Artificial Intelligence in teaching practice

Information Technology teacher from UOW College Australia, Keshav Jha, discusses the use of generative AI in class and how students have responded. Keshav shares perspectives, strategies for talking with students, example activities and advice for other peers.

" GenAI needs you to be an expert to a certain level, and teachers and my students have taken that as a positive... They have started to use it for brainstorming… and then they see what is real and what is not real by doing fact checking… and due diligence"
- Keshav Jha

Text transcript

The first time when I came across generative AI was when I went for my friend's son's 16th birthday party and they were all talking about this ChatGPT and I had no clue. So I tried to learn more about it when I came back home and I started to relate to it how as an IT teacher or as a teacher itself, I can use and capitalise on the unlimited potential of ChatGPT. As a teacher I find there is a polarised kind of understanding between the teachers. Some think that this is going to be end of their career or there will be less opportunity for teaching, while the other teachers are quite enthusiastic about it, and my message to all the teachers and what discussions I have, and once I shared what I could do with ChatGPT, they all were really, really excited to use it. So we really need to shed light on what aspects of ChatGPT is going to be beneficial for them, what are the ethics involved and what are the level of accuracy or biases that is found in AI-generated content and how to deal with them.

Look, I'm an old guy. Students, they have got so much of energy they actually end up knowing more about ChatGPT than us. So as a teacher I have found that they have been raving about ChatGPT from the students' perspective, but I have also let them know that there are AI detections, so be careful. The first thing is you need to be responsible. You cannot just let ChatGPT do your work. So even if you have got the world's best machine, but if you are not knowledgeable about it then you won't be able to drive and get the result or at least the depth of quality of work that you can generate through ChatGPT needs you to be an expert to a certain level, and my teachers, my students have taken that as a positive note, and they have started to use ChatGPT as a brainstorming, and then they will generate an essay for example on a particular topic, and then they will see what is real and what is not real by doing fact checking. So those are the things that we have to keep in mind and students need to know that sometime their assessment that they straight away generate may be biased or might have misinformation, so they need to do their due diligence to check if they are accurate and they are free of any biases.

So, if I need to share something which can help the students to become more expert and better at using ChatGPT and being more responsible, then something called prompt engineering is what I need to teach them. So basically asking intelligent questions. Or how to drill down and dive deeper into a certain area, it is not easy with AI generatives like ChatGPT still. So you could ask a straight question and it can give you a straight answer, but if you want it to drive to a point where it starts to become like a research analyst, then you need the knowledge of prompt engineering so the ChatGPT can be given the groundwork of acting as a teacher, or acting as a mining engineer or acting as a molecular biologist, and then you can ask the question, give them the context and it can build upon it as a conversation, and these are the things that is hard to teach yet. Maybe it will become easier in future, but this is where it's a good start to teach them prompt engineering. They all work on algorithms, and algorithms is very logical and sequential. So if you want to go from here to Canberra for example, then the roadway you need to know, the Google Map needs to know which one to take first. So this is exactly what prompt engineering does is, what questions you ask first, what question you should ask next and so on. So you can create a fork and sub-fork and keep asking the questions and going to the depth and get the ChatGPT to give you what actually you are after either quantity or quality, either way.

I would say it is an exciting time and we don't need to be afraid or fearful of anything. A great example would be IBM's Watson AI. It won the chess match against one of the greatest players. But did it change the world? We human beings are still the leaders. So these are technologies, and they are not sentient beings. So at the end of the day, whatever we need to do with this technology is up to us. We can embrace it or be fearful of it. But at the end, if you embrace it, then you will be the early adopter and you could be more productive. So as a teacher, as a student, as an employee, you could end up saving a lot of time for those repetitive tasks.