How I’m Using AI to Improve Student Outcomes

… and add value for students

… and add value for students

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My exploration of AI emerges from researching communities in the creator economy. Everyone is focused on how AI will disrupt education … well, the creator economy has been doing this for a while.

Education in the creator economy probably won’t replace universities … but it’s going to give us stiff competition. Students run screaming from university writing classes … yet, people from all walks of life are paying thousands of dollars to take online writing classes like Ship30 and Write of Passage.

One reason these courses are so attractive is because they focus on transformation … not on the delivery of content … the exact opposite of most university classes. This is why we need to re-focus on the outcomes of our courses and dig into how they might give value to students … not just how we can use them to gatekeep, grade, or sort students into categories.

This is also how we can incorporate AI in meaningful ways. Students aren’t taking classes to learn how to generate text. They are learning to do things with text. Adapting to the rise of AI means re-focusing on student transformation.

With that in mind, I’ve been taking a close look at the departmental outcomes for ENG 109 Adventures in Literature, the class where I am teaching AI & Digital Storytelling.

None of these outcomes are about writing … but we can achieve all of them through writing (and in tandem with AI writing tools).

Here is how I am adapting them.

1️. Students will sharpen critical and close reading skills by analyzing AI-generated stories.

The purpose of ENG 109 is to introduce students to how literary perspectives can help them interpret the world … not just literature. Some of the most successful and influential people were English majors because they know how to interpret the world in multiple ways.

In this class, my students will use literary terms and conventions to better understand how AI-generated stories work and how they can be adapted, providing a deeper knowledge of narrative structures. We will think about what kinds of story features AI can replicate and how.

They will have detailed knowledge of what AI can and can’t do, enabling them to write beyond AI tools.

2️. Students will learn to make cogent judgements on stories by analyzing and comparing digital stories by humans and/or AI.

AI can generate stories, but it cannot make judgements about them or determine meaning. Any organization that wants to use AI or build AI to tell stories will need humans to do it for them. Sadly, I don’t see many engineers in my writing classes.

Understanding the attributes of AI-generated stories and their shortcomings will enable students to develop into better critics, not just of stories, but of the tools we use to write stories. They will be able to recognize the affordances and constraints of any writing technology and ponder how it influences the decisions writers make about content, voice, and style.

The students in my class will learn to develop this skill on their own.

3️. Understand ethical use of other people’s ideas and citations practices by exploring how AI relies on training data and determining what kind of information needs cited, referenced, or researched.

Students will need to determine what kind of information needs sourced and when. AI can produce some research and facts, but it is usually fake. And, of course, most of what AI knows is scraped from the internet. Just like our own writing, students will have to pay attention to unfounded claims, details, and research opportunities.

In storytelling, this often means discussion of what is “real” and what is “creative.” Having students do this with AI will hone this skill.

4️. Use technology and writing to enhance creativity and develop confidence as a writer.

Students will want to tell good stories … AI cannot do that for them. Sure, if a professor asks students for a story with no purpose or audience, AI can produce this in seconds. In my class, students will be writing stories they care about. This will mean not ceding their work to GPT-3.

Students will have to gather the tools and strategies that AI can’t replicate in order to create great stories. That’s the transformation.

Exploring their relationship to technology through the practice of writing will help them move beyond text generation and make them “AI-proof” … not just in school, but in the workplace. By the end of the course, students will have developed their critical thinking skills, as well as their creativity, confidence, and ethical practices as a writer … whether they us AI will be irrelevant.

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