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AI: The Teaching Assistant You Never Knew You Needed

Written by Danielle Bailiey, Director of The Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning

As Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, I get questions about AI by fellow faculty members often. Typically, the questions focus on the students, with the most common centering how professors can stop students from cheating with AI.

While these are important questions, and discussions on these topics should and must continue, an often overlooked area of AI in higher education is how TEACHERS can use AI. Let me tell you, the answer is A LOT.

After dabbling with generative AI for the past two years, I created a workshop appropriately titled “AI: The Teaching Assistant You Never Knew You Needed” to share what I learned about using AI for courses from the teacher’s perspective. For those with less time on their hands, I have posted the top highlights below:

1. Chat Assistants are one of the most valuable (and free!) tools right now for course preparation. Microsoft CoPilot has a contractual agreement with UT Tyler and provides links to sources, which seems to reduce hallucinations fairly well, but has a limited chat archive so it is more difficult to have sustained conversations. Chat-GPT provides no contractual protections or links to sources, but archives all chats indefinitely.

2. You can use chat assistants to do any of the following simply. Other programs like MagicSchool.ai and Eduaide.ai provide similar assistance, but may have paywalled content and automatically focus on K-12 audiences.

1. Develop learning objectives for your class (ask specifically for Bloom’s taxonomy in the prompt to make them stronger)
2. Create exam questions
3. Develop grading rubrics (and give personalized feedback using the rubric!)
4. Suggest learning activities
5. Write out activity instructions
6. Create fake student submissions as examples
7. Translate course materials into other languages

3) Image generators are useful tools for creating diverse photographs and graphics for your course materials. Programs like SlidesAI can help create an entire presentation from a written script. Programs like ImageFX can locate or create images for individual slides or for assignment graphics

4) Always remember to use caution when using AI to avoid providing personal identifying information or violating copyright laws.

Find more resources here:

AI Pedagogy Project by Harvard
101 Creative Ideas to Use AI in Education (Open Access e-Book)