The Graphing Calculator in the Gen AI Era

“But…but…they’re just being lazy”. “But that’s cheating!”.  “I never did it that way” 

These are common refrains I hear when meeting with instructors these days. Many of my colleagues are resisting the changes generative AI can bring to classrooms. They have been teaching the same way for 5, 10, 15 or more years, and prefer to keep their assessments, papers, and assignments as they are. To those colleagues I say two words: 

“Graphing Calculator”. 

I was in high school when the graphing calculator became popular. Only a few classmates had the calculators but boy were they magical. They could spit out a beautiful graph in seconds! And, they were not allowed in our tests. We had to turn the graphing functions “off” for the test (can you even do that?). We loved it when those graphing calculator classmates were assigned to our homework groups because we were sure we would get all the answers correct. Except… we didn’t. Sometimes we misused or misunderstood the technology, and we didn’t understand enough about the subject to know that what we were looking at was not a good answer for our query. 

The same can be said for Gen AI. Yes, students can and do input your questions into Chat GPT or Gemini and get answers they can copy and paste. It’s no different than the file cabinets rumored to be housed in greek life housing, or the papers students can buy online. Gen AI is here to stay. Our students are using it, and are not going to stop. So, what are we going to do about it? How are we going to educate these students with this technology at everyone’s fingertips?

There are no bones about it…We need to change. 

Change is hard. Change takes effort. And for many, Change is not fun. And asking instructors to change and adjust the way they teach students can be met with blank stares or simmering anger. Presumably, we understand that we need to learn how to use the technology well, so that we can train our students to be critical consumers of its uses, information, and messages. When I started using google to do academic research my mentor at the time was suspect that it could do as good a job as the Psychology databases. I had to show him that yes, it did, and it pulled MORE information than our databases… but there was the rub. Some of the information it pulled was not useless. Not scientific. Easily debunked. I had to know what I was looking for, what was usable, and what wasn’t. I had to be good consumer of the technology.

 While I am no longer full-time in a college classroom, I still adjunct, while I run my e-learning design company.  Here are the top 5 things working for me and my colleagues today. 

1. Jump in. Don’t wait for someone to explain Gen AI fully to you. The field is growing so fast, that by the end of their discussion, some of the messaging will be out of date. You aren’t going to break the internet. Open a Gen AI chatbot and write something…anything…You can even tell your bot how you would like it to respond: ‘I have a curriculum update to present. Tell me the most important things to include from the board of director’s point of view” If you want to go further, you can describe your board of directors and the type of institution you work for to get even more relevant results. Dr. Jules White, the Director of Vanderbilt’s Initiative on the Future of Learning & Generative AI, and Professor of Computer Science at Vanderbilt University has put together an informative short course on Prompt Engineering for ChatGPT. Take the course and learn how to make Gen AI work with you!
2. Tell your students your feelings about using Generative AI. My thoughts are like this: “If you live by the Gen AI sword, you die by it also”. Just like if they quote bad science from a magazine, if they quote bad science from a Gen AI chatbot, they will suffer the consequences. 
3. Adjust your assessments. Here comes that “change” idea again. You’re going to need to be flexible (Chat GPT can help you with that). Instead of asking students to NOT use Gen AI, ask them TO use it about a topic (maybe the history of Personality Theories) and have them submit the Gen AI answers and bring them to class. Then- have them critically analyze what Gen AI got right, and where it missed the mark. These are the critical thinking our students will need once they leave the confines of your college classroom.
4. Let Gen AI be your partner. You’re ready to post an assignment. You love it, and you’re proud of it. Just for fun… paste it into Chat GPT or Gemini, or any of the other Gen AI LLMs and ask if the assignment meets the learning objectives, is clear, encourages critical thinking, and ways it can be improved. Within seconds you have a review of your work.  Coursera has a great, quick course on Using Generative AI as Your Thought Partner.
5. Use Gen AI as a new teaching tool. When book publishers started making all those fancy websites and portals, Instructors were obsessed! We can feel that way about Gen AI!  Use Gen AI as a teaching tool… don’t know how? Ask Chat GPT. You may just be surprised at the answers.