With the rise of artificial intelligence, Ohio University faculty have changed their teaching styles and incorporated it into their classrooms.
Professors have been using AI for research, organizing and modeling ideas and checking grammar.
Quang Nguyen, a mass communications doctoral and computer science master’s student, said the presence of AI is causing teachers to change how they approach classroom learning.
“If you give a student a kind of homework or whatever — just write and submit the deliverable writing — that (assignment means) nothing because 90% of students don't learn anything,” Nguyen said. “(They) just use a prompt, ChatGPT, write them down and then submit it, and the students get nothing.”
Bernhard Debatin, a journalism professor, said if people are going to use AI, they do not have to understand it, especially because it is a complex technology. Instead, people have to understand what the limitations and consequences are.
“(AI’s) decisions are not known to us,” Debatin said. “Your results will be very different from the results I get because the algorithm for you is based on your user behavior and the history of your user behavior, which is very different from mine, and what the system thinks you like. This gets multiplied, of course, when you deal with AI.”
According to the OU Website, there is currently no university-wide policy about the usage of AI to generate text and images. Debatin said he is shocked by the lack of policy and how the website instead focuses on data protection concerns with AI.
“In order to address the problem, we should think much more about AI, and we should think about it particularly from the institutional level,” Debatin said. “There is not even a warning that says, ‘Oh, by the way, if you use this for writing your papers, and you use certain functions, it will write the paper for you.’ This could maybe not be so kosher.”
The Center for Teaching, Learning and Assessment, a part of the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost offering teaching and learning resources, has offered the asynchronous AI in Teaching and Learning Institute, a course to teach faculty how to use AI to do administrative tasks, since March.
Melinda Rhodes, the executive director for the CTLA, wrote in an email the center recognizes AI does not have a “one-size fits all approach.”
“We have provided faculty development to hundreds of faculty who have incorporated GenAI course policy statements to clearly articulate the acceptable use of AI in their courses,” Rhodes said via email. “A syllabus statement and the University's current academic integrity and misconduct/plagiarism policies go far to both build student skillsets, competencies and ethical use of AI while protecting the intellectual property of all involved.”
The university also began offering a specific AI degree program separate from computer science in the fall of 2024.
"For this program, AI is kind of a side of computer science,” Zhewei Wang, a visiting assistant professor in AI, said. “I think the school thought about that for a long time, but first, AI is quite popular, and secondly, I think there's some difference between AI and computer science.”
The major trains and teaches students about machine and deep learning, focusing on topics such as knowledge representation, heuristic search, automated problem solving, decision making and other relevant fields.
The major requires students to take four classes, including Concepts of AI, Foundations of AI, Statistical Learning and Foundations of Deep Learning, along with two capstone classes.
“(By dedicating) the whole year or at the worst a day, a chance to learn how to use AI, no matter what your major is, you can come to take these four classes or at least some of these classes to understand it for careers,” Wang said.
In Wang’s classes, he encourages his students to finish their assignments by using AI.
Jared DeForest, a CTLA’s GenAI fellow and chair of Environmental and Plant Biology, created a chatbot tutor called SoilSage by using AI.
“I just think when the people who feel scared, they better be more protective, proactive, to kind of hug this new trend,” Wang said. “Of course, we know it's not good, but we have no choice, so it's better to be equipped with that weapon.”
