Faculty Toolkit

The release of ChatGPT from Open AI, presents educators with a new challenge but also substantial opportunities to innovate in their classrooms. 

ChatGPT is a powerful, easy-to-use, free generative AI tool. Anyone can create an account, ask questions or enter prompts, and receive clear, well-written, and seemingly accurate answers. ChatGPT writes with confidence and clarity; it sounds convincing. According to OpenAI, "It is important to keep in mind that this is a direct result of the system's design (i.e. maximizing the similarity between outputs and the dataset the models were trained on) and that such outputs may be inaccurate, untruthful, and otherwise misleading at times: (https://help.openai.com/en/articles/6783457-chatgpt-faq). 

Where does this leave us as educators? First, we need to remember that there are ethical and unethical uses of AI and we must hold our students to high ethical standards in how they use and interact with AI tools. Second, we should consider that these tools are not going away. AI tools will continue to exist, continue to improve, and continue to be accessible to our students.  As educators we have a choice about how to look at ChatGPT and the future of AI. We can treat it as a threat or we can treat it as an opportunity to innovate.

Possible assignments using ChatGPT

• Students prompt ChatGPT to produce a research paper. Students fact-check and source the AI generated paper. 
• Students prompt ChatGPT to provide a list of sources of a topic. Students either find the source or identify which elements of the citation are real and what are fabricated. 
• Students write a short essay and prompt ChatGPT to do the same. Compare and contrast the human and AI generated papers. 
• Students ask ChatGPT for a list of facts. Verify those facts using reliable sources. 
• Have ChatGPT generate a portion of a class lecture. Before the lecture, brainstorm a list of red flags for AI generated content. Discuss as a class after the lecture. 

Your NSCC librarians are excited to collaborate with faculty  teaching the information and digital literacy skills our students need to be successful. We can help you adapt current research assignments and your information literacy based outcomes to include engaging with AI ethically.

We have lots of ideas about how to work together but we thought we'd ask ChatGPT. Like most of the content it produces there are some good ideas, some repetition, and some filler.

When ChatGPT says: "By working closely with faculty, librarians can help to ensure that ChatGPT is being used effectively in the classroom to enhance student learning and engagement," we couldn't agree more.