GenAI – Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning

Camosun Story #97: Aidan

Aidan is a faculty member in the Management & Human Resources (HR) Leadership (MHRL) department. She completed her PhD during COVID, and while she was working on her dissertation, realized that research was not where her interest lay – instead, she wanted to teach. So, three years ago, after she moved to Victoria, she started at Camosun, and now teaches mostly HR courses, including Organizational Behaviour, Recruitment and Selection, HR Foundations, and Occupational Health and Safety.

Aidan teaches in all modes: in-person, asynchronous, blended, hyflex, you name it! “If I’m teaching four courses in a term, typically two are fully in-person, one is blended, and the fourth will either be blended or entirely asynchronous – it depends on the courses I’m teaching that term. But for my upper-level courses, including recruitment and selection, I’ve been exploring a hyflex approach, so while I teach in the classroom, students can choose to attend either via Zoom or in-person.”

I wondered how the hyflex model was working for her recruitment and selection course. “It’s going really well even though it developed into hyflex accidentally. The first time I taught it was the year the course moved from fully synchronous during COVID back to in-person. Some students were hesitant, wondering what would happen if they were sick and missed several lectures. A colleague advised me to record the audio for the lectures so if students could not attend, they would not miss content. But then I realized that students were just hearing me and looking at lecture slides for 3 hours, which was not engaging. So, I spoke with Derek Murray in CETL about the idea of hyflex, and what does it means, and during my first Scheduled Development time I revamped that course to hyflex.” And a large part of that redevelopment involved redesigning activities so they could be done hyflex.

Aidan taught two sections of the new hyflex version of the course, one during the day, and one in the evening. “Student feedback was phenomenal. Those who really wanted to be in-person came in-person and those students who had family commitments or other challenges making it hard for them to come to class, loved that they could still participate online. Some students attended the whole term either in-person or online, but many went back and forth depending on their schedules.”

There is currently no “hyflex” designation in Camosun’s course registration system, so I wondered if students know ahead of time how Aidan teaches the class. “I send out an email to students before the first day of class to let them know what to expect, and that information is also in the course outline. And then, to make students who miss that email know, I also let tell them on the first day of class.”

Aidan told me that her chair has been very supportive as she (and some of her fellow faculty members) dove into hyflex teaching. And that encouragement meant Aidan felt supported to also redesign her occupational health and safety course for hyflex. “Students who had taken the recruitment and selection course loved the model and asked if I was offering anything else hyflex. But my chair, Dr. Steve Scott, is phenomenal, and says if you want to do something, try it, and if students love it, let’s look at how we can make it better. So, there’s definitely support in our department, and interest among some of my colleagues to do more.”

I knew that accessibility was important to Aidan, and I wondered how she made her courses more accessible for students. “In the recruitment selection course, I moved away from using a textbook, to using a mixture of academic articles, news articles, etc. which are all freely available for students. I’ve asked students if they would rather have a textbook, but most say, no, they’re happy not paying for a textbook, and that they find the information in the resources I supply gives them what they need for this course.” In addition, Aidan feels that the hyflex option also provides access and flexibility for those students who struggle to make it to an on-campus course for a variety of reasons. For example, “I had a student who had severe social anxiety and for her, taking class from home and still being able to interact with classmates and ask questions with the camera off meant she was able to get more out of the class than she would have otherwise. Plus, I record the hyflex lectures so all students can review them later.” In addition, Aidan offers students extensions for any assignment as long as they ask in advance. “Quite a few students have taken me up on that when they have a tough week or have many other assessments due at the same time.”

I asked Aidan if she could tell me a bit more about how she designed her hyflex course. “First, not all courses are suited for hyflex; it depends on the amount or kind of information students need to learn. But the recruitment and selection course relies on students sharing their experiences, and using those experiences as examples to build on, so there’s a lot of engagement happening. And because I wanted ensure students were present and participating, hyflex seemed like a good option to explore.” And to encourage engagement in a hyflex class, Aidan looked at Mentimeter and Kahoot. “The engagement needed to be online, meaning students could be in-person or at home, I wanted it to be anonymous, so students didn’t feel pressured, and I wanted to see the results of the engagement immediately. So using tools makes it easier to move to hyflex teaching because it doesn’t matter where students are – if they have a mobile device or a laptop, they can participate.”

Hyflex does not mean Aidan’s students no longer work in teams. At the same time students do groupwork in the classroom, she sets up breakout rooms for students online. “I’ll open breakout rooms, but I don’t force people into them. This way, students can form their own groups online just like they do in the classroom, with the people that they want to be with. Because some students like breakout rooms and some don’t, I only use them every third class or so.” I wondered how Aidan felt about some students not engaging in breakout rooms. “I had to let go of attendance, and understand that if students are not engaged, it’s either because I’m not engaging, or they just don’t want to engage. If I’m doing everything I can to make this class engaging and somebody still doesn’t want to engage, that’s not on me. They’re adults and I’m not here to penalize them or force them into breakout rooms. If this is how they choose to learn I’m here to support them. If they want help, I’m here. If they don’t want to come to class, they don’t have to come to class. If they want to learn on their own, that’s their choice.”

Turning to a new topic, I wondered how Aidan was handling some of the concerns around assessments and students using Generative AI. “For my take-home quizzes, which are open for 48 hours to provide some flexibility for students, I first run my questions through ChatGPT and Gemini to see what answers AI is going to give. I also base my questions either on things we talk about in class, which GenAI would not know, or I use what AI gave me as an answer and then develop the question to purposefully set that as the wrong answer. So, for example, I won’t specify in my question that we’re in B.C., but all the legislation we discuss in class is B.C.-based. However, GenAI will assume the question is about federal, or American, or some other legislation, giving the wrong answer. I also write my case studies in such a way that GenAI answers most of my questions about them incorrectly. I do tell students not to use GenAI because it’s not great for their learning, but I don’t tell them that if they use GenAI, they will get a zero. Instead, I let them know that if they use GenAI, they will probably get only one or two out of seven for that question because it’s not actually answering the question with the nuance needed.”

However, students can use GenAI for some assignment components. “In my recruitment and selection class, the major assignment is an interview. Students work in teams to come up with competencies and interview questions, then they conduct an interview with someone and record that interview. Students can use GenAI to come up with their interview questions, because in the real world, they would probably use GenAI like this, but GenAI will not help them conduct the actual interview. So that’s how I’ve navigated the use of GenAI, through creating authentic reflective assessments.”

I asked Aidan what she enjoyed most about teaching. “One of the things I love most is that I get to influence people who are going to make a difference in the real world. That was one thing I struggled with around research: you spend three years working on a project, the review process takes another two years, then if it’s published, few people read it, and it doesn’t usually make any change. But I’ve taught managers and CEOs who later tell me that what I taught them made a big difference in terms of how they manage their teams or how they deal with various situations. So, I felt like I could make more of a difference teaching than through doing research, and I find that very rewarding.”

As we came to the end of our time together, I asked Aidan what advice she might have for a new faculty member coming to teach at Camosun. “I would say, don’t be afraid of using resources. In my first year, while I knew about CETL I didn’t reach out because I didn’t want to be the person who was new and didn’t know anything. It wasn’t until I attended a workshop and met people from CETL that I realized they want to help. In addition, reach out to your chair and ask for help, and, if possible, sit in on other instructors’ classes to see what strategies they’re using to engage students. I’ve learned a lot from other teaching styles, and even if someone else’s style doesn’t work for you, you can still learn a lot from them.

Camosun Story #96: Max

“Max is a phenomenal instructor that made our first-year class so interesting and educational. She provided us with detailed in-class lectures partnered with informative slideshows that were easily accessible via D2L, and she frequently updated us with any changes well in advance. To make up for lost classes due to holidays, Max dedicated time to post recorded lectures with the same amount of depth. Her labs are very engaging, and she provides well-structured feedback on each assignment. For our final project, she broke it up into chunks which allowed for feedback and correction throughout the course. She actively acknowledged the challenges that come with our lives and continuously led with kindness.”

Max has been a faculty member in the Psychology department at Camosun since 2017. She told me her PhD was in environmental psychology, explaining that her research was around the question “if we spend more time in nature, does it positively impact our psychological well being and our physical well being?” Some of the courses she teaches include Experimental Psychology, Contemporary Issues, Interpersonal Skills, and Human Development: LifeSpan. And she sees “a whole range of students, coming from high school, returning to school after being in the workforce for a long time, and of course a good component of international students.”

I wondered what Max enjoys most about teaching and she told me that, because research is still her comfort zone, she loves showing her students why research is exciting. But she also said that she enjoys “the connection to students and the engagement in class. There’s nothing like seeing students who are quiet or struggling finally find the confidence to speak up in class because they know it’s a safe space for them.”

Max was one of the many instructors who was teaching here when we all moved online during the pandemic, and I wondered what that experience was like for her and if she had brought anything with her from that time. Maxine said while she gained more “online savviness from having to deliver all my courses online, with support from our department and CETL,” she had previously taught courses online. But she added “what I recognized during that time was just how isolated some of our international students are. It’s one thing to be a student who is surrounded by family during a time of isolation, but I really felt for the international students who didn’t have their family and friends around them, many of whom were living on their own. So now, I have more empathy for international students who may not have the same supports as domestic students.”

I asked Max if, like some other instructors, she has seen differences in students now as opposed to before the pandemic. “I hear this over and over, that students have changed, and I believe that they have, but subtly rather than drastically. Yes, I see students struggling a bit more with boundaries, deadlines, etc., and perhaps we pulled back on those during COVID to give everybody a bit more flexibility, but for my own classes, I provide the same guidelines around expectations now that I did pre-COVID to post COVID: there are deadlines, but if a student who is struggling or needs a bit of extra time reaches out to me, I’ll support them as best as I can.

I wondered if Max had any memories from her years of teaching to share. “The moments for me that are most meaningful are when that shy student who hasn’t said anything for two months finally finds their footing and begins to share and make observations. Because our brains work better when we’re relaxed and if our stress levels rise too much, it impairs our cognition, I try to make the classroom a safe space. And I’ve had students tell me that they feel safe to share their thoughts or ideas in class, and that even when students have differing ideas, everybody still feels that their position is heard and validated – those are the memories that mean the most for me for me.”

I wanted to know a bit more about this last point, especially in our current world where opposing discourse is often seen as ‘I’m right and you’re wrong.’ “One of the courses I teach is interpersonal communication, and it is important to establish from day one of saying that the classroom has to be a safe space, while also making the students accountable in that space. They need to be able to share but be careful about what they are sharing because I can’t control if a student says something outside of class, even though I’ve asked them not to. So, part of it is acknowledging that I try to keep class as safe as I can, but they also need to keep themselves safe in that space. Then in that space, we talk about how we manage conflict and how we can have dialogue in spite of having differing opinions without falling into the name calling or nastiness that can happen when we become emotionally charged.”

Another question I had for Max was how she is working with students around Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) as it becomes more pervasive in our education systems. “That’s something that I’m still working on, to integrate it more in my classes. I talk about GenAI as a tool because I would guess for a lot of these younger students, within three to five years, AI is going to be part of their workplace environment. So, I feel like part of my job is (which is the part that I haven’t integrated as well as I would like to) is to teach them how to use AI well and how to be transparent about it. If, as instructors at a post-secondary institution, we’re educating students how to search online effectively, decide if a journal article is good or bad, and create proper APA in-text citations or reference pages, then I feel we should do the same with GenAI and help them consider when it’s appropriate to use it, and how.”

One of the ways Max has mitigated the potential use of GenAI in her classes is to have students engage in applied work, which is one of her passions. “Many of my assignments are applied which makes it tricker for students to use GenAI, but not impossible. For example, in the communication course, students need to write down and quote conversations they’ve had with friends and loved ones and give me context around the conversation using the communication tools we talked about in class.”

I wanted to know more about the applied assignments Max works with in her classes. “A part of it is making the course concepts more relevant to students, so for example, in the communication course, students complete a questionnaire about their listening skills, we learn about what good listening looks like, and then they redo the assessment again at the end of the semester. They then think about how their listening skills have changed from their perspective. So, they’re writing about their own behaviours and bringing content from the course into those reflections about what they’ve learned about themselves, which I think students enjoy.”

As we came to the end of our time together, I asked Max what advice she might have for a new faculty member starting out at Camosun. “Go to one of the new employee orientations and use the resources available to you. For example, the Arts and Science team is fabulous, and they’re more than willing to help you…you just have to reach out. Everybody here is willing to lend a hand if you just reach out.”

Camosun Story #95: Melissa M

When I asked Melissa to tell me a bit about how she came to teach at Camosun, she called herself ‘the accidental teacher,’ saying, “I worked for Tourism Victoria for 22 years, finishing my time there as the senior VP of Marketing and Communications. Then I went into consulting and wandered around the world for a while. But something haunted me in the back of my mind. Back in the late 1980s, I had taught part time at Camosun in what was then the new certificate in tourism management. And I loved it. So, when Marina Jaffey called me to say they were looking for someone to teach their media communications course, I jumped at the chance. I taught on a term basis for awhile, and then they couldn’t get rid of me.”

Right now, Melissa teaches Global Business Strategies, Services Marketing, Marketing Communications Portfolio, and her new love, Current Trends in Marketing (MARK 485). MARK 485 is a new course (taught for the first time in Winter 2024) designed to cover a topic that marketing is influenced by and/or that marketing can influence, for example climate change or Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the topic is meant to change every few years. When I asked my students in Fall 2023 what topic we should cover they almost unanimously said AI.” And it is the story of MARK 485 that Melissa shared with me.

But before we talked about this new course and how it worked, I asked Melissa what she enjoys most about teaching. “I confess when I taught in the 80s, I was the sage on the stage. I loved moving from one end of the stage to the other and delivering stories with great anecdotes. But while that was well received back then, when I returned to teaching, students didn’t seem to respond in the same way, so, I started to introduce activities into my teaching. Even if I have to deliver a lecture (to set the tone for example,) I try to make it interactive, and I get the most amazing adrenaline rush from seeing a group of students engaging and thinking out loud. And when I walk out of a class and say to myself, well, I learned something new today too, I love that!”

In the MARK 485 course, Melissa took student engagement even further turning almost everything over to the students. There were 25 students in the first offering, and Marketing and AI was the topic. “It was a risk for me because AI is changing constantly. I had done some Scheduled Development the summer before to prepare, but so much had changed by the time I taught the course that I knew this would truly be a collaboration between me and the students.” To support the students in co-creating the course as it moved along, Melissa walked the students through Bloom’s taxonomy. “I showed them how their four years in the program progressed, from first-year courses where they were asked to write multiple-choice exams that tested their recall and worked my way up to the most exciting part of taxonomy, explaining how they were now analyzing, creating, and using their critical thinking skills. Then I introduced them to the BOPPPS model for lesson planning. No one had heard of it, although no doubt they had seen a host of instructors model it for them in past courses.” The final piece was talking to students about how to read and analyze the journal articles Melissa had chosen to support possible class-led session topics. Pulling from an activity she had encountered in a class she took in an MEd class at Simon Fraser University, Melissa picked a 12-page article and handed it out to students. Students looked horrified, but she walked them through how to read a journal article, how to analyze it, and how to look for three quotes in the article that resonated the most with them. “I also had them write a guided reflection (for a 2% grade) on each article before class so they would come prepared for the student led class sessions. If they hadn’t read the articles, I didn’t grade them harshly because I knew that reading the articles themselves was just the first step, and hopefully they would learn a lot more from their peers during these student-led sessions.”

With the foundation for the student-led class sessions laid, student teams then picked their topics from Melissa’s suggested list. “The first group’s class session topic focused on AI, marketing, and stakeholder relationships. This team modeled the BOPPPS approach brilliantly and the session was very interactive. The team leading the class session appeared confident and engaged, setting a high bar for the rest of the class-led sessions.”

About halfway through the class, Melissa raised the topic of AI and the students’ future. “I asked how many of them would be graduating that term and planning to go directly into marketing jobs. Then I told them that there would be a good chance they would be hired in part because of how current their AI education is, including their newly gained knowledge about the impact of AI on marketing (and vice versa.) Helping students see how AI likely will fit into their careers and how they likely will take an early leadership role in making significant recommendations to their employers, perhaps even proposing how a company should go about rolling out an AI strategy integrated with their marketing plan, made this course all the more practical and significant to this first class of MARK 485 students.”

Melissa also had students write critical reflections three times during the term. “For the first one, they could pick any topic related to AI and marketing. Many of the students wrote about being worried whether they were going to have a long-term career in marketing, or if AI would take it away from them, and I, in turn, was worried that I had sparked this anxiety. But by the second reflection, I started to see a different theme: that AI is just another tool in their marketing toolkit. The evolution from anxiety, through to ‘I think I’ve got it,’ to their final reflection where AI was not seen as a significant threat to their long-term marketing careers, was very gratifying.”

Melissa based the final class assignment on an article written by a marketing professor about an experiment he conducted on himself. “He’d given himself 30 minutes to engage with an AI tool to write a marketing plan, from the initial gathering of research, evaluating the external market and finding what separates you from your competitors, identifying your target markets, developing the marketing mix, all the way to determining conclusions and recommendations for action. So, I replicated this experiment and had students work on it in teams. Each student had 30 minutes to explore one or more AI tools. Their team then had to pick a company, and hand the controls over to one or more the AI tools to “write” a marketing plan for the company. After seeing the results of the experiment, student teams wrote a paper describing the experience, including analyzing how effective the AI tools they used were in producing an effective marketing plan. Finally, I asked them to make three to five recommendations for a senior marketing director in an organization about how someone in this role should move forward with AI.” Melissa gave them class time to work on the assignment and watched them work. “I loved seeing the playfulness of their experimentation, their curiosity, and their critical analysis.” On presentation day, students reported that while certain AI tools collect and report secondary research with an impressive depth and level of accuracy, the AI tools used currently fall down when it comes to creativity. “One team had AI write a marketing plan for Crocs, but when they tried to direct AI to create a print ad, the results were comical. The Crocs pictured in one of their ads had toes sticking out through the holes, another had extra toes on the side. We laughed, but they presented a mature analysis concluding that the number one thing they need to learn as marketers is how to communicate with AI tools effectively so these tools can help deliver desired results.” Overall students proposed practical, well reasoned recommendations for themselves moving forward as soon-to-be marketing professionals and for the advice and guidance they can provide for their employers.

I wondered what was next for this course. “The curriculum for MARK 485 was designed by Joan Yates (retired faculty member) who observed that even though the course would be student led, instructor preparation is enormous, meaning that a topic should be taught at least twice.” So, this winter, AI will once again be the focus of the course, although Melissa wonders how much it will have changed by then. She also worries a bit that the next offering might not be as successful as this first one was. “Numerous students have told me it was their favorite class, and I also looked forward to coming to class every time. But sometimes those magical experiences don’t repeat. Since students are becoming more knowledgeable about AI now and the course doesn’t run again until Winter 2025, I wonder: will I have the same success with this approach?”

Regardless of what may happen by Winter 2025, Melissa is sure AI will still be an important and relevant topic. “I say to my students, when I was a young marketer, it was so much easier for me. There were a few daily newspapers that were seen by consumers as “the authority,” the 6:00 pm news, only three American TV networks, CBC, and CTV. So, when you set out to write a promotional plan, that was all what you had to draw on. But today you can’t keep up with the number of for-marketing communications options that have been popping up over the past 10-plus years, so I empathize with them finding their way through this more complex marketing landscape, now compounded with the addition of AI for marketing. But at the same time, I tell them how excited I am watching them at the start of this AI era in marketing, because I was there for the first consumer websites, the first live e-commerce sites, the first social media platforms – and we had to decide which ones to focus on for our work. And now they will be the ones deciding which AI tools to recommend for and use in their own workplaces.”

Camosun Story #93: Liz and how GenAI can support student learning

I’ve interviewed Liz before, first way back when I was first talking to faculty in 2021 about their teaching experiences during COVID, and then about her Open Education work as part of our Open Sustainability project. This last March, Liz also received an Open Education Recognition award for her work in Open Education at the college. But this story is different. I was in the Lansdowne office one day several months ago when Liz came running in to talk to my colleague Sue about a Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) assignment she had just finished running with her students. And she was SO excited I just had to see if she would tell me this story too…and she did!

Liz has been a faculty member in the Dental Hygiene program at Camosun for 35 years. In addition to supporting her students, Liz has a passion for keeping up with and teaching students about the use of current technologies and exploring different ways of evaluating learning. “Traditional ways of evaluation just don’t inspire students in their educational journey, so I try to be innovative and to find ways to ignite excitement in students.”

Preliminaries complete, we dove into a discussion of how Liz worked with GenAI in her course during the Winter 2024 term. “I didn’t know a lot about GenAI when I started this journey, but I knew that we are already behind what our students know, and that GenAI is a game changer in the information world.” Of course, there’s a lot of concern in our educational institutions about what the growth of GenAI means for us, resulting in resistance and fear amongst administrators, staff, and faculty. Not that this is anything new, as Liz noted, saying, “I remember back in high school when there was concern about the impact of calculators. I find it interesting how the initial reaction of education is to try to keep new technology out, but can we stop students from using it? I don’t think that’s possible. So, I took a different approach when it came to GenAI.” And related to all of this, Liz believes that one of the most critical things we can do for students is to teach them the difference between information, disinformation, and misinformation. “In a world where so much information comes from unreliable sources, we need to teach students to critically examine what they’re reading and assess it for validity and reliability.”

Liz began by learning about GenAI – what it is and how it works, and also met with Patsy, one of the librarians at Camosun, who helped her understand the benefits and limitations a bit more. Then Liz met with Sue and Kristina, two instructional designers in CETL to discuss what she was thinking. “What we see in dental hygiene is patients coming into clinic after going to ‘Doctor Google’ to ‘research’ their symptoms [research in quotes because, as Liz notes, there is a difference between academic research and ‘looking stuff up’ on the Internet.] Equipped with findings from Google, patients can believe they know their problems and come seeking validation so it’s important for students to learn how to ask patients investigative questions, in a nonjudgemental way, to assess where the information came from to determine reliability and validity.”

To support students to build this skill, Liz decided to add a new assessment to her nutrition course, choosing this course because the outcomes are broad enough to allow for flexibility. Liz chose to create an activity and assessment around the topic of the role nutrition plays in how the microbiome of the gut may contribute to inflammation and how this may impact the inflammation in the mouth and vice versa. “After choosing the topic, we [Liz, Kristina, and Sue] discussed how students could use GenAI to explore it. Students, in groups, chose a topic that related inflammation, nutrition, and periodontal disease, then created a prompt which they entered into ChatGPT. Groups then would examine the information provided for them and had to look for traditional peer-reviewed evidence to determine the reliability of the ChatGPT information.”

Before setting students loose, Patsy came to her class to give students an introduction to GenAI, walk them through how to use ChatGPT (the tool Liz recommended students use), and explain how to check for source reliability. Then they began. “I wasn’t sure how it was going to play out. Students learned something about nutrition, of course, but they also learned about GenAI and how it works,” supporting some soft skills development surrounding the use of AI.

Liz had students use traditional academic research tools to verify the sources presented by ChatGPT. She had broken them into larger groups than she normally would because “larger groups invited more conversation and discussion among the students and presented less risk because only one of them needed to sign up for ChatGPT. We then had a class where students presented their findings. They put up their prompts on the board and we talked about what they’d discovered. Then we put up the information they found and discussed the sources of the information. And that was where the discussion took off, because in each case, many of the sources provided by AI were made up: sometimes the article title was correct, but the author was incorrect, and several of the journals cited were nonexistent which was eye opening for them.” And that direct experience taught them more than Liz ever could.”

The class then moved on to a discussion around how they verified the information ChatGPT provided. “Again, the discussion was very rich. Students noticed that the information provided by GenAI was often general, although they were surprised with how much of the information was accurate overall. The other thing they noted was that ChatGPT provided a lot of qualifiers before answering prompts, for example saying, ‘you know, I’m not a doctor…,’ which they also found interesting.” In the end, students learned that GenAI might be useful to provide basic information as a starting point, but the specific information that may be needed in evidence-based care for patients.

Liz was excited by the engaging conversation the assignment produced. “Students were pumped. It was one of those magical classes where students are all talking, saying ‘Yeah, we found that – did you find that too? and ‘What do you think about that?’ They learned so much more than they could have learned by reading a single research paper which wouldn’t have created that excitement and engagement. When I asked them what they thought of this assignment, they said it was their favorite assignment for the whole year. It was another example of how, when you get out of the way of students and allow them to learn, with you as the guide on the side, it blows your mind.”

Liz’s assignment is also exciting for a few other reasons. First, from an employment standpoint. “One of the things employers will be looking for is knowledge of GenAI and how to use it, but with a healthy skepticism.” And second, a realization that this is the direction we should be heading around student assessments. “Sometimes in education, we’re afraid to let go of control. But we need to look at where our students are today and ask: Who are they? What do they want and need to learn? What kinds of tools are they familiar with? And we have to catch up to them.”

Liz emphasized the collaboration that went into this assessment creation. “I would never have been able to do this without support, to remind me about the concerns about student data or been able to maneuver the intricacies of the technology on my own. When I first sat down with Kristina and Sue the first time and I said, ‘we should be teaching students more about GenAI because they’re already using it but may not be aware of the benefits and limitations,’ they walked me through a thought process that helped me get to where I wanted to be. Then Kristina provided me with a sample, and I modified it from there. But without that collaboration, along with the support and encouragement to take the risk, this assessment would not have happened.”

As we wrapped up our conversation, Liz had some final words. “I think that the whole college community can benefit and learn from an experience like this. We have such a rich teaching and learning environment here, and there are so many instructors doing amazing things, but they are still not well known across the college. I think it’s a shame there aren’t more opportunities for cross-college learning and sharing.” We in CETL agree and will continue to support instructors in sharing their experiences so we can all learn from each other.

Camosun Story #69: Tim

Over the past few months, CETL educational developers have been working with faculty across the college exploring the advantages and disadvantages of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in teaching and learning. As we talked to more and more faculty, we discovered several who were already working GenAI into their assessments and talking about its implications with their students and I wanted to share some of their stories with you. So here is the first of these interviews focused on using GenAI in the classroom with Tim, a full-time Instructor in the School of Business at Camosun who teaches everything from International Management to Marketing Research to Workplace Professionalism.

When I asked Tim how he is integrating GenAI into his teaching, he told me “I’d been teaching about AI for the last ten years or so when it became apparent that something like GenAI was imminent. Up until recently, I’ve taught it in a very general way and stayed abreast of its development. But with the rise of ChatGPT over the past year, I was asked, along with three other Instructors in the School of Business, if I would be willing to put some Professional Development time into figuring out what a good response to AI might be. We were starting to see people misusing it from an academic honesty perspective.”

Tim spent quite a bit of time over summer 2023 keeping an eye on the various AIs releases (at one point there were about a dozen new English language AIs released every day of the week) and by the end of August, he had built a list categorizing about 80 in an Excel sheet that anyone can access.

As Tim explored, he concluded that “It’s a mistake to be afraid of AI. What I tell students, is: You’ve been told that AI is coming for your job. It’s not. Somebody who knows how to use AI is coming for your job. That means you had better get out ahead of the curve and learn how to use it effectively.”

Tim explained that his approach is to turn artificial intelligence into a Research Assistant. “When I went to college and grad school, the Internet as we know it didn’t exist. Instead, we spent time going to the library, digging through card catalogs, and writing notes on cue cards. Took forever. The Internet changed all that. But while it’s become easy to find information, it’s hard to sift through because there’s so much out there. I think AI is most useful in an academic world as a Research Assistant because it can find information and put ideas together for you in minutes rather than in hours or more. That said, we still have to teach students how to determine what information is valid.”

In other words, Tim encourages students to use GenAI tools to find ideas but to personally review the sources and websites where the ideas come from. “You have to be careful because AIs sometimes make things up. For example, I asked an AI tool to create a timeline of Camosun College history, and it did in two minutes. Beautifully presented. All the key events were there, but they were placed in the wrong years, and some were out by ten or more years. The AI had done the research, found the events, but when it couldn’t figure out when these events happened relevant to each other, it made things up and presented them as fact. If I didn’t know Camosun’s history, I’d have believed it.” Lesson learned: “Use AI to do the initial research and collect basic information, but then go dig and make sure that the information was used correctly.”

I wondered how Tim supports with students as they work with AI tools in class and for assessments, and aside from warning them about plagiarism and checking original sources, he works with them to ensure they understand what they are presenting (in Tim’s classes, students present their papers live). “I come from government where if the Minister of Advanced Education has a question in the middle of your presentation, she doesn’t wait until the end to ask. So, to replicate real-world experiences, I interrupt students in the middle of their presentations and pepper them with questions to make sure they understand what they are presenting. Demonstrating comprehension is critically important. It’s also important they understand that while AI will do the writing for them, if fail to develop their ability to write, they will harm their professional and personal development.” “In a very real sense, learning to write is learning to think.”

Tim also teaches his students how to use various AI tools in his 400-level class. “I teach them how to use ChatGPT and the one built into Bing which is the easiest to use, as well as how to get the tool to show you the original sources and provide APA citations.” “In my 400-level course, student teams do an hour-long group-presentation on a particular topic each week. I give them a Backgrounder on their topic, and their job is to boil it down to something that can be explained in an hour to people who know nothing about it. For example, for a recent presentation on Fake News, I had the student team use the Gamma AI tool to build a PowerPoint-like website. It does the research, but also allows you to edit the results.” Tim sees Gamma AI and other GenAI tools as the next step up from the Internet and says, “If we don’t get on board and learn how to use them, we will be left behind by those who do.”

In his lower-level classes, Tim’s approach to students using AI is a bit different. “In the Market Research class students take after completing Intro level Statistics, AI can’t really help. Student teams conduct Primary Research, interviewing real clients from the community, design a survey, obtain ethics approval, collect data, and analyze it using Excel. Then we do Boardroom Simulations in the last two weeks of class where they present their Findings, Conclusions, the Options, and Recommendations to the Board, of which I am the Chair. It’s great fun!”

In Tim’s Workplace Professionalism course, “students complete a series of short presentations on various topics, and AI can be very helpful in conducting secondary research. I check their comprehension in real-time by asking questions during their presentations. I think in the future academic research skills are likely to change much as they did when we learned to use the Internet. This means we have to focus on comprehension and application.”

When I asked how students are reacting to AI, Tim said “They’re not afraid of it at all. They live on their screens, and this is just another way of getting something done. The industrious ones will use AI to build a framework and then they will do the deep dive themselves because they’re curious. The ones who are looking for shortcuts will not do the deep dive and just pretend they understand. That’s why it’s on us to check for comprehension.”

I wondered how Tim’s colleagues have been reacting to all of this. “It depends on what you’re teaching. If I was still teaching Statistics, AI wouldn’t bother me at all because there are already thousands of videos online students can watch until they understand the concepts. It’s when students must engage in research that it becomes dangerous. In fact, some of my colleagues are playing with the idea of accepting only peer-reviewed sources because it is more challenging for AI to work behind paywalls (although there are ways around this).”

As we reached the end of our conversation, I asked Tim what is in the future for GenAI and his classes, and he indicated he would still be teaching GenAI tools to his 400-level courses but said “we’ll see when I review their final papers this term whether I will have to begin checking for comprehension even more now.”

As for GenAI itself, Tim says “It’s not clear to me where AI is going to end up. On November 1, 50 countries (including Canada) – countries who recognize that AI has unintended consequences for economies – met at Bletchley Park and signed a declaration about how to regulate AI going forward. But regulations or not, we’re rapidly reaching the stage where you either use GenAI or get replaced by someone who knows how to use it. That’s why I’m teaching it.”