By Doug Ward
A chatbot in Adobe Acrobat became available to KU users last month after a new contract with Adobe took effect. The company had added a chatbot to Acrobat a couple of years ago, but KU had blocked access.
You will find the bot, known as AI Assistant, on the upper right side of the Acrobat app.
By Doug Ward
As many educators in the United States and Canada have held back or retreated on adapting courses to generative artificial intelligence, those in the rest of the world have pushed forward.
The approaches are in some cases so divergent that a new report from the Digital Education Council sometimes reads like two reports about two different worldviews of higher education.
By Doug Ward
How do we adapt online courses to generative artificial intelligence?
That’s the question we asked about a dozen instructors, instructional designers, and educational technology specialists to grapple with this semester.
Through a series of discussions we called a CTE Innovation Lab, they worked at identifying the major challenges in online education and considered how we might approach online teaching in more effective ways and how generative AI might help us overcome some of the problems it has created.
Mahdis Mousavi, Unsplash
By Doug Ward
A new survey from the Association of American Colleges and Universities emphasizes the challenges instructors face in handling generative artificial intelligence in their classes.
By Doug Ward
I talk frequently about the need for faculty members to experiment with and adapt their teaching to generative artificial intelligence.
During a CTE session last week, an instructor mentioned how difficult that was, saying that “the landscape of AI is changing so rapidly that it seems impossible to keep up with.”
By Doug Ward
The phrase “humans in the loop" has become a cliché for the importance of overseeing the processes and output of generative artificial intelligence.
By Doug Ward
Microsoft has recently added Copilot tools specifically for teachers.
By Doug Ward
Research about learning and artificial intelligence mostly reinforces what instructors had suspected: Generative AI can extend students’ abilities, but it can’t replace the hard work of learning. Students who use generative AI to avoid early course material eventually struggle with deeper learning and more complex tasks.
On the other hand, AI can improve learning among motivated students, it can assist creativity, and it can help students accomplish tasks they might never have tried on their own.
By Doug Ward
A few eye-popping statistics help demonstrate the growing reach of generative AI: