Professor encourages generative AI for college class projects – Inside Higher Ed

Increasingly, employers are indicating that there’s a need for students to be trained in generative artificial intelligence tools as more businesses integrate the tech’s capabilities into the workplace.

Some instructors have implemented AI into their classes to demonstrate prompt engineering and showcase AI’s research and writing abilities. Entrepreneurship professor Mark Lacker at Miami University in Ohio encourages students to use generative AI tools to complete projects, inspiring creative and critical thinking skills that can prepare them for careers.

How it works: Whether it was talking with employers or with students as they engaged in internships or reading recent research, the theme of generative AI in the workplace was made exceedingly apparent to Lacker this past summer.

So, on the first day of classes, Lacker told his students what he’d learned: That a majority of graduates wished they’d been taught AI, that businesses were aggressively investing in AI tools and that if they didn’t board the AI train, it would leave the station without them. The students bought in immediately, he says.

The rapid evolution of AI has shown Lacker that it’s not enough to teach students how to use tools, but to teach them to use these tools while learning. “It’s gotta be in the workflow,” he explains.

The course, which covers start-up marketing and finance, is a 200-level course predominately taken by first-semester sophomores who represent a variety of majors and disciplines.

Lacker considers his course similar to an internship, where he fulfills the role of supervisor and his students act as interns, receiving project requests and submitting them. Each class, students are assigned to work with a small group of their peers to use AI to solve a problem.

One example is building understanding of what a landing page is, how to build one and when it’s useful and best practices. Students are assigned a prompt strategy to implement, take the output and continue to refine until they’ve accomplished their goal.

From there, one group is randomly selected each week to present their findings for around five minutes, demonstrating their learning to their peers and showcasing their thinking.

How it’s going: The course is still in a pilot phase, with students halfway through the semester. “I told them, ‘You’re the guinea pig class,’” Lacker jokes. Although he views it as experimental, the class has met and exceeded many of Lacker’s expectations.

One unintended consequence of the new course: Lacker doesn’t use his slide deck any more to teach, as students are teaching and learning from each other.

The short presentations at the start of class often prompt new questions and follow-up, some of which are answered by peers but others addressed by Lacker. The environment has flipped to be more active and more engaged, which he believes better mirrors workplaces and high-functioning teams.

What’s next: The overarching goal is to prepare students to get themselves up to speed quickly in whatever workplace they’re in, whether that’s an internship or roles after graduation, making them competitive applicants and efficient workers.

After students return from fall break, they’ll begin more advanced levels of AI learning not by having a prompt structure created by Lacker, but instead they will have to write their own prompt strategies and outline their thinking. Lacker will grade students based on the processes, and he hopes to see deeper thinking and applied learning in new ways.

Three other entrepreneurship faculty members at Miami U are also integrating AI into their courses, two 100-level courses and a 200-level course, a sign to Lacker that the department is embracing AI and learning to equip students with the career skills they need.

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