Dr. Jonathan Jackson is Associate Professor of SCM at Providence College.
Preparing for an upcoming semester is a challenging task for educators in normal circumstances, but infinitely harder when facing the largest disruption in education since the internet. The introduction of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have caused us to rethink an entire course.
While AI will inevitably cause challenges, it also provides great opportunity to improve higher education. Here are 4 opportunities to make your teaching easier and more impactful using AI:
1. We have all been in the situation where no matter how we try to explain a challenging topic (e.g., the bullwhip effect), it still isn’t “clicking” for our students. This is where AI can help. By prompting an LLM like ChatGPT with a topic (say, bullwhip) and an audience (business students), it can help generate alternative explanations at varying levels of complexity to help improve student understanding.
2. Relevant and interesting examples help keep students engaged, but coming up with good examples is no easy task. Similar to generating alternative explanations, AI can provide various examples to help students connect a topic (e.g., inventory management) to things they see in their day-to-day lives.
3. While your Heizer/Render/Munson OM text has an amazing set of questions that can be auto-graded through MyLab, sometimes we need additional questions for a particular topic or class session. For example, before introducing SPC in Supplement 6, we may want to devise a low-stakes quiz to refresh students on topics from their previous statistics course such as central limit theorem and Normal distribution. AI can not only develop the questions, but also provide an answer key and explanations.
4. Short feedback mechanisms like “1-minute paper” and “muddiest point” are excellent tools to help gauge student understanding and gaps in knowledge. Unfortunately, they can be cumbersome for us to administer on the back end. Specifically, AI can help in summarizing the responses from the 25+ students into important points (understanding) and areas of confusion. By inputting all student responses into the LLM, it can provide prevalent key points and areas of confusion in a matter of seconds.
Much of the discussion around AI and education comes in an adversarial tone, but these opportunities are framed around leveraging this new technology for the betterment of our courses (and to save us a little time!).
Note: Generative AI and LLMs are not foolproof and should be carefully vetted using your content expertise.