I was honored to be invited to join the discussion panel of a campus-wide symposium titled "Striking the Balance: AI Automation and Human Interaction in Teaching and Learning", which will happen on September 8, 2023 from 10 am to 12 pm in the Big Blue Room, Chartway Arena, Old Dominion University (ODU).
The other panel members are:
- Dr. Helen Crompton, Executive Director of the Research Institute for Digital Innovation in Learning (RIDIL) and Professor of STEM Education & Professional Studies. She is also the CEO of Crompton Consulting.
- Dr. Khan Iftekharuddin, Professor of Battern College of Engineering and Technology.
- Dr. Chrysoula Malogianni, Associate Vice President of Digital Innovation, Division of Digital Learning of ODU.
The panel discussion moderator will be Dr. Tracie Ortiz, Instructional Designer Manager, and DEI Design Coordinator.
The panel discussion is motivated by the fast advancement of artificial intelligence in the past decades, especially the dissemination and application of ChatGPT in a variety of tasks in research and education. Earlier this year, another panel was assembled to discuss the impact of AI on higher education. The panel included four faculty members from Management, English, Philosophy, and Computer Science.
Recently, I was interviewed by www.13newsnow.com to talk about my experience in applying AI to teaching. Since last year, I have integrated AI as a separate task into CS418/518 (Web Programming). This project-oriented course taught students methods and tools to build dynamic webpages. Traditionally, the projects did not have any AI components. Students pulled data directly from a relational database, such as MySQL, or a NoSQL datastore, such as Elasticsearch, and displayed them on the webpage. I introduced a new task to extract keyphrases from free text using language models before they are displayed on the webpages. Many students liked this task because they learned how to integrate an AI-powered functionality with a dynamic webpage. In Fall 2023, I will apply a service called packback to teaching. Packback is powered by large language models (I think it is by OpenAI's GPT but they did not tell me the detail). It could be used as a tutor for students or an assistant for instructors. I will use packback's Deep Dive to assess student's project reports. I am eager to see how well it works!
Back to the panel, several weeks ago, I was contacted by the President's office and later was given a list of questions that I may be asked by the moderator. I cannot disclose these questions for now but I can say that these are great questions and I need to think about the answers carefully. These questions cover virtually all aspects of the impact of AI on teaching and learning, administration, and research.
Hope to see you at the symposium!
-- Jian Wu