How to Learn with AI

Generative AI tools are very good at coming up with creative assignment and assessment ideas. Sometimes all you need to do is give these tools an example of your course outline or a list of your course-level objectives, and they will generate a variety of assignment ideas for you. From there, you can choose what you want to do with those assignments: whether it's exploring them further by asking the AI to provide you with more details or asking the AI to give you another set of assignments for more options. The point is that you can use the AI tool as a brainstorming partner to iterate these assignment ideas quickly.

Deciding on the Level of AI Integration

Another interesting way you can use Generative AI tools is to incorporate them within your assignments and assessments. By making these tools an interactive element of your course activities, you can increase the level of engagement your students experience while learning. Of course, it's first helpful to consider the degree to which you will want your students to interact with Generative AI. For example, do you want your students to use AI to only come up with some initial brainstorming ideas for their assignments? Do you want them to use AI for feedback on their writing? Or do you perhaps want them to use AI to interview a famous historical figure as part of a simulated experience? You can refer to the AI Assessment Scale by Leon Furze and colleagues to get a better sense of what else is possible and to help you make that determination. 

Rubrics for AI-Enhanced Assessments

Creating general rubrics with a Generative AI tool is a very straightforward process. You can either have the AI generate a rubric based on something it created, or you can have the AI generate a rubric based on one of your pre-existing assessments. These tools do well when asked to create criteria, re-organize point values, and even change formatting styles (e.g., from lists to tables). What's interesting is that you can also have them come up with a set of criteria based on the expected level AI-interaction within an assessment. When thinking about what to look for in a more AI-enhanced assessment, consider the degree of student-to-AI interaction. There are many things that you can potentially grade. For example, you could look at the student's prompt designs, the student's evaluation of AI responses, or even student's ability to connect AI responses to relevant course work and/or scholarly articles. Here is a great resource from the University of Sydney, which goes into the finer details of what these rubrics might look like (see Appendix 3).