New Workshop: Preparing Your AI Strategy

AI offers your campus much more than a chance to increase efficiency or reduce staff. Strategy is about improving your odds for success and now is the time to ask what new service or support could we now offer. We will get hands-on experience of how AI is changing work and thinking. AI can improve quality, speed and even work happiness by outsourcing tedious tasks, but it is also a better listener and can improve student support, meeting notes and assessment. We will learn how to create fine-tuned AIs that can do specific tasks (like financial aid). AI is also changing average: you will need to consider both when good is good enough and where humans need to focus. AI makes almost everyone more creative by surpassing human ability for quantity of new ideas—the most important phase of innovation. How will you change your processes and culture to leverage these new capabilities?

Many more workshops on Teaching with AI: https://teachingnaked.com/workshop-abstracts/

Teaching with AI is DONE!

You can now pre-order the new book from Johns Hopkins or Amazon.

I am on the road every week starting at Georgia Southern University on Jan 4/5 through to the AALHE Conference in Portland (June 5) and the National Higher Ed Teaching Conference in Minneapolis (June 13). (If you look through the word “National” on that page, you can see me sitting on the opening panel from last year.) I will also be the keynote at the Teaching with AI conference at the University of Central Florida (July 22). And a dozen more–all listed on my venue page.

Teaching with AI Book Coming Soon! PRE-ORDER NOW at JHUPbooks

https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/53869/teaching-ai

I am doing my new AI workshop from coast to coast this fall and there is a new book on the way too: Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning that I am doing with C. Edward Watson. (We also co-wrote Teaching Naked Techniques together.)

With everything being written about AI, this is coming together quickly and it will be out from Johns Hopkins University Press in early 2024. It will be SHORT and PRACTICAL, but also hopefully relatively comprehensive (AI for research, AI at work, AI assignments, cheating, writing a policy etc.)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has is revolutionizing the way we learn, work and think. Its integration into classrooms and workplaces is already underway, impacting and challenging ideas about creativity, authorship, and education. We are hoping to help teachers discover how to harness and manage AI as a powerful teaching tool.  More to come.

Teaching with AI

There are at least three big ways AI is going to change human thinking.
– AI is changing how we work
– AI is changing what average means
– AI is changing creativity
In each case humans are going to have to THINK WITH AI.

This has profound implications for education and I am exploring the implications for curriculum, policies, assignments and assessments in a new keynote and workshop on teaching with AI that I am giving a lot starting next month (and soon in a new book).

More on this to come, but start with the idea that AI is going to change our relationship with thinking, and in unexpected ways.

There is a new field of AI-Medicated Communication (AI-MC) that finds that when AI listens and offers “conversational assistance” it improves both patient/customer/client outcomes and perceptions of satisfaction (5 different research studies below all with similar conclusions from different arenas).

In all cases human interactions are improved with AI support–we can think better with AI. As one researcher put it:

“It’s like Grammerly for empathy.”

•Online Counseling
Hsu, S., Shah, R.S., Senthil, P., et al. (2023). Helping the Helper: Supporting Peer Counselors via AI-Empowered Practice and Feedback. ArXiv, abs/2305.08982.  
• Customer Assistance
Brynjolfsson, E., Li, D., & Raymond, L. (2023, April). Generative Ai at Work NBER Working Paper No. w31161.
•Peer Support (19% increase in perceived empathy)
Sharma, A., Lin, I.W., Miner, A.S. et al. (2023) Human–AI collaboration enables more empathic conversations in text-based peer-to-peer mental health support. Nat Mach Intell 5, 46–57.
•Detection of Distress in Healthcare
Morrow, E., Zidaru, T., Ross, F., et al. (2023). Artificial intelligence technologies and compassion in healthcare: A systematic scoping review. Frontiers in psychology, 13, 971044.
•Consolation of Pet Loss (even when told directly by AI)
Liu, Y., Mittal, A., Yang, D. & Bruckman, Amy. (2022). Will AI Console Me when I Lose my Pet? Understanding Perceptions of AI-Mediated Email Writing. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 1-13.

I can see a new relationship app coming soon…

ChatGPT is the New C Grade

Think of AI as your new 24/7 test subject. You can now try out every exam question and every writing prompt, to see how an average student might respond. You might try to 2-3 times, to get a variety of responses.

Give all of these responses a C (maybe a C-). However much you love or hate ChatGPT’s answers, they are, by design, somewhat average.

Now REVISE your prompts, using these average answers, to encourage A work. You are now more likely to identify what is missing from the BEST answer.

Your job is to be that better coach. Your charges, may have had good coaches in high school, but you need to get them to the next level. In absolute terms, the difference between a good high school score and a good college score, might be slight (in the 100m dash it might be moving from 10.5 to 10.2 seconds), but great coaches focus on fractions of a second.

Great coaches also recognize that a good score is constantly changing. What got you a scholarship in 2000, won’t in 2023. All those tricks that got your dashers from 10.8 to 10.5, might not work when all of your new students arrive with 10.5 and you need to get them 10.2 to compete.

ChapGPT may have shrunk the distance between a C grade and an A grade in absolute terms, but it has made articulating that distance between them more important. The bar has been raised, ad we need to teach to the new higher human standard.  

AI can actually help you articulate that edge that you want your students to have.

The world has always been an open book test. Employers responded to the internet by asking for employees who could do more than just Google an answer and now they will want to hire graduates who can also do more than just ask ChatGPT.  

AI can be a tool to help teachers create better prompts and test questions that will move students to provide better answers that AI can’t.  

Inclusive Teaching

I am working on a new book: Inclusive Teaching Techniques: a Short Guide for Everyone that is coming out of the many inclusive teaching workshops I am doing. The idea is to provide only the briefest amount of theory and provide lots of easy techniques teaches can use today around the ideas of transparency, belonging, engagement and scaffolding. So the focus is on every class, including STEM and not just classes that deal with sensitive topics–although there is a chapter on that too. All good teaching is inclusive teaching.

You can get a taste in this new article from Inside Higher Education: Is Your Math Course Racist?

Pre-Order Teaching Change

My new book, Teaching Change: How to Develop Independent Thinkers Using Relationships, Resilience, and Reflection, is on its way! You can now find out more (and pre-order) at Johns Hopkins University Press, or preorder at Amazon.

An exploration of the difficulty of human learning, especially the ability to change your mind. Teaching Change makes a powerful argument as to how a new 3Rs of relationships, resilience and reflection can better prepare graduates for an uncertain future. Elegant and gripping explanations of recent and wide-ranging research from biology, economics, education, and neuroscience are paired with hundreds of practical suggestions for individual teachers. 

Teaching Change: How to Develop Independent Thinkers Using Relationships, Resilience, and Reflection

New Book from José Antonio Bowen in 2021 (Johns Hopkins University Press)

An exploration of the difficulty of human learning, especially the ability to change your mind. Teaching Change makes a powerful argument as to how a new 3Rs of Relationships, Resilience and Reflection can better prepare graduates for an uncertain future. Elegant and gripping explanations of recent and wide-ranging research from biology, economics, education, and neuroscience are paired with hundreds of practical suggestions for individual teachers.

See the outline HERE

Virtual Gap Years

A lot of institutions have recently converted back to virtual learning for the fall semester. Some of their offering will be fine, but many faculty are still new to online teaching. Plus many of these institutions are still charging full price.

Online courses have the potential to be great–think Star Wars the movie. But what many places will be offering is emergency remote teaching–think Star Wars the high school play. It is not quite the same thing. Here is a brief list of other options for virtual gap years and other virtual educational options.

Virtual Semester from Verto and Minerva  

Virtual Gap Year – College Programs

Chamblain College Virtual Gap Year

Adelphi University Virtual Gap Year

Park University $2250 Flat Rate Tuition Virtual Gap Year

Virtual internships, outdoor experiences and study abroad programs

GoOverseas Virtual Internships

https://www.unitedplanet.org/virtual-gap-year

UMass Lowell Virtual Study Abroad

https://www.globalcitizenyear.org

CISAbroad Virtual Internships

Virtual Internships

National Outdoor Leadership School

Study Abroad Association Virtual Study Abroad

AIFS and Global Experiences

Exotic Campus-like environments (mountains and beach) providing dorms and services to support virtual classes at your home institution: “keep your college education on track AND be based somewhere beautiful with freedom to explore, study, and be surrounded with awesome like-minded people.”

https://www.aplacebeyond.com

https://www.pacificdiscovery.org/programs/discovery-campus/#e745%23program-info

High quality free online courses from the best brand-name institution’s (often with optional pay certificates)

https://www.coursera.org

https://www.edx.org

Online providers of high quality courses that should transfer

https://outlier.org  (only Calculus and Intro Psych so far but $400 for 3 credits)

Lots of cheaper NFP online options, from places that specialize in online education 

https://www.wgu.edu

https://www.snhu.edu

Plus the large  “Global Campus” units many campuses

U Texas https://global.utexas.edu Maryland global campus

U Arizona  https://global.arizona.edu

Arizona State https://go.asuonline.asu.edu/brand-nwt/

U Maryland https://www.umgc.edu

Johns Hopkins https://www.jhu.edu/academics/online/

Cornell https://onlinelearning.cornell.edu