Thoughts on Managing the Use of Generative AI in the classroom

From the Rice Center for Teaching, Williams College

Text-based Generative AI platforms, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Bard, make it possible to quickly acquire information and generate original text in a variety of formats: essays, research papers, poems, outlines, short answers to exam questions, and even mathematical proofs and computer code. These AI platforms feature a “chat” user interface that allows for back-and-forth conversation and follow up questions.

Here are some thoughts and recommendations on managing the use of generative AI in the classroom from Williams’s Rice Center for Teaching.

 

From the Writing Center Director

For those seeking ways to discuss AI with students, feel free to share Julia’s OpEd from Inside Higher Education: A Message to Students about ‘the Bot,’ in which she urges students not to “rob yourself of the chance to understand—and expand—your own brain. Don’t waste your years in college looking for shortcuts. Don’t let The Bot do your writing about books or big ideas or science experiments for you, and let what you could have learned from them disappear.”