Beyond never sharing sensitive data with publicly available AI systems, we recommend that you remove or change any details that can identify you or someone else in any documents or text that you upload or provide as input. If there’s something you wouldn’t want others to know or see, it’s best to keep it out of the AI system altogether (Nield, 2023). This is not just about personal details, but also proprietary information (including ideas, algorithms or code), unpublished research, or sensitive communications.
It’s also essential to recognize that once data is entered into most AI systems, it’s challenging—if not impossible—to remove it (Heikkilä, 2023). Always exercise caution and make sure any information you provide aligns with your comfort level and understanding of its potential long-term presence in the AI system, as well as with MIT’s privacy and security requirements.
Falsehoods and Bias
There are well-documented issues around AI systems generating content that includes falsehoods (“hallucinations”) and harmful bias (Germain, 2023; Nicoletti & Bass, 2023). Educators have a responsibility to monitor AI output, address problems promptly, and encourage critical thinking about AI’s limitations.
We encourage you to review our resources on protecting privacy, integrating AI responsibly into your course, and mitigating AI’s issues with hallucinations and bias:
- Navigating Data Privacy: Using generative AI tools to enhance your teaching requires a strong commitment to data privacy. This article outlines considerations for protecting your and students’ privacy when using publicly available generative AI tools for teaching and learning. These include avoiding sharing sensitive data, treating AI inputs carefully, and customizing privacy settings.
- Teaching Responsibly with Generative AI: This guide offers strategies for harnessing AI tools to augment education while addressing AI biases and hallucinations, guiding student engagement with AI tools, and developing AI literacy.
- When AI Gets It Wrong: Addressing AI Hallucinations and Bias: This article provides an overview of the biases and inaccuracies currently common in generative AI outputs. It outlines strategies for identifying and mitigating the impact of problematic AI content.
By proactively addressing ethical considerations and AI’s limitations, we can realize the promise of generative AI while upholding principles of fairness, accuracy, and transparency.
AI-Powered Teaching Strategies
Thinking about using generative AI in your teaching but not sure where to start? In this section, we’ll walk through several simple strategies for implementing research-based teaching best practices with the help of generative AI tools. These approaches are grounded in the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and insights from the learning sciences. You can use the strategies as-is or think about creative ways to adapt them to your own courses.
1. Use AI to Generate Concrete Examples
Teaching often involves explaining abstract concepts or theories. While these are essential for academic understanding, they can sometimes be challenging for students to grasp without real-world context. You can use generative AI tools to come up with many concrete examples to make abstract ideas more relatable and understandable for students.
How to Implement This Strategy:
- Identify an abstract concept. Select one abstract concept or theory that you’ll be covering in your lesson.
- Choose a generative AI tool. Select one or several AI Writing and Content Creation Tools that you’ll use for this task.
- Teach the AI. Prompt your chosen AI tool to engage with the concept you’ve selected. If the tool is connected to the internet, you can ask it to look up and summarize the concept. If the tool is not connected to the internet, provide it with open-source content describing the concept and ask it to summarize that information.
- Prompt the AI. Ask your chosen chatbot for examples or applications of the chosen concept. You can use a prompt like this one created by Ethan Mollick and Lilach Mollick: “I would like you to act as an example generator for students. When confronted with new and complex concepts, adding many and varied examples helps students better understand those concepts. I would like you to ask what concept I would like examples of, and what level of students I am teaching. You will look up the concept, and then provide me with four different and varied accurate examples of the concept in action” (Mollick & Mollick, 2023-b).
- Review and select examples. From the generated examples, select the most relevant and clear examples that align with the lesson’s objectives. Always verify the accuracy of the examples provided by the AI using trusted sources. Make sure to address and eliminate any harmful bias in AI-generated examples.
- Integrate the examples into lessons. Incorporate these examples into your lectures, discussions, or assignments.
What’s the research? Concrete examples help bridge the gap between abstract theories and real-world applications. Research shows that exploring tangible instances can help students better relate to and understand complex concepts, activating their background knowledge and making learning experiences more meaningful (Smith & Weinstein, n.d.-a; CAST, n.d.-b).
2. Use AI to Create Practice Quizzes
Frequent low-stakes quizzes are a great way to help students test their knowledge and reinforce their understanding. However, creating quizzes can be time-consuming for faculty. With the rise of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, though, it’s now possible to streamline the quiz creation process. You can use AI to generate practice quizzes tailored to specific topics. Moreover, these AI-generated quizzes can be adapted to fit various teaching approaches and course requirements, offering a flexible solution for assessment needs.
How to Implement This Strategy:
- Choose your topics. Identify the topics or concepts for which you want to create practice quizzes.
- Select a generative AI tool. Identify one or several AI Writing and Content Creation Tools that you’ll use for this task.
- Teach the AI. Prompt your chosen AI tool to engage with the concept you’ve selected. If the tool is connected to the internet, you can ask it to look up and summarize the concept. If the tool is not connected to the internet, provide it with open-source content describing the concept and ask it to summarize that information.
- Prompt the AI. Ask the AI tool to generate quiz questions related to these topics. Use a quiz-question generating prompt like this one created by Ethan Mollick and Lilach Mollick: “You are a quiz creator of highly diagnostic quizzes. You will look up how to do good low-stakes tests and diagnostics. You will then ask me two questions. (1) First, what, specifically, should the quiz test. (2) Second, for which audience is the quiz. Once you have my answers you will look up the topic and construct several multiple choice questions to quiz the audience on that topic. The questions should be highly relevant and go beyond just facts. Multiple choice questions should include plausible, competitive alternate responses and should not include an ‘all of the above’ option. At the end of the quiz, you will provide an answer key and explain the right answer” (Mollick & Mollick, 2023-b).
- Review and refine the results. Examine the generated questions for relevance and accuracy. Remove any content that perpetuates harmful biases. Modify or refine as necessary.
- Distribute the quizzes to students. Share the practice quizzes with students. You may want to incorporate the questions into a Canvas quiz.
What’s the research? Retrieval practice, or the act of recalling information from memory, strengthens memory retention (Smith & Weinstein, n.d.-d). Practice quizzes offer students an opportunity to test their understanding and reinforce their learning, making the information more retrievable in the future.
3. Assign Students to Generate Visual Summaries
Visual aids have always been a cornerstone in effective teaching, aiding in comprehension and retention. With the rise of image-generating AI models, we now have new tools in hand to help create these visual aids. In this use case, you’ll ask students to craft visual summaries of specific topics, blending both verbal descriptions and AI-generated imagery. This not only deepens their understanding but also fosters creativity and critical thinking as they evaluate and refine the visuals produced by AI tools.
How to Implement This Strategy:
- Assign topics. Provide students with specific topics for which they should create visual summaries.
- Guide students to explore AI Image Generation Tools. Follow the tips in our article Teaching Responsibly with AI to set your students up for success with their chosen AI tool. Make sure they are aware of generative AI’s limitations and privacy implications.
- Have students create visual summaries. Ask students to find or generate images that they can use to create visual aids for the assigned topics. Encourage students to combine text and visual information to summarize the topic’s main points.
- Review and discuss students’ work. Examine the visual summaries in class, discussing the concepts and clarifying any misconceptions. If this assignment is graded, make sure to grade based on conceptual understanding rather than image quality.
What’s the research? Dual coding is when learners interact with content through both verbal and visual information, enhancing memory and understanding (Smith & Weinstein, n.d.-b). This research-backed study strategy aligns with the Universal Design for Learning checkpoint “Illustrate through multiple media” (CAST, n.d.-a). Visual summaries allow students to integrate two forms of information, deepening their comprehension and making the learning experience more engaging.
4. Ask Students to Teach the AI
Deep understanding often comes from the act of explaining. In the realm of education, having students articulate their understanding of a concept can solidify their grasp and highlight areas needing further clarification. With the advent of AI tools like ChatGPT, students now have an interactive platform where they can practice this act of elaboration. By engaging in detailed conversations with the AI, students can receive instant feedback, refine their understanding, and practice the art of explanation.
