Can artificial intelligence (AI) be a useful tool in teaching at VID?

This article has been translated form Norwegian using artificial intelligence.

I lecture in a course called Value-Based Leadership and Organization in the master's program in Value-Based Leadership. We have approximately 50 students who attend two gatherings per semester for continuing education.

Together with the students, this semester I will be testing and sharing with you how we can use AI to prepare for teaching and in the teaching itself. We will look at various tools that can help us as lecturers to prepare for teaching, look at different ways to talk to students about the use and ethics related to AI, and look at how our students use AI in their daily lives as leaders.

How can AI help us in teaching?

Too little time, too many tasks. Both lecturers and students have probably been there! So today I tested Questionwell, an AI tool that might help us in a busy everyday life!

This is a website that allows you to enter text and based on this, it creates multiple-choice questions that you can upload to Canvas. You can think of it as an automatic quizmaster who creates questions (and finds the correct answer!) based on a text you choose. Then it converts the questions and answers into a format that allows students to answer them as multiple-choice questions in Canvas.

To test this, I decided to ask it to create a quiz based on the article "Servant Leadership: A systematic review and call for future research"

Questionwell has several ways to "feed in" text, my experience was that only linking to the text or writing the name of the article works poorly. But by copying the text from the article and pasting it on the website, it spat out a list of about 15 questions and answers in Norwegian, from an English article! Not all were equally good, and some had to be edited a bit for both language and content. In particular, it had a tendency to create slightly too simple, or similar questions. But the whole process took ten minutes and then I was left with nine questions about the article.

Several of the students have tried it, and when asked how they experienced it, several responded that it was useful and that they used it to test their own knowledge. The conclusion is that with a little editing of questions and direct pasting of text, this can be an effective way to create questions, which the students also find relevant.

How to introduce and talk about AI in the classroom?

At the previous meeting, we spent approximately 45 minutes discussing the use of AI in the workplace and in the classroom. We started with an article that presents AI as a possible team member and decision support. I then gave the students a group assignment where they were to write down a list of questions and tasks that they often dealt with as leaders and that AI might be able to solve. I then demonstrated to everyone how such questions can be entered into Google's Bard.

This seemed to be a fun exercise where they quickly realized the potential and usefulness of feeding in new questions and answers to test the limits of the text robot. With little guidance from me beyond this, the students quickly realized that this was both exciting and with great potential, it can do everything from writing summaries of articles to providing answers to questions about leave regulations in Rælingen municipality!

After testing this quite freely, we had a summary in plenary. The main impression here was that this was something that could be useful, and several saw good uses both at work and school. Be it asking questions about regulations, texts or using it to create summaries or translations of articles on the curriculum.

Through testing in the classroom, several of the students found that it was a disadvantage that it could give wrong answers, for example by citing regulations for Rælingen municipality that did not exist! This led to a nice group reflection on the importance of being critical of AI as a tool and what it can tell us both as practitioners and as researchers. This provided a good opportunity to discuss how AI can be used as a creative sparring partner rather than a scientific assistant in working with assignments and exams, as well as a clarification about how direct use of AI text will be considered plagiarism. Such awareness through self-discovery gives students good opportunities to use this tool as an effective aid and not a crutch in their further work.