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EDINBORO — Artificial intelligence can help educators create and update lesson plans and complete other peripheral tasks so that they can focus more on teaching and research.
It can help students gather information needed to complete assignments, check their grammar and format their work in alignment with style guides.
It also can help students cheat.
Colleges and universities are scrambling to educate themselves about the opportunities and challenges of artificial intelligence and how to harness it to improve teaching and learning.
“It’s the hottest topic right now in education,” said Camille Dempsey, director of Pennsylvania Western University’s new Center for Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies and associate professor of education at PennWest’s Edinboro campus.
The challenges
The biggest challenge is that artificial intelligence is developing so fast that most educators can’t keep up with it.
“It is one of the fastest-growing technologies I’ve seen my lifetime. The other two that were transformational were the mobile device and the internet. AI is moving way faster, and it’s way more powerful,” Dempsey said.
PennWest’s Center for Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies is being designed by faculty, staff and students at all three of the university’s campuses to give faculty the tools, understanding and training to incorporate AI in teaching and to help students to become proficient, ethical users of AI, both in learning and in later careers.
Expected to be operational this spring, the center additionally will help governments, industry, nonprofits and other community partners leverage the time- and cost-saving opportunities of AI.
“School districts are contacting us because they want to know how to advise their teachers on using it and how they work with students so students are using it correctly,” Dempsey said.
Educators’ No. 1 concern with artificial intelligence is that students will use it to cheat, according to a November 2023 Microsoft report on AI in Education.
Forty-two percent of U.S. and international educators surveyed for the report indicated that they worry that artificial intelligence will increase student plagiarism and cheating, such as using AI to write reports and essays.
Students’ No. 1 concern with AI is similar. Fifty-two percent of student surveyed indicated that their biggest worry is that they will be accused of plagiarism and cheating.
Cheating concerns generally arise when there is a lack of direction on how a student can use artificial intelligence, said Dempsey, who is a faculty research fellow in AI through the International Society of Technology in Education. She also is a fellow with the EDSAFE AI Alliance, a coalition of organizations focused on fostering the safe and equitable use of AI in education, according to the group’s website.
“Students don’t know what they don’t know,” Dempsey said. “Just like the rest of us, they are exploring it; they’re trying to figure it out, too. That’s why having professional development for teachers and universities and schools is really important because it’s easy to fall into saying that something is plagiarism when the reality might be that the professor or teacher doesn’t have an AI policy,” or students aren’t properly citing AI use.
The key to using AI in education and in other applications is to remain in the pilot’s seat, Dempsey said.
“Don’t give up your human brain. AI certainly can make our lives easier in many ways, but I would never rely on it 100%. I think of AI not only as a teaching assistant but also as a co-pilot. It’s assistive; it’s assisting what we do.”
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Contact Valerie Myers at vmyers@timesnews.com.