Kasun is part of an increasing number of higher education teachers using generative AI models in their work.
A national survey of more than 1,800 higher education staff led by the Tyton Partners consulting firm earlier this year has revealed that around 40% of administrators and 30% of instructions use daily or weekly genetive AI – which is up only 2% and 4%, in spring 2023 respectively.
New research by Anthropic – The company behind the Chatbot Claude de l’IA – suggests that teachers from around the world use AI for programs, course design, research research, writing subsidies, budget management, students’ work classification and the design of their own interactive learning tools, among other uses.
“When we examined the data at the end of last year, we saw this in all the ways that people used Claude, education composed two of the four main use cases,” said Drew Bent, the Chief of Education at Anthropic and one of the researchers who led the study.
This includes students and teachers. Bent says that these results have inspired a report on how university students use AI chatbot and the most recent research on the use of Claude teacher.
How teachers use AI
The anthropic report is based on approximately 74,000 conversations that users with e-mail addresses in higher education had Claude over a period of 11 days at the end of May and early June of this year. The company used an automated tool to analyze conversations.
The majority – or 57% of the conversations analyzed – linked to the development of the curriculum, such as the design of course plans and assignments. Bent says that one of the most surprising conclusions was the teachers who use Claude to develop interactive simulations for students, such as web games.
“This helps to write the code so that you can have an interactive simulation that you as a educator can share with the students of your class to help understand a concept,” explains Bent.
The second most common means of teachers used Claude for university research – this represented 13% of conversations. The educators also used the AI chatbot to carry out administrative tasks, including budgetary plans, the drafting of letters of recommendation and the creation of meeting agendas.
Their analysis suggests that teachers tend to automate more tedious and routine work, including financial and administrative tasks.
“But for other areas such as teaching and conception of courses, it was much more a collaborative process, where the educators and the AI assistant go back and forth and collaborate together,” explains Bent.
The data is delivered with warnings – Anthropic has published its results but has not published the complete data behind them – including the number of teachers in the analysis.
And research captured an snapshot over time; The period studied included the end of the academic year. If they had analyzed a period of 11 days in October, Bent said, for example, the results could have been different.
Student working with AI
About 7% of anthropogenic conversations aimed to classify the work of students.
“When educators use AI for the classification, they often automate a large part, and they have an AI to make important parts of the ranking,” explains Bent.
The company has teamed up with the Northeastern University on this research – by examining 22 members of the faculty on how and why they use Claude. In their responses to the survey, university professors said that students’ work was the task in which the chatbot was the least effective.
It is not clear if one of the evaluations that Claude produced has really taken into account the ratings and comments that students received.
Nevertheless, Marc Watkins, professor and researcher at the University of Mississippi, fears that the results of Anthropic report a disturbing trend. Watkins studies the impact of AI on higher education.
“This kind of nightmarish scenario that we could meet is students who use AI to write articles and teachers using AI to note the same articles. If so, then what is the purpose of education? ”
Watkins says he is also alarmed by the use of AI in a way he says, devalues teachers’ relations.
“If you just use this to automate part of your life, whether by writing e-mails to students, in letters of recommendation, noting or providing comments, I am really against it,” he said.
The teachers need advice
Kasun – The state of Georgia state – does not believe that teachers should use AI for the ranking.
She wants colleges and universities to have more support and advice on the best way to use this new technology.
“We are here, in a way alone in the forest, getting rid of ourselves,” explains Kasun.
Drew Bent, with Anthropic, says that companies and his should associate with higher education establishments. He warns: “We as a technological business, telling educators what to do or what not to do is not the right way.”
But educators and those who work in AI, like Bent, agree that the decisions made on how to integrate AI into university and university courses will have an impact on students for the years to come.
