AI and CHAT GPT: FRIEND OR FOE IN THE CLASSROOM?

Many schools and organizations are grappling with the reality of AI and whether to embrace it, create safeguards against it or hope that it’s a trend that will quickly fade away (unlikely) .

Our professors have chosen to both embrace the positives and guard against misuse in a number of creative ways.

In the management department, associate professor Henry Jin incorporates AI in the classroom extensively He starts by distributing a “cheat sheet” with overall tips on how to use generative AI most effectively He also spends an entire class exploring the prompts and how to use them . Since his class’s centerpiece is a client-based project, students deploy their familiarity with generative AI toward enhancing their project deliverables, using AI to assist with research, coding, and proofreading their presentations and summary papers

For all of the above, students are required to turn in a version with track changes on, so that he can see what they changed based on AI-generated content Throughout the semester he also assists them with finetuning their AI prompts and troubleshooting unexpected output

Henry noted, “The common theme of all of these is that AI not only improves productivity in terms of speed and quality but also allows me and the students to gain capabilities that we otherwise wouldn’t possess ”

In accountancy, assistant professor James Zhang’s students recently completed a client project for PwC in their capstone class about AI, integrating GPT4 and New Bing .

Professor Brian Ballou received a curriculum grant for integrating intelligent automation in the accounting curriculum and met with the KPMG advisory partner in charge of IA and the firm’s head of Audit Innovation Technologies He used a lot of the information from them in classroom discussions to promote “data literacy” versus expertise

In our First Year Integrated Core (FYIC), a mandatory set of courses that all first-year business students take, AI was a recurring theme

Assistant teaching professor Jake Matig encouraged students to use ChatGPT to come up with creative ideas for an opening hook to help their final presentation stand out for the FYIC client challenge He also did a few in-class activities throughout the semester to have students use ChatGPT to help write professional emails, cover letters, and resumes

Assistant teaching professor and BUS101 Team Lead Justin McGlothin shared that all the professors who teach BUS 101 used ChatGPT in their courses to help students develop a SWOT Analysis and Ansoff Matrix for the FYIC client challenge They used AI to develop their first draft and then used research to make it more specific to the client and market

Associate lecturer and FSB Director of Innovation David Eyman had all of his students in five classes use ChatGPT for every creative project that was due, encouraging them to use it as a tool instead of a crutch He required them to write a summary about their prompt, the information AI gave them, what they did with it, and how they used the tool to inspire creativity . One assignment was subtitled “How am I better than AI?”

And visiting assistant professor Greg Dern taught all five of his ESP103 sections how to create artwork using Dall-E and he had them create a professional logo and an image that represents compelling narratives without using words .

In the marketing department, instructor Bruce Lux uses AI to enhance his teaching He prepares unique content that combines key learning objectives from the textbook, his experience, current industry articles and podcasts And, he also prompts at least 2 AI agents for ways to bring the content further along . An example of a frequently used prompt is, “You are a marketing professor for an introductory undergraduate course . Provide me 2-4 examples of ways in which I can make the topic of Services Marketing more interactive .” He believes profg .ai to be most helpful with this .

To eliminate any potential copyright issues with reusing Google Images in content, he is using AI imagery using a combination of Adobe Firefly and Dall-e 3 to bring to life key concepts .

He also encourages his students to leverage AI where creativity can be enhanced and to write their assignments, and then have AI check them for brevity, clarity, and professionalism

Bruce said, “While allowing this is potentially opening Pandora’s Box, I do believe it is essential to preparing students to be job ready on day one To guard against misuse, I caution them that, just like in business, they should be prepared to have their analysis challenged and their recommendations questioned I also insist that they note where they are using AI in any project or in-class work . One watchout: one student keeps ChatGPT open during class and when I ask the class for examples of something we’re talking about, or have them do a table discussion, he will ask ChatGPT and proudly provide an answer . ”

Information Systems & Analytics associate professor Fadel Megahed actively encourages students to use the different generative AI tools to supplement their knowledge of the course material and assist with some of the coding tasks . The students are expected to verify the correctness of the generated outputs and correct them if necessary The tools include commercially and publicly available chatbots (e .g ., BARD, ChatGPT and Claude) and also ChatISA, a chat bot that he specifically created .

Students must submit proof of their interaction with ChatISA and professor Megahed has created a PDF output which captures their entire “conversation” as follows:

Headers and footers: that would capture the student’s name and course number, Miami logo, a disclaimer about the app, and automated page numbers

Cover page: containing three sections: (a) the purpose behind ChatISA, (b) the formatting of the generated PDF, and (c) the cost of the student’s interaction with ChatISA

The Student’s Interaction with ChatISA: The entire chat conversation would be formatted, with light red text for the student query and black text on a white background for the ChatISA response (except when there is code -- code blocks are highlighted in gray)

An Appendix: that contains the custom instructions

These are just a few of the ways our faculty are ensuring that their students will graduate beyond ready to embrace and harness technology to benefit their employers

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