How to Use ChatGPT for More Effective Online Teaching

It’s also not going away. So instead of running from it, we’re attempting to think of it as an additional instructional resource—your AI TA. That’s right, an artificially intelligent teaching assistant that in no way can take the place of your humanly intelligent teaching assistant, but can certainly help you improve the effectiveness of your online courses. Here are four strategies that can help you to take advantage of ChatGPT, including using it as an opportunity to uphold academic integrity.

Planning Instruction

It’s a lot of work to design and plan an online course. So imagine how helpful ChatGPT could be if you’re teaching multiple online courses at once! In an intelligence.com survey of 1,000 U.S. high school, undergraduate, and graduate professors, 97% of respondents said they are frequently (41%) or sometimes (56%), and their top reason for doing so is to save time during lesson and course prep.

How You Can Use ChatGPT for Course Prep

You can use ChatGPT to help you streamline the planning of your lessons. For example, if you’re struggling with coming up with new or fresh ideas, you can generate plans that align with the scope and sequence of your syllabus. ChatGPT will spit out ideas and a basic plan that you can use as a jumping off point.

The better and more fleshed out your inputs are to the tool, the more comprehensive your output will be. For example, You could input the following prompt into Chat GPT: “Create a lesson plan on [concept being taught] that includes a variety of activities and assessments and takes into account the following paragraph where I provide a brief description on the skills and knowledge of my students.”

ChatGPT will compose ideas for assessments, activities, scaffolding, and objectives. Want that in the form of problem-based learning, experiential-based learning, or a blended course? With that direction, ChatGPT can adjust the plan. Here are other planning materials ChatGPT can help you with:

• Slide shows: When directed to outline a slide show for any topic and level of understanding, ChatGPT creates an intuitive organization and adds formative assessment questions if requested.
• Simplifying topics: Having difficulty putting advanced or dense concepts into clear and understandable terms? ChatGPT can even help you translate some of those lessons or takeaways in simpler language. You can instruct ChatGPT to “explain the topic as if you were a 6th grader.” Here’s the tool’s simplified explanation of chloroplasts: “Chloroplasts are little green things inside plant leaves that help the plant make its own food. They are like tiny factories that use sunlight, air, and water to make the plant’s food.” You can also ask ChatGPT for real-world examples to illustrate more complex concepts—giving students another frame of reference.
• Additional resources for students: You can use ChatGPT to expedite your creation of study aids and student resources. For example, create solved examples of math problems with explanations of each step. Provide word problems—for example, using ratios: ChatGPT gives the problem, the formula for solving it, and a full explanation of the procedure.You can build a pre-reading or advanced organizer by extracting critical and unfamiliar vocabulary from a lesson and listing them with their definitions.
• Syllabi prep: Compose a syllabus boilerplate that includes a course schedule, late-work policies, and a description of how assignments will be graded. It can also help you develop more detailed course syllabi that include recommended readings relevant to a given topic.

The point is using ChatGPT during your course planning and lesson prep stage can help you save time, inspire new ideas, supplement your existing lessons, and give you a solid foundation to build from.

Developing Prompts More Quickly

Have you ever spent your Sunday afternoons or even week nights struggling to come up with some thought-provoking questions for your online discussion? And then potentially turning to Google for some ideas? The struggle is real!

Online discussions have become a hallmark of online courses because they foster a sense of community, which research demonstrates improves learner engagement and leads to better academic outcomes. But they’re also a lot of work to build from scratch.

Discussions can take the form of debate or reflective sharing — led by instructors or students themselves — giving all learners the opportunity to expand upon and clarify their understanding of key ideas. They move beyond the more passive learning forms of reading, listening, and watching and allows the learner to actively engage with their peers and instructor. But generating thought-provoking questions that can deeply engage your students and require critical thinking and textual evidence can be a challenging task. That’s where ChatGPT can help.

How to Use ChatGPT to Scale Prompt Development

Imagine being able to instruct ChatGPT on the topic, objectives of the discussion, level of difficulty, and interaction strategy you wanted students to use—debate or small-group, for example—all relevant to the course level. You would be able to develop more discussion prompts in less time. You’ll get high-quality prompts that you can add to, change up, or align to lesson objectives.

ChatGPT can also help you personalize student learning, in ways that would have been impossible before. Think about writing-based assignments. You could now more quickly and easily differentiate writing prompts for each student or for groups of students, challenging and engaging them at their appropriate level of learning. You can provide some students with more support and scaffolding in order to understand the material, and others with more complex and advanced questions that require higher-level thinking skills.

Fore more on how to Use ChatGPT in Harmonize for More Engaging Discussions

Using AI for Assessment Prep

At the heart of your course is student learning. And students achieve your learning outcomes and course objectives through both formative and summative assessment as well as constructive, ongoing feedback. That will never change.

Grading essays, evaluating students’ analyses and understanding of course material, and providing constructive feedback on what students did well and where they can improve is time consuming. In fact, according to the American Faculty Association, instructors spend up to 4 hours of out-of-class time preparing and assessing students for each hour of a class, which holds just as true for online, hybrid, or blended learning. Data showed that teaching an online course requires anywhere from 3 to 7 or more hours per week — of course, that varies by discipline, experience level, and whether or not you’ve taught the course before.

It’s this work that helps lead to stronger student engagement, better outcomes, and eventual success. But what if you could spend more of your time on the part that matters most—feedback for student improvement.

How to Use ChatGPT to Streamline Assessment Prep

You can use ChatGPT to create a variety of assessment materials more quickly than ever, significantly reducing the amount of time you spend on some of the routine prep pieces.

• Different quiz versions: Ask ChatGPT to create tests on specific topics using any type of question format. Paste a passage into the chatbot or identify the unit or lesson, provide as much on the lesson as possible, and the AI can produce a test bank and answer key.
• Rubrics: ChatGPT in Harmonize will compose a rubric for any type of student performance. Depending on your needs, examples include analytic, holistic, and developmental rubrics, as well as rating scales.
• Checklists: The tool can develop an observation checklist to help you document students’ academic, social, and emotional progress.
• Cloze tests: A cloze test is an exercise or assessment consisting of a portion of language with certain items, words, or signs removed. ChatGPT can create a cloze comprehension test, where words or parts of formulas are removed from, and the student is asked to fill in the blanks to test their understanding of concepts or terminology.

Consider this example from Samuel Saudners, an educational developer at the University of Liverpool, whose focus is assessment and feedback.

He input the parameters of an assessment and asked ChatGPT to create a real-world brief by acting as a ‘client’ in the context of a specific disciplinary background. In his example below, he asked ChatGPT to act as a client to a business and create a brief to design a campaign for an unidentified product, including a budget, timescale and market reach. ChatGPT responded with a request for a 6-month, $100,000 campaign across the USA to sell smart thermostats. A student could then work to actually create materials for this campaign as an assessment task.

Now with the ability to quickly create a variety of scenario-based assessments, instructors can reduce the potential for copying and academic misconduct and increase the inclusivity of the assessment.

Whether it be rubric generation or any other materials for assessment, ChatGPT can help simplify your tasks in this area, amplify your pedagogy, and provide a solid starting point for tailoring the materials to your specific needs, especially helpful for newer online instructors.

What it won’t do is replace your feedback. The tool always sounds canned and authoritative, even when disseminating inaccurate content, because it was written by an algorithm. It’s not alive. It doesn’t think or feel. And it will never know your students the way you do—how they learn and how they receive feedback best. You’ll now have more time to focus on that.

Educating Students: Academic Dishonesty

ChatGPT is capable of writing cogent essays and original poetry, solving math problems, and producing working computer code—and your students know it. But then again, they’ve always known it. Students know better than any of us that there’s an app for nearly everything, including cheating.

In a study from Marshall University, 33% of the 635 students surveyed admitted to cheating in an online course — and according to OnlineCollege.org, 55% of college presidents said plagiarism has increased in recent years due to expanded access to online resources. And contract cheating companies are making billions of dollars selling test answers, trading tests, hawking pre-written essays, writing new work, or even taking an entire class for a student.

Clearly, we want students to be using their own creativity, their own ingenuity, their own understanding. When students take work or responses from ChatGPT and submit it as their own, it’s plagiarism. But the tool is not infallible. It’s pattern matching. When you give it a prompt, the app scrubs through all the data and literature it has been given and weighs the most appropriate answer word by word. Consider the following experiment.

University of Minnesota law school professors put it to the test. They gave ChatGPT four law exams, comprising 95 multiple-choice questions and 12 essays, and then they blindly graded the tests. It made mistakes and only passed with a C+ average. While there were no typos and perfect grammar, it did poorly on what the legal processors called ‘core legal skills’ like the ability to spot potential legal problems and do deep analysis—that is, critical thinking and problem-solving.

How to Use ChatGPT to Promote an Environment of Academic Integrity

There are several ways to promote the kind of conditions that value academic integrity in your course, the most important being to: Communicate Expectations

Have a clear and concise policy on academic integrity, which should be easily accessible to students. This policy should outline why integrity is important, what is considered to be academic dishonesty, and the consequences for engaging in such behavior, including the moral consequences.

Cizek (2003) discusses the “habit-forming” nature of cheating and cheating’s devaluation of hard work, integrity, and fairness. The habitual nature of cheating indicates that those who cheat in academic activities and think they can get away with it may continue to cheat at work, in family life, and in other aspects of life. In the long run, this attitude can be harmful not only to the cheater, but to everyone else affected by his or her actions.

Make sure students are aware of the tools you, and your institution, employ to detect plagiarism—such as, originality checkers, many of which are integrated with your LMS and grading tools. Most of these checkers can now detect AI-generated writing as part of their plagiarism reports on student work.

Another way to promote academic integrity is through education and training. At a broader level, institutions can offer workshops and seminars on the topic, and make academic integrity a part of new student orientation programs. You can also:

• Highlight the support and resources available to students who are struggling with their work.
• Introduce more flexible and varied assessment methods to make sure students can’t pass off work to other students. Make assignments more specific and vary them from course.
• Finally, if you find your students are going to use it anyway, encourage them to evaluate or even challenge what ChatGPT produces. The technology’s imperfections and limitations are an opportunity to teach and learn in new ways, hone students’ critical analysis skills, and critiquing the answers given back to them — using evidence and support from credible sources.

If we focus on creating an environment that places less weight on competitive grading and more emphasis on growing and learning, you’ll work to create a course community built on trust, that values academic honesty, and disincentivizes cheating.

Using ChatGPT in Harmonize

Generative AI tools, like ChatGPT, aren’t going anywhere. When new technologies emerge, we often mistrust their use before they become normalized. We evolve to accept and rely on them, and when we do, they can help us become more efficient, accurate, and effective. It may be a long road to that point when it comes to ChatGPT and education, but in the end, there will be no replacement for human understanding—only aids.

Think of ChatGPT in Harmonize as your newest teaching assistant. You’ve added the subject matter expertise to the prompt, and because we’ve trained the bot on many course-level appropriate interaction strategies, you can be sure your students will be met with different discussion prompt approaches throughout different points in their academic journey. The goal is to ensure they stay engaged and continue building their critical thinking skills as they progress through levels of content.

By integrating ChatGPT into Harmonize’s suite of online course discussion and collaboration tools, instructors will create a more interactive learning environment. They can prepare more effective discussion prompts, more quickly than ever, and students can engage in thought-provoking discussions, receive valuable feedback, and enhance their critical thinking skills like never before. And remember, if you’re concerned about Googled or ChatGPT-generated student responses to your discussions, we can catch that too! 😉

With the power of AI-driven conversations, coupled with sound pedagogy around what makes a good discussion prompt, you’ll immerse your online students in more complex topics, exchange ideas, and deepen their understanding.

If you’re interested in seeing how you can use ChatGPT to build better, more engaging course discussion prompts in half the time, get started here.