Bloom's Sixth

When Turnitin activated its artificial intelligence detector this month, it provided a substantial amount of nuanced guidance. Trying to keep ahead of artificial intelligence is like playing a bizarre game of whack-a-mole. The company did a laudable job of explaining the strengths and the weaknesses of its new tool, saying that it would rather be cautious and have its tool miss some questionable material than to falsely accuse someone of unethical behavior. It will make mistakes, though, and “…

We called it a non-workshop. Infinite Flexibility (Futuristic) No. 1, via Catbird.ai The goal of the session earlier this month was to offer lunch to faculty members and let them talk about the challenges they continue to face three years into the pandemic. We also invited Sarah Kirk, director of the KU Psychological Clinic, and Heather Frost, assistant director of Counseling and Psychological Services, to offer perspectives on students. In an hour of conversation, our non-workshop ended up being a sort of academic stone soup…

Martha Oakley couldn’t ignore the data. The statistics about student success in her discipline were damning, and the success rates elsewhere were just as troubling: Martha Oakley, a professor of chemistry and associate vice provost at Indiana University, speaks at Beren Auditorium on the KU campus. Women do worse than men in STEM courses but do better than men in other university courses. Students of color, first-generation students, and low-income students have lower success rates than women. The richer students’ parents are, the higher the students’ GPAs are. “We have no problem…

We just looked at our office clock and realized that it was already March. After we did some deep-breathing exercises and some puzzling over what happened to February, we realized the upside of losing track of time: Spring break is only days – yes, days! – away. We know how time can drag when you use an office clock as a calendar, though. So to help you get over those extra-long days before break, we offer the latest issue of Pupil magazine. This is a themed issue, focusing on artificial intelligence, a topic that has generated almost as much academic froth as Prince Harry’s biography…

We often idealize a college campus as a place of ideas and personal growth, but we have to remember that danger can erupt without notice. The shootings at Michigan State this week were, sickeningly, just the latest in string of killings over the past year that also involved students or faculty members from Virginia, Iowa State, and Arizona, …

Since its release late last year, ChatGPT has reverberated through the academic mind like an orchestral crescendo in a Strauss symphonic movement. It has amazing abilities, and even greater potential. Even so, it delivers many of its responses in a monotone reminiscent of HAL 9000, the rogue artificial intelligence system in 2001: A Space Odyssey. PlaygroundAI and Doug Ward Like others, I want to know more about what ChatGPT can and can’t do, and how we might…

The intellectual work that goes into teaching often goes unnoticed. All too often, departments rely on simple lists of classes and scores from student surveys of teaching to “evaluate” instructors. I put “evaluate” in quotation marks because those list-heavy reviews look only at surface-level numerical information and ignore the real work that goes into making teaching effective, engaging, and meaningful. Debby Hudson via Unsplash An annual evaluation is a great time for instructors to document the substantial intellectual work of teaching and for evaluators to put that work front and…

Nearly a decade ago, the Associated Press began distributing articles written by an artificial intelligence platform. Not surprisingly, that news sent ripples of concern among journalists. If a bot could turn structured data into comprehensible – even fluid – prose, where did humans fit into the process? Did this portend yet more ominous changes in the profession? By DALL-E and Doug Ward I bring that up because …

The latest enrollment report for universities in the Kansas regents system (down 1.5%) seems worth little more than a shrug. Longer term, though, the higher education trends in Kansas will require considerable attention – and action. Enrollment at the six regents universities has fallen 13.5%, or 10,100 students, since peaking in 2011. That average masks even bigger declines at individual universities: Pittsburg State, down 28.4% since 2011; K-…

Lisa Sharpe Elles ignites a hydrogen balloon during the first day of Chemistry 130. The poor balloon never had a chance. It was Monday, the first day of fall classes. Lisa Sharpe Elles, assistant teaching professor in chemistry, circled a yellow, hydrogen-filled balloon as it floated above a table in Gray-Little Hall. She told the 200-plus students in Chemistry 130 to cover their ears. She carefully lifted a flame-tipped wooden rod to the balloon and suddenly pulled back. She had remembered the lone fool in the front row. That was me, two cameras poised, awaiting a promised explosion…