AI in Academia: Teaching Challenges and Opportunities

At the end of November in 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a text-generating AI with never-before-seen capabilities of producing almost any type of text with the click of a button. Students immediately realized the potential of using it for their assignments, easily generating essays and code, while avoiding being caught by existing plagiarism detection software. Since then, an arms race has developed between AI users and those who try to detect and discourage its use.

In this webinar, I explain why we owe it to our students to adjust our teaching practices in light of AI technology, and I present some practical suggestions for how to do so. We still need to teach our students how to write on their own, so we need to develop assignments that discourage the use of AI and teach basic writing skills. But we can also take advantage of these new technologies, develop new teaching strategies that rely on them, and teach our students how to employ them effectively and responsibly.