cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/31251815
I asked teachers to tell me how AI has changed how they teach.
The response from teachers and university professors was overwhelming. In my entire career, I’ve rarely gotten so many email responses to a single article, and I have never gotten so many thoughtful and comprehensive responses.
One thing is clear: teachers are not OK.
They describe trying to grade “hybrid essays half written by students and half written by robots,” trying to teach Spanish to kids who don’t know the meaning of the words they’re trying to teach them in English, and students who use AI in the middle of conversation. They describe spending hours grading papers that took their students seconds to generate: “I’ve been thinking more and more about how much time I am almost certainly spending grading and writing feedback for papers that were not even written by the student,” one teacher told me. “That sure feels like bullshit.”
I agree, the assignments will need to adapt to discourage the use of LLMs. Easiest is in-class writing or written exams. Unfortunately that takes away from other class activities.
I remember one of my favourite courses in university had exams where you could bring in any resource you wanted (excluding phones), because the exam was written in a way that required understanding of the core topic, something you can’t simply look up.
A quote from one of my favorite profs, “You can bring your books, you can bring your notes, you can bring a friend; if you don’t know the material, you will fail.”