Nancy became an instructor in the Visual Arts Department at Camosun in 1997 when she began teaching photography while completing her Master’s in art history. Currently, Nancy teaches several courses, including Modern Art History, Visual Culture, Digital Photography and Filmmaking, and Film Photography. Nancy told me that her current art practice revolves around creative writing, either on its own or in conjunction with photographs.
I sat down with Nancy to find out more about how Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has affected her teaching and her students, and she began by talking the impact GenAI has had on how she approaches her lecture-based courses. “I knew I had to start by looking at my exams. I typically provide an exam overview so that students can focus their studying and spend more time with course material. They could bring in these notes on paper or access the information from the desktop. I had open-book exams because my philosophy is that exams are opportunities for students to show off their knowledge. I use the D2L Quiz tool and allowed students to cut and paste in their answers which supports students who don’t have strong keyboarding skills and those who may struggle with English. But last summer when I was teach Modern art history, I noticed that about a third of the exam answers did not sound like students wrote them, so I felt I had to make a change. But rather than moving to pen and paper exams like some faculty have, I decided that students could bring in as much printed information as they wanted into the exam but would have to type their answers into D2L rather than copy and paste. In addition, I changed the kinds of questions I asked on the exam.”
In addition to changing her exams, GenAI also made Nancy rethink the research papers in her art history courses. Moving from her model students creating an essay proposal early in the term and handing in a final paper at the end of term, Nancy now starts with “a series of small, kickstart assignments working up to the essay proposal: a thesis statement, an outline, a bibliography of ten sources – all providing proof that students did their own work. I tell them that if I don’t think they’re doing their own work, we’re going to have a conversation.” In addition, Nancy provides a statement in her syllabi around GenAI and how it should and should not be used, not endorsing its use, but acknowledging its existence and potential as a tool.
In preparation for these changes to her assessments, Nancy decided it was important to learn how to use ChatGPT – to find out more about what it can and can’t do. One of the first things she did was ask ChatGPT to help her revise a lecture on Russian Constructivism. “Normally writing a lecture takes 10 hours to research it, 10 hours to find the visuals and create the PowerPoint presentation, check everything for copyright, etc. So, I put everything into ChatGPT and in 10 seconds I had an outline for a lecture. I went through it, and it was pretty good – ChatGPT even included ideas I had not considered.” Nancy was elevated, but wondered, “if I’m using ChatGPT to generate lectures outlines, but telling students they can’t use it to generate ideas, am I a hypocrite? But I brought myself back to how I talk about GenAI with students, asking are you using it as a tool or a crutch?” Because in the end, as much as ChatGPT helped Nancy create her lecture outline, she still had to spend time reviewing the results before finishing it. For example, “I asked ChatGPT if other painters were painting the Death of Sardanapalus in the 1800s. It generated a list of well-known artists, the titles of the paintings, and even dates. But when I started to research these leads, all the information was fabricated.” It was an important lesson in the importance of checking ChatGPT’s work and letting students know to do the same. “I tell students if you’re going to use it, then you need to follow-up, which can be more work than just sitting in the library and typing in your keywords. And as instructors we need to understand how GenAI tools work so we can find a middle ground between ignoring it and letting its use go unchecked. Maybe someday we will see a shift in education where there is less emphasis placed on generating information and more on research and editing, where GenAI finds information and students are responsible for checking for its accuracy and then finessing the writing.”
I asked Nancy how her colleagues around the college are handling GenAI tool use in the classroom. “A tool like ChatGPT represents a big adjustment and people will embrace it slowly as they start to see what other people are doing with it. While some instructors are reverting to pen and paper assessment, a lot of people I talk to about ChatGPT are excited when I tell them how I created a rubric in 10 seconds and then spent 30 minutes to finalize it.” What Nancy finds is that it’s in those hallway conversations where we share what we’ve tried, how we’ve failed, what we are doing to do differently, etc. that gives us courage to try something new or think about our teaching practice in a different way.
I was curious if Nancy had noticed any questions around AI in her photography classes. “I had a student last year who wondered why were not working with AI in our classes, which is a good question, but I still have to think about how it could be used creatively. If students are gathering information to create something, then AI is just another tool to support that. But using AI to create art is another thing. When I teach Photoshop [a tool which integrates AI] for example, I want students to think about why they choose AI generated effects, and not just say, ‘because it looks cool.’ Maybe another one of our roles as educators is to help students gain the language around the why.”
I’ve known Nancy for a few years now, and she is always ready to try new things to enhance her teaching, so I was happy to hear how she is embracing GenAI in these small ways. “New tools push me as an instructor, push me as an artist, push me as a human, and help me reevaluate and let go of my preconceptions. So often new things that are out of our control, like GenAI, cause people to shut down. But for me, when I start to panic, I think, okay, it’s just a tool. Let’s see what we can do with it.”