In October, a terrified mother called the police to help her daughter in Fountain, Colorado. With her panic surging and fearing for her daughter’s life, she did her utmost to get help until she could be there.
The triggering event? Her daughter sent a photograph of a homeless individual sitting in their living room. With a panicked mother eagerly trying to get to her daughter and hear what the police did, her shock intensified as the officer shared, “Your daughter answered the door. She said the whole thing was a prank.”
Using a photo generated by AI, the daughter jumped on the latest trend of trolls exposing new technologies to pull pranks. These acts are reminiscent of “Is your refrigerator running?” prank phone calls, emails declaring the recipient won millions of dollars, and catfishing on social media. Human beings find a way to misuse technologies. With artificial intelligence, we’re just scraping the surface of the different ways this technology can be abused.
The moral of this story: we need AI literacy. We need to understand the impact, how to use AI to elevate our work, and how to recognize AI-generated content. This need falls into the hands of educators. Not only those in higher education, but K-12 partners as well. Embracing the technology is the first step. Knowing that this is not a huge undertaking is the second step.
This column is provided by the Instructional Technology Council, an affiliated council of the American Association of Community Colleges. The article is part of the work of ITC’s AI Affinity and Emerging Technologies Committee.
Our first step is learning how to create AI bot activities. In Paul Hanstedt’s Creating Wicked Students: Designing Courses for a Complex World (2018), he writes, “If we wish students to learn content deeply and develop a capacity for wicked thinking, we need to structure our courses in ways that ask them to do the kinds of authoritative work we do in our own fields.” AI bots can be utilized to put students in the shoes of the decision-makers to solve complex problems.
Make your own bot
Create a bot. Do not let this step intimidate you. Because, quite frankly, there is a bot for that! Bots can help you create bots. I do this by providing a bot builder bot (say that three times fast!) with my learning outcomes, goal for the activity, and time frame for the activity.
Once the bot is built, I test to ensure it functions correctly. I use tools such as Boodlebox and Playlab AI to build my bots. When the bot is ready to go, place the link in your course learning management system for students to access.
Creating a text-based, choose-your-own-adventure game with a bot was one of my favorite moments in my AI journey. Here are a few examples of bots that were not only fun to create, but also allowed students to spend time and energy actively engaging with the material:
- Students worked through a scenario titled “The Case of the Cheeseburglar,” where a roommate throws away expensive food while the other roommate is at work. A fun and interactive activity replaced the previous document-style case study students had worked on. Students were not only reading a story, but they also embodied a role in the scenario and adopted a persona to explore conflict management strategies.
- In a friendship maintenance strategies scenario, students send “text messages” to a bot that discusses a tough situation with them. This “Ahsoka Loki Vader” bot opens with “Hey… 😕 I need to talk to you about something that’s been bothering me. Is now an okay time?” Students then try to navigate their misstep in this friendship using techniques from the textbook.
- The “Aardvark Advertising Agency” is a choose-your-own-adventure activity that walks students through representation in media and the impact on society over time. Students begin with a campaign in the 1950s and trace the impact to today. This activity led to a richer discussion of hegemony and ideology, which meant students needed to have the chapter read and ready to apply in class.
Woven into the work
Students working through these scenarios are building their skills, learning what AI can do, and getting used to generating information in AI environments. They were not identifying communication dispositions in a case study but adopting and exploring these dispositions in a roleplay scenario. This AI literacy is not built on top of the learning outcomes but woven into the course.
As AI evolves, we also have course/assignment environments. Students do not have to share a link or screenshots of the conversation. My students are assigned to the bot in a course in Boodlebox. I receive a list of their completed conversations that I can read through. During the Teaching Professor Conference this June, “process over product” was a key phrase that kept coming up. The course/assignment environment makes this possible in an accessible way. I can grade the process the student takes as they learn and work with an activity bot.
AI tools are becoming just what educators need: a classroom tool. Whether we’re teaching in person, online, hybrid or hyflex, these bots can be woven into a course to support student AI tool experience, as well as bring learning to life in an active way.
Start small
With the advice of James Lang, author of Small Teaching, in mind, begin small. We do not need AI bots every week. We don’t have to overhaul our entire course. Think creatively and have fun. AI bots can bring case studies, discussions, assignment preparation and critical-thinking exercises to life in a different way.
As we embrace AI, these platforms and models will be a part of our teaching toolbox alongside other apps and software. Time will tell, but these activities lead me to ponder how else AI can extend learning in the classroom.
