Using generative AI chat tools like ChatGPT to enhance your teaching doesn’t have to be a time-consuming or “all-in” investment. Try out these techniques at the start of the semester to make some teaching tasks more efficient. Think of AI as your teaching assistant and brainstorming partner — ease into using it as just another tool in your teaching. You might employ your “AI teaching assistant” to help you with
- Writing discussion forum prompts → Copy/paste existing discussion forum prompts into an AI tool and ask for revisions and suggestions for new prompts. Follow up by adding in some former student-written examples and ask the tool to revise the questions further. Try scenario-based discussion prompts and ask the AI tool to create the scenarios based on your provided parameters. What does it look like? Check out this example of writing a discussion forum prompt with AI.
- Writing course/module learning objectives → Copy/paste existing course goals or a course description into an AI tool. Ask the tool to revise them to be specific and measurable. Ask for multiple iterations and refine until you get what you want. Go further by asking for suggested assignments that will assess the new objectives. Check out this example of writing course/module learning objectives with AI.
- Creating student samples → Copy/paste assignment directions, rubrics, etc., into an AI tool and ask it to generate student samples at different performance levels. Use these to give students a sense of what to expect, or to give them practice for peer evaluation. Check out this example of creating student samples with AI.
- Outlining a module or entire course → Copy/paste a project or assessment description and ask an AI tool to create an outline with learning activities for a module leading up to that assessment. Tweak results by adding more context, including how long students should spend completing activities and whether or not the course is online. If you are teaching a new course, try out similar questioning and discussion with an AI tool to outline the whole course week-by-week. Check out this example of outlining teaching activities for a single project with AI.
Creating a rubric → Copy/paste evaluation criteria for a project, paper, presentation, etc., into an AI tool and ask it to develop a rubric. Include information on the levels, for example Exemplary to Needs Improvement, and ask it to create the rubric in a matrix. Check out this example of creating a rubric with AI.
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