Surfacing Students' Prior Experience with AI

Last week I helped lead a two-day institute for faculty members participating in the University of Virginia's new Faculty AI Guides program. These faculty have signed up to explore the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in their own teaching and support their colleagues as they make informed, intentional decisions about the roles of AI in their teaching.

We covered a lot of ground in our two days with the AI Guides, as you might imagine. I wanted to share one slice of the discussion here in the newsletter, since it's timely for the start of the fall semester. That slice focused on surfacing students' prior experiences with generative AI, an important part of teaching with, about, or against AI this fall, as generative AI weaves its way into all kinds of software and tasks. If we're to help our students become more effective and ethical users of generative AI, it's important to know what experiences and perspectives and skills they're bringing with them when they enter our classrooms.

During the institute, we asked the AI Guides to participate in an escalating round robin, a group work structure I've written about here in the newsletter in the past. One of the questions in the round robin asked participants to brainstorm ways that instructors might surface students' prior experiences with generative AI. Between the creative faculty the room and a little help from AI chatbot Poe, we came up with a very interesting list of suggestions! What follows is a lightly edited set of highlights from the list. [My comments are in brackets.]

• Show a few different uses of generative AI and ask students to share their reaction to each use with an emoji of their choosing.
• Ask students to share with the class a generative AI tool they have found useful for their productivity.
• Ask students to share a funny or weird use of generative AI they've seen. [I usually share Johnny Cash singing "Barbie Girl" when I'm asked to do this.]
• Have students use a generative AI tool on an early, low-stakes assignment and submit their chat log.
• Have students use generative AI to create a meme about the topic of your course.
• Ask students to create a personal timeline of their experiences with generative AI. Optionally, ask students to map their personal timeline onto a class timeline that also features key moments in generative AI more broadly.
• Invite students to share ways they use generative AI in a shared document or polling question, allowing them to share anonymously.
• Recruit a confidential informant (CI) or two from your students to report how they or their peers are using AI. [I don't know if I would recommend this, but seeing "CI" show up in the round robin notes made me laugh.]
• Invite students to share, rate, and review course policies about generative AI they have seen in prior courses.
• As a whole class activity, have students coach you through an interaction with an AI tool around a task.

Reviewing this list, I see a couple of underlying ideas to keep in mind. One is to decide if you would rather learn about students' academic uses of generative AI or their just-for-fun uses of AI. In some cases, learning about academic uses will be more useful to you as an instructor, but students might feel more comfortable sharing their just-for-fun uses.

Another idea is related to the first one: Depending on the atmosphere at your institution, students may be very hesitant to talk about how they have used AI at all. Many students have received the message (correct or not) that any use of AI is tantamount to cheating. If that isn't true in your course, you'll have to make that clear to students. And, indeed, some of these activities might help communicate that idea.

By the way, that timeline idea came from the AI chatbot Poe, which generated a really great list of approaches to surfacing students' prior experiences with AI, so if none of the ideas above make sense for your teaching context, check out Poe's list.

Accessibility and AI

I'm happy to share a new collection on the University of Virginia Teaching Hub. Katie Bertel, senior instructional designer at the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning at Princeton University, has curated a collected called "Accessibility and AI." It features five really useful resources for centering accessibility in your approaches to teaching with AI. Katie takes a balanced approach in the collection, "highlighting how AI can both support and pose challenges to students with disabilities."

Thanks for reading!

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