Join us for a Faculty Forum about ChatGPT and AI
Dear Faculty Colleagues,
[Please join us this Friday, January 20th for a noon Zoom Faculty Forum on ChatGPT and other AI concerns.]
Many educators were convinced that the introduction of the calculator, the grammar checker, and the online translator would all weaken our students’ self-reliance and problem-solving skills. Since these and other disruptive technologies were introduced, innovative educators have harnessed these technologies as we taught students how to apply higher order thinking skills to ever more demanding and inspiring intellectual challenges.
A new technology was introduced late last year that will shake up education once again, one which will necessitate faculty awareness, and, most likely, a faculty response. This new technology breakthrough concerns artificial intelligence.
First made available to the public on November 30, 2022, ChatGPT is a chatbot that can understand and follow commands from a user that are more complex than any Google search. One could ask ChatGPT to summarize books, write essays and reports, write resumes and cover letters, write and debug code, tell stories, and translate languages. Showing the tool to a colleague recently, I asked ChatGPT what prominent named historians see as the causes of the War of 1812. Within 30 seconds, the tool provided us a numbered list of several short paragraphs that explained causes of the war, quoting the titles and authors of academic texts where those causes are explored.
Some faculty think that the capabilities of ChatGPT will change everything in K-16 education, while others feel that the tool will motivate us to further personalize, localize, and narrow the scope of the essay prompts and other sorts of assignments that we assign our students.
On this coming Friday, January 20, Academic Technology Services will be hosting a faculty forum on artificial intelligence with a focus on the OpenAI tool ChatGPT. We will discuss the challenges that the tool poses to the ways that we run our classes, the ways that we ask our students to collect information, and the written assessments that we require of our students. Because the tool can also write computer code, ChatGPT is relevant not only to the humanities and social sciences, but to STEM disciplines as well.
We do not expect to solve the problems raised in our discussion on Friday. From the point of view of ATS, any response to this or other disruptive technologies would need to be informed by faculty concerns and priorities. We see this faculty forum as our first opportunity to raise awareness about the applications and relevance of this new tool, as well as to consider the challenges and the opportunities presented by ChatGPT and other emerging artificial intelligence tools.
We hope you will join us on Zoom at 12pm on Friday, January 20th, for the discussion!
Andy Jones
Academic Associate Director, Academic Technology Services.
University of California, Davis