Bloom's Sixth

By Doug Ward The Kansas Board of Regents voted on Thursday to make development of an AI framework its top priority for the coming year. Neelima Parasker, who was appointed to the regents in 2023, will lead a committee charged with drafting recommendations for the board. Parasker is the president and CEO of SnapIT Solutions, an information technology services company in Overland Park. Parasker said the committee would identify goals related to AI, problems institutions faced, steps the regents could take on AI, and “what we can do…

By Doug WardA 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.I have found it surprisingly good. It can summarize documents, but it has many other functions available, including:Creating presentations and podcasts from PDFs.…

The AI Readiness Rankings put KU at 373rd out of 491 universities. By Doug WardI’m not a fan of rankings, which try to squeeze vast amounts of complex, nebulous data into a single number. So I look at the recently released AI Readiness Rankings with a skeptical eye, especially because it comes from a group selling consulting services. Unfortunately, its assessment seems about right. Out of 496 universities, KU was tied with 15 other universities at 373rd in terms of AI readiness. The rankings defined that readiness as how well universities “use…

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.           That’s an oversimplification. Faculty and…

By Doug WardHow 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.I came away from each discussion energized by the contributions of thoughtful…

Mahdis Mousavi, UnsplashBy Doug WardA new survey from the Association of American Colleges and Universities emphasizes the challenges instructors face in handling generative artificial intelligence in their classes.Large percentages of faculty express concern about student overreliance on generative AI, diminishment of student skills, decreased attention spans, and an increase in cheating. The sample for the survey is not representative of all faculty, but it captures many of the concerns I have heard from instructors over the past…

 By Doug WardI 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.”I agree. Not only that, but the rapid changes in generative AI seem to increase the pace of life. Daniel Burrus writes that “the world has shifted from a time of rapid…

By Doug WardThe phrase “humans in the loop" has become a cliché for the importance of overseeing the processes and output of generative artificial intelligence.The rapid changes that generative AI have brought about, though, often make us feel like we are caught in an endless digital loop. Since the release of ChatGPT 3.5 three years ago, a bombardment of announcements and changes have made it hard to cut through the noise and gain clarity about the direction of this new AI-fueled world. ChatGPT and competing AI models have improved with head-spinning speed, new tools have been released…

 By Doug WardTeaching tools in CopilotMicrosoft has recently added Copilot tools specifically for teachers.You will find the tools under the “Teach” link on the lower left toolbar in Copilot, Microsoft’s generative AI chatbot. (Make sure you log in with your KU credentials.) Here’s an overview of the new tools. Lesson plan creatorYou start by selecting a subject, a grade level (it has a setting for higher…

By Doug WardResearch 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.Keep in mind that nearly all the research over the past three years focuses on AI…