AI Prompts Global Campus Staff to Offer Knowledge of Tools

Global Campus staff don’t need to be prompted to put artificial intelligence tools at the top of the list when they offer guidance to instructors who teach online. No hallucinating here as teams of University of Arkansas instructors and Global Campus staff work together to create effective learning experiences for students.

The Global Campus instructional designers, learning technology specialists, media production staff, faculty support specialist and faculty support coordinator work one-on-one with instructors as well as presenting group sessions and offering the annual BOLT conference, which stands for Better Online Learning Together, in October.

Faculty experience a gamut of feelings about the use of large language models in higher education, namely curiosity, enthusiasm and apprehension. They report that their students experience much the same feelings. Faculty are learning how to use AI tools to create courses, grade assignments and prompt discussions.

Ash Shackelford, a learning technology specialist at the Global Campus, presented a BOLT session called “A Practical Guide to Using (Blackboard) Ultra’s AI Features.”

“AI is making long, time-consuming tasks take less time and making them easier,” said Shackelford, after playing an AI-generated video of himself talking. It looked and sounded like the real thing.

 

AI in Blackboard Ultra

All U of A instructors use the Blackboard Ultra learning management system whether they teach their courses online or face-to-face. It can incorporate content produced by third-party artificial intelligence tools but also offers several built-in AI features, Shackelford said.

Blackboard Ultra provides a handy process for creating a grading rubric. Shackelford introduced the tool, and Bob Hinton, senior instructional designer, went deeper into it in a separate presentation. Hinton started by going over three types of rubrics, which are criteria an instructor can use to grade assignments. Blackboard Ultra allows the instructor to create a rubric using AI, among other choices.

Blackboard Ultra also can generate a question bank, Shackelford said. The instructor chooses a course item and then selects from several options of how to structure the questions and answers – multiple choice or essay, for example. The instructor can also choose the level of complexity.

Kelly Westeen, faculty support coordinator for Global Campus, posted an article on the TIPS website (Teaching Innovation and Pedagogical Support) describing a number of AI features on Blackboard Ultra, including:

• Generating course structure
• Creating discussion prompts
• Customizing visuals with image generation
• Setting up simulated conversations and scenarios with role-playing

The TIPS website, which is a joint project of the Global Campus, the U of A’s IT Services and the Wally Cordes Teaching and Faculty Support Center, focuses on academic technology and teaching support with the goals of promoting faculty development and enhancing student success.

 

Marketing Case Study

Nicole Cox, in her BOLT presentation with Alex Dowell, outlined an experience in the retail strategy course she teaches online. Cox, an instructor in the marketing department of the Sam M. Walton College of Business, has worked with Dowell, an instructional designer at the Global Campus, several times on course development.

“We have seen a constant need to address some yellow flags and, in one instance in particular, some red flags that popped up,” Dowell said.

Cox recalled another professor who doesn’t teach online told her 30 of 80 of her students used ChatGPT to complete an assignment in the spring semester. That raised a flag for her, and she asked Dowell to help her revamp her assignments to take AI use into account.

Dowell explained they approached the redesign with three objectives:

• Safeguarding academic integrity, what Dowell called “the other AI,” is faculty’s top concern. They want to be sure students are producing work that is unique to them and that they learn the material they need to learn, he said.
• Increasing active learning by filtering AI.
• Increasing active learning by incorporating AI.

Cox and Dowell implemented three steps to safeguard academic integrity:

• Apply a program such as Turnitin, which uses AI to detect the use of AI. It will show you what you need to investigate further, Dowell said, but he advised not to rely on these tools as the single determinant of whether a student is cheating.
• Incorporate a clear AI policy and require AI citations. Dowell encouraged instructors to use policies to start conversations with students. The use of AI may vary based on content, assignments and activities in a course.
• AI interaction references provide a proactive step for students, explaining how they can use AI as a springboard into ideas for papers and projects. Students need to understand how to put AI citations into a bibliography.

“At the very least require some kind of evidence that they are using it, because they are using it, and whether they are using it well is still a question to be asked,” Dowell said.

 

Classroom Use

Cox discussed filtering and incorporating AI for active learning.

“We played with lot of different ideas,” she said. “I fed my assignments through a couple of different AI programs, asked it to edit the assignment so that generative AI could not complete the assignment. It kept referring us back to add personalization, asking student to draw on personal experiences because an AI can’t do that.”

The AI program also asked students to reference current class material, things she had covered in the past week or two, Cox said.

Next, she incorporated student use of AI in the assignment.

“Instead of the student writing a report incorporating concepts and theories covered in course like I usually would, we had the student ask AI to write the report,” Cox said. “The students’ learning comes from them critiquing the report, where are the holes, what concepts did AI miss. I asked students to analyze AI’s performance: overall assessment, primary strengths/weaknesses, two ideas for improving the report, one from class materials and the other from their in-depth knowledge of the area.”

She gave the assignment to three sections of the class at different times, tweaking it after each experience.

“My mistake was overestimating their ability to use AI,” Cox said. “I thought they were more familiar with it than they were. They didn’t know how to write a prompt. My students said, ‘We need rules for engagement, guidelines on what we are allowed to do interacting with AI and what we are not allowed to do.’ The students were responsible for anything left out and for correcting hallucinations.”

Dowell and Cox made several observations based on the students’ experience. They found that students needed to be empowered to use AI.

“The use of AI forces students to understand it,” Dowell said. “They analyze and evaluate content itself that you want them to know, and they also analyze and critique abilities of the AI. It takes away some of the mystery, fear, over-reliance and over-assumptions of what it can and can’t do.”

Students will have to use AI if they work in jobs that involve retail strategy, Cox said.

Instructors can show students how they use AI to refine, enhance and improve material they are providing, while keeping themselves in the driver’s seat, Dowell said.