Previously we covered what you need to know if you are starting from scratch with Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education. We mentioned our intention to follow up with action steps for the Fall. In researching we found an excellent guide posted on 8/2 by Inara Scott who serves as the Senior Associate Dean in the College of Business at Oregon State. We strongly recommend reading her well thought out piece. Several of the points she makes mirrored our own draft and we want to point you to her work. In correspondence with Scott we received permission to link and republish sections of the article. Here are some key highlights from her article.

It’s summer and as professors that means we’re not on the clock as it were. Zach and I have been posting nearly 1-2 per weeks since February, trying to stay on top of all the changes to ChatGPT and its impact on higher education. So, we’re taking a summer break but we’ll be back in mid to late August with new content with some super relevant topics for the start of the new fall semester.

As Zach wrote last week, one of the most common responses we get from faculty when showing them ChatGPT or talking about it is that we need to move away from analytical assignments to personal reflection assignments, or at least combine them. Some faculty think that we can out smart ChatGPT or they think there are truly human things that ChatGPT can’t produce. As Zach outlined, it is becoming increasingly clear that this is not true.

Zach and I presented at an Alchemy webinar on the ChatGPT and higher education. You can now watch the webinar.

While Zach and I are working on new material, please join us on a webinar we are giving titled “ChatGPT in Higher Education: A New Frontier” organized by Alchemy. The webinar will be held Wednesday May 3 9am Pacific/12pm Eastern. Register here.

In the new and rapidly evolving lexicon of ChatGPT, the word “hallucination” has taken the name of the phenomenon of ChatGPT providing incorrect and misleading information. Because ChatGPT is not sentient, it’s a bit misleading and anthropomorphic to say that a machine learning algorithm is hallucinating. That said, when Zach asked ChatGPT to write a bio of Nik, it was fair to ask whether ChatGPT was on acid. The gap between its bio of Nik and Nik’s actual bio was wide. That ChatGPT provides false information is a real problem and it is better to call it what it is: just making shit up. 

Disbelief, nervous giggles, jaws dropped, incredulity, knowing smiles of triumph. Those are some of the reactions when I showed ChatGPT to my class of sociology seniors. After some preamble, I just got to the point: I showed ChatGPT in action.