“What if someone uses ChatGPT to write their essay?”
Last month I had the pleasure of delivering a series of lectures at Iowa State University, one of which was a faculty workshop on Teaching with AI.
As I led the auditorium through an exercise of AI use case design for the classroom, this question and all its various forms continued to butt its head into the conversation.
Although there was clear intrigue over the potential AI was bringing to the table, this nagging question about what to do to keep students from cheating the system was blocking us from moving forward in the discussion.
A very valid concern, it was starting to feel like a classic catch-22 problem. If we introduced AI into the classroom to enhance learning experiences, we also introduced the possibility for students to use that same tool to skip over the essential step of actual learning.
Trying to control for the counterproductive and undesired behavior was getting us no where. So, I decided it was time to flip the script and start with a different kind of question:
“What is our driving value?”
TL;DR - By rooting your use case design of AI in a clear and defined value, you create clarity and purpose that drives innovation.
P.S. Read to the end of this newsletter for a fun surprise 😉
Define Your Driving Value
My question was met with a mix of confused, blank, and curious expressions. The title of the workshop was “Teaching with AI”, and yet there I was asking an auditorium full of higher education faculty what their values were - not a hint of AI in sight.
“Um, we value using AI well,” came a voice from the middle rows, the remark sounding more like a question than statement of fact.
Well…not quite what I was asking for. Giving the group a gentle nudge in a different direction, I started asking about the values of the university, higher education, even their individual classrooms. Essentially, I wanted the audience to tell me why any of them were here, why did any of this even matter?
Little by little the answers started to trickle out - research and innovation, exposure to new ideas, hope for a better future, life long learning, specialization in a field - suddenly the faculty wasn’t short on answers anymore.
Throwing the values up onto a white board, we took a vote and decided that the underlying driving value we wanted to explore was “deep and applied learning” since it touched on both the mission of the university and higher education.
Understand Your User & Their Needs
Step one, done. We had our value, now it was time to explore.
And by explore, I still did not mean AI.
As the faculty in attendance once again felt the pull of temptation to jump right back into ideating on AI solutions, I instead took us on a hard left turn and asked what a student needs in order to experience our selected value of deep and applied learning. In other words, how would someone experience this value?
This time the participants were ready for my curve ball, and immediately the ideas began to flow. In order to gain a deep and applied knowledge set in any given subject, a student would need room to experiment with concepts, the ability to test different contexts, the challenge to debate opposing views, the focus to engage with long-form material, and on, and on, and on. I’m pretty sure we could have spent the entire day expanding on the details of what factors create deep and applied learning - turns out teachers think about this a lot, who knew?
This time the vote to select a single need was far more vicious, but in the end we managed to come to a pact and settled on the need to experiment with information in different contexts.
Explore How AI Can Support
At this point we had our value and we had what a student needed to experience this value. Simply put, by experimenting with the contextualization of information, a student could experience deep and applied learning in the classroom.
Now that’s what I call the start to a use case.
With our end goal in mind, it was finally time to start exploring how AI could support it. However, as I stressed with the audience before I let them lose on their AI ideation, the key was to remember we didn’t want the AI to experiment with the contextualization of information itself - we wanted AI to support the students in that experimentation.
Fast forward through the lively discussions that ensued, and by the end of the workshop we had more ideas on how to bring AI into the classroom than we could vote on. (One of my favorites was a marketing assignment that asked students to write contextualization prompts for LLMs that would rewrite a single LinkedIn post for different audiences, and then explain which prompt they found the most useful and why.)
Although we had an abundance of solutions to now chose from, it wasn’t the quantity of ideas that made this exercise a success. It was the fact that the faculty was no longer afraid of AI in the classroom, and instead were excited by the opportunities they saw unfolding before them.
We started from a place of fear that if we brought AI into the classroom, we were threatening the very value we were trying to achieve. And we ended in a place of empowerment, seeing exactly how the technology that threatened deep and applied learning transformed before our very eyes into a powerful tool to support that very same value.
Values-Based AI Innovation in Education
So, what do you do when a student uses ChatGPT to write their essay?
You go back to the drawing board to explore how you can incorporate this technology in a way that serves the value of eduction instead of impeding it.
The Fun Surprise
I’d like you to meet…me. Or at least, an echo of me that is.
For the past six months, I’ve been partnering with a blossoming startup called Wisdom to develop what we call my Echo.
My Echo is an AI avatar built off the back of my book, research, and Values Canvas - bringing all the resources I’ve created over the years to life in a way that you, my reader, can actively engage with the material through conversation.
Now, in order to practice what I preach, I am turning to you all for feedback. Before my Echo is released to the general public, we need to test it in action - and I couldn’t think of a better audience than you all.
Beta testing is limited. The first 50 people get 50 free credits to explore this exciting new tool, follow the link below to join!