key

concept of Economics that's even throw a

little Emoji here which is cute uh can

you ask us about our learning level what

level are we at here 11th grade 11th

grade

now I wouldn't get too tied up on the

individual grade it's not amazing at

differentiating a 10th grader from 11th

grader but this is part of the context

in which it's working and so it's not

pulling from some sort of universal

standards here and it says what do we

know about opportunity cost

well we know that it has to do with

choices has to do with alternative

choices

that is it and of course the advance one

of the advantages of AI is this kind of

freeform texted interaction is the real

power of education and it's something

the AI can fake reasonably well again

not as well as a real human instructor

yet and you'll notice it's giving us

examples and explaining things in

different ways which is a powerful thing

that AI can do it's very good at

breaking things down in different ways

but you'll notice that it's now starting

to ask questions it's asking us to make

choices so one of the things we know

from the research on tutoring is you

can't just declaim things to people the

advantage of tutoring comes from

soliciting information making

connections and you can see the AI

starting to do this and asking us for

Connections in our own life the other

thing to mention too about the Tudor

prompt is that it is not assuming that

the student can judge their own learning

uh very often you'll see in a tutor

prompt that is very simple like explain

to me like I'm 10 It'll ask you if you

understand something instead here it's

not asking you to make a judgment about

your own learning which we know is

inherently flawed instead it's

soliciting as Ethan said soliciting

information from you to find out what

you know and to help you build on your

knowledge and these sorts of subtle

differences are what separates

using AI in sort of an expert way in a

classroom where we know what we want to

have happen from just the naive use

people are doing

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I I think that there is an advantage to

taking charge of your students AI usage

because they're going to be using it

anyway and thinking about directing it

either by giving them prompts having

these discussions and it's a really

powerful tool that in the future will

greatly boost classroom learning and is

not a replacement or threat for students

for teachers it is something that we can

use to improve the outputs of our work

improve student learning make our lives

easier while making students lives

better and I think that that's a very

powerful view of the future and I hope

that you at least Embrace that

experiment with AI before deciding

whether you want to use it or ban it in

your classrooms

wow there really are so many ways to

enhance student learning using AI

with AI technology advancing rapidly

there will be more and more tools

available as with any new tool Educators

have a responsibility to ensure they are

using age-appropriate tools

protecting student privacy and creating

spaces for students to critically

evaluate the potential of pitfalls of

the technology they are using join us in

session four ensuring a responsible

approach to AI as we explore these

topics thanks for joining us see you

again in session four visit the AI 101

for teachers website at co.org AI 101 to

sign up for Early Access and to explore

additional resources from code.org ETS

IST and Khan Academy thanks for joining

us