Like many fields, AI anxietyhas hit education over the past few years. Mostly, it’s been a question of academic integrity. Are students using ChatGPT to write their essays for them? Can they use Artificial Intelligence tools for research? How can students prove they really learned the material if they use them?
Many schools and universities have written academic integrity policies addressing student submission of AI-generated work. Northern Illinois University currently does not have a uniform policy at this point.
Andrea Guzman is an associate professor of communication at NIU. She studies human-machine communication and the intersection of AI and communication. She says the best way to talk about AI is to focus on individual applications: what they can do and what they can't do.
Some NIU faculty like Guzman are piloting an AI design assistant through their virtual learning platform Blackboard.
“I think a lot of people, when they hear the word AI, they think, oh my gosh, it must be super smart,” she said. “But these tools are fairly basic.”
Essentially, the tool is meant to help professors streamline tedious tasks. The main way she’s used the design assistant is to help create grading rubrics.
“You have to plug all these different descriptions into all these little boxes. And then that can take anywhere from up to like half an hour to 45 minutes,” she said. “It's not perfect, but Blackboard AI, what it allows me to do is give a description of my grading criteria and it auto-populates those boxes for me, so I can just go in and tweak. So, it probably saves me about like 20 minutes.”
So, it’s not developing the content, it’s copying and pasting a format.
Similarly, it can suggest learning modules for professors. Faculty might have their learning objectives written up and can feed it into the AI tool instead of spending time formatting and building it in Blackboard. Then they can go in and fix them more quickly.
The tool can also propose test questions based on specific content or generate images for their courses. It’s NOT doing things like grading assignments or writing curriculum.
Guzman says that the utility of the assistant depends on how you teach. Those who teach primarily online often need to use Blackboard more, use a lot of images and may use the tool more and in different ways.
Stephanie Richter with NIU’s Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning says the Blackboard design assistant was announced and released last summer. She says the university held faculty focus groups through the fall to talk about how to roll it out on campus, which led to the pilot program starting this winter.
“We are asking faculty to experiment with the design assistant to use it in a couple of ways in their courses," said Richter. "They don't have to actually use the materials that the AI produces but try it out and see what types of material it would produce for them."
The pilot runs through the spring and faculty can still sign up. Richter says they’ll use the feedback to decide if they’ll make the AI assistant available to all faculty this summer or fall.
She says the Blackboard assistant was built for use in higher ed.
“It also has user agreements and licensing in place, which means that faculty and students' work through the design assistant isn't being used to train AI,” she said. “It isn't being held as corporate property, [so]that what faculty and students are doing in the learning management system remains theirs.”
And even though they’re basic tools, she says it leads to some interesting ethical questions for students and staff to grapple with.
Ben Creed is president of the faculty senate and a professor in the College of Education. He says Richter spoke to the faculty senate in January about the AI tool and some professors had concerns.
“Faculty members think there's this disconnect or this kind of need to square the story," he said. "How can we rely on a tool that we're asking our students maybe not to use in a similar way?"
In other words, students may think, "I can’t use ChatGPT, but they can use Blackboard AI?”
Even though the university itself doesn’t have an AI academic integrity policy, Guzman says plenty of professors have AI policies in their syllabi.
“Mine basically says on my syllabus that it's, it's assignment-dependent," she said. "And that's because journalism students actually need to know how to use AI in different contexts in journalism and public relations students."
She says transparency about how and when students AND professors can use AI is crucial. And, Guzman says, it brings interesting conversations about what it means to be a professor. What parts of the job should only be done by humans, and what are we comfortable streamlining? We’re comfortable with calculators in math and inputting data into Microsoft Excel -- where’s the line with AI?
Ben Creed says that’s why it’s good that there’s so much AI expertise on campus to help facilitate those conversations across disciplines -- from fine arts to physics. Because AI is becoming an ever-greater part of everyone’s life -- in education, and beyond.
