industry & research campusreview . com . au
Education refocus
How AI can help reduce lecturer ’ s workloads .
By Emilie Lauer
University academics should learn to use artificial intelligence to help craft their assignment guidelines , lesson plans and marking rubrics , according to a writing expert , but should disclose its use to students .
According to the University of Sydney ' s Dr Benjamin Miller , ChatGPT is an " adaptable tool " that can be used across every academic discipline .
“ It ’ s forcing a reconsideration and a conversation around standards and achievements in assessments to ensure that students are achieving above the potential of chat GPT ,” he said .
Dr Miller joined Campus Review to discuss how AI is changing Australia ' s academic landscape .
CR : Do you think the fear around Chat GPT is justified ? BM : I think the fear is understandable . When I first looked at Chat GPT in relation to an assessment task in a unit I teach , and I tried to use it to generate an answer , I personally was really shocked by the ability of artificial intelligence , in this case Chat GPT , to generate an answer that was very close to pass , maybe even a higher level of essay . So initially I was really shocked and taken aback , and I understand if people are panicking when they first realised this . But from there I moved into a space of thinking about how can we educate students about using artificial intelligence in their writing process and the opportunities became really exciting as far as I could see . There are ways to improve education at university by engaging with artificial intelligence .
How can Chat GPT be used efficiently in universities ? I ' ve been talking to a lot of colleagues about this question , and we keep coming back to the idea of how we teach our materials , whether we ' re teaching a learning process and we ' re assessing a learning process , or whether we ' re asking students to produce a product at the end of a unit of study or a course that we can assess . In all of this , we find that if we focus too much on the product of education , then Chat GPT is a real threat but if we focus on the process of learning in our assessment and in our teaching , then there ' s a real opportunity to engage with something like Chat GPT .
So in terms of how it could be used efficiently at universities , I think it could be used to refocus education onto the essential processes in our discipline . How in my instance , in my case , I teach writing whether it ' s academic writing or professional writing . So if I focus on the process , it ' s about the research , the
It comes back to the expertise of the teacher to think creatively about how to use Chat GPT .
drafting , the editing process in writing , not the finished product of an essay or a business report . And when I focus on the process , Chat GPT becomes an exciting addition to the range of things we ' re trying to teach students .
What are some ways lecturers use Chat GPT in their classes prep and everyday work ? I think there are a lot of opportunities here and they all come with , for me , one caveat , which is that we are , as teachers , really transparent with our students about how we ' re using and why we ' re using artificial intelligence or Chat GPT . My students early in semester so far have been really excited to hear why and how I ' m using Chat GPT to help in their learning .
So with practical examples , we can create use Chat GPT to create exemplar tasks and then ask students to find faults in those tasks or find weaknesses or strengths in the answers that Chat GPT can generate . That ' s just one way that we can run a very simple classroom activity , but it has great learning outcomes where students learn to recognise strengths and disadvantages in
18