Are You Ready To Use AI In Your Teaching?

College faculty are uncertain about the use of AI. Most talk related to AI among non-science faculty pertains to how students might be using it to cheat rather than how they can use it to streamline their own work or how to be innovative in their approaches to teaching. Anthology is hoping to simplify many of the components of teaching through the use of AI in its learning management system (LMS) — Blackboard Learn Ultra.

Recently I talked with Nicolaas Matthijs, Anthology’s Chief Product Officer, to learn more about how faculty can use AI in college course design. He shared that Blackboard Learn Ultra will now provide faculty with AI tools to strengthen their courses. From Matthijs’s perspective, AI can “Help instructors build out a class.” However, he noted that the “Instructor is always in control of the course.”

As a historian, I asked him how I might use the AI feature in Blackboard. Matthijs explained that once I load my syllabus into the LMS, the AI function will suggest course activities to help student better understand the topical areas I have delineated. It will also generate discussion questions based specifically on my readings. Creating activities and crafting discussion questions is something I spend hours doing prior to the beginning of a course. I typically revisit them the week before each class as there are many changes over the semester and the activities and discussion questions often need to be revised depending on the students in the class and the depth of the learning. The AI feature can help generate ideas or help you revise ideas.

Moreover, the AI feature will offer visuals that represent the various topical areas and connect to the readings I am assigning. AI will also craft assessments that directly relate to the learning goals in my syllabus, and it will create a rubric for each assignment that helps students understand how they will be assessed. I must admit that I’m not a fan of rubrics so this kind of assistance would be especially helpful in helping students understand how I am assessing them for each assignment.

When I expressed concern about AI sharing materials with students that I might not consider appropriate or relevant, Matthijs explained that Blackboard’s AI support “doesn’t create course content — the instructor is in charge — everything is based on the content provide by the instructor and the instructor approves everything.” He added, “If the instructor is not in charge of the content, things will fall apart.”

During our conversation, we also talked about the use of AI to cheat in courses as this is the main concern among faculty based on recent surveys and a review of conversations on X/Twitter. Matthijs believes that faculty should be less concerned with catching students using AI for cheating and more focused on how students can use AI to creatively complete assignments and assist them in their learning process. He cautioned that AI detectors often don’t always work — there are many false positives — and a “detection” culture can feel alienating for students. Moreover, AI detectors are more likely to label non-English writers as AI-written. According to Jing Lei, a professor in Syracuse University’s School of Education who specialized in technology integration, “A teacher’s best tool in detecting any potential violation of academic integrity is their understanding of their own students.”

Anthology has been thinking extensively about the issue of integrity and AI, releasing a white paper pertaining to the topic. AI, Academic Integrity, and Authentic Assessment: An Ethical Path Forward for Education focuses on four main ideas: 1.) AI is here to stay, and colleges and universities should focus on building on its benefits rather than merely restricting its threats; 2.) AI will bring about large changes just like other innovations in learning; 3.) AI necessitates flexible policies and practices; 4.) Empowering faculty in the use of AI is essential to its use and fostering integrity.

One of the most interesting — and perhaps controversial statements in the white paper — is: “Academic integrity, and related terms like plagiarism, have always been very clearly defined, with a shared understanding of what is considered ethical practice. AI changes this. It will no longer be possible to maintain strict, institution-wide policies, as the impact of AI will change for different study areas. While having clear guidelines is essential, instructors should also have autonomy to apply these relative to their subject matter.” I’m sure there will be much debate among faculty around this particular issue, and there should be informed debate as colleges are learning environments.

Currently, nearly 500 colleges and universities have enabled the AI Design Assist feature in Blackboard, resulting in 350,000 unique uses of generative AI among faculty users in the last 9 months. I’m sure there will be many more to come.