For Faculty: Making AI Work for You

January 13, 2025 /

AI is here and not going away. When ChatGPT first came out of nowhere it was hard to imagine the implications, applications and its future. We still are just beginning on this journey and don’t know what the next few years will bring. But what is clear is that these tools are useful for tasks well beyond generating mediocre essays. This guide will give faculty some practical, time saving ideas on how to make AI work for you and your students. A great repository for suggestion can be found in Ethan and Lilach Mollick’s Prompt library.

First some guiding principles on approaching AI:

  • Think of AI as your intern but also collaborate don’t delegate
  • Always invite AI to the table for any brainstorming session
  • AI aims to please, you have to guide it along the way to get where you want to be
  • Have a conversation, correct it when it goes astray, ask it to clarify or rework ideas to meet your needs
  • See our post on prompt engineering. AI works best when you give it a persona or a role to play and a task to complete

Ideas to help with course planning
Ideas to use with students in the classroom
Ideas for help with administrative tasks

For course planning:

  • Generate Open Education Resources (OER) using ChatGPT (provide ChatGPT with the closed captioning of video lectures to generate a text to be edited into a textbook)
  • Generate suggestions for a course outline for specific topics
    • Example: Input “Create a syllabus outline for a 15-week course on environmental ethics”
  • Brainstorm lecture/session topics
    • Example: “Suggest weekly topics and assignments for an introductory course in cognitive psychology.”
  • Refine learning objectives you can then use to create assignments and activities
  • Create images to use in slides to demonstrate concepts and provide visual interest. You can most likely get better results in less time than just searching, plus there are no copyright questions!
  • Ask AI to recommend articles, case studies, or open educational resources.
    • Example: “Suggest 5 seminal readings for an introduction to feminist theory course.”
  • Syllabus evaluator
    • Example: “Is this inclusive? What learning styles are missing from my assignments?”
  • Generate discussion questions to get class conversations going
  • Brainstorm test questions
  • Brainstorm common misconceptions about their topic/content
  • Find ways to make course content more relevant
  • Ask it for ideas for how to explain complex topics to your students: “Explain X to me like I am a 10 year old”
  • Create Custom Chatbots (virtual Assistant) by uploading course materials (all sample files of lecture slides, homework assignments, etc) so students can ask questions about problem sets, lectures topics, etc. NotebookLM is especially great for this.
  • Generate draft rubrics for specific assignments using AI.
  • Create an escape room activity to review content, speeds up a really time-consuming creation process
  • Create a Murder mystery activity related to course content
  • Improve Accessibility: Upload a picture and write a description
  • Incorporate Universal Design for Learning Guidelines easily

In the classroom:

  • Discuss challenges such as bias in AI, over-reliance, and ensuring that AI complements critical thinking rather than replacing it.
  • Encourage discussions on the role of AI in your field of study
  • Assign tasks where students critique the reliability of AI outputs.
    • Have AI generate an essay about the course content (do it yourself or have the students do it) then have students critique and grade it. Here is a suggested rubric.
    • Ask students to compare AI-generated text with a peer-reviewed article on the same topic to identify gaps or inaccuracies.
    • Compare AI’s explanation of historical events to textbook descriptions.
  • Include assignments where students collaborate with AI to develop creative projects or solve problems.
  • Encourage students to reflect on their experience using AI tools in assignments or projects.
  • Have students get feedback on draft papers or other assignments.
    • Give them a suggested prompt to use such as: I’ve written an essay on [Insert Topic Here]. Can you review it and provide feedback on my argument structure, use of examples, and overall coherence?
    • Try out our custom Writing Feedback bot at: https://poe.com/TrinWritingFeedback
    • Or create your own that is specific to your assignment
  • Ask students to have AI to reframe/explain dense texts into their primary language / learning style / etc. Have them then reflect on how helpful and accurate it was.
    • Multilingual learner support
    • “Translate/reframe this in the way I learn best”
  • For a host of assignment ideas see https://docs.google.com/document/d/15NjfdSzNSYk2YTEAqji-ipW2lBoqG3EeuKRH7fUEwkE/edit?tab=t.0 which is a summary of this OER work https://stars.library.ucf.edu/oer/8/
  • Generating study guides and example test questions from course material in prep for exams
    • Feeding test prep material and have students follow up with “ask me more questions in the same style”

For other administrative tasks:

  • Draft routine accreditation submissions
  • Brainstorm ideas for letters of recommendation
  • Assist in wording for emails and other communications