By Emma Tuey
Staff Writer
Professor Warren Cook dishes out an innovative classroom in BUS 111, where traditional methods meet the cutting edge in that he is one of the first professors on campus to incorporate ChatGPT into his coursework.
Since implementing ChatGPT in the classroom, he said he is able to create a dynamic learning experience by blending teaching with the power of artificial intelligence.
Professor Cook uses ChatGpt “not because you have to be thrilled about this technology necessarily but because you just don’t have much of a choice because that’s the reality we’re facing,” he said. “This technology is only going to get better and it’s only going to become more undetectable because the AI itself is well outpacing these sort of AI detectors,” Cook said.
“I have a class session in the beginning of the semester on ChatGPT, I give demonstrations in class and talk about good vs bad prompting, and I actually am going to do a session that is open to the campus for students next semester using the material I’ve worked out,” said Cook. “I have some prompts that I recommend experimenting with, more than anything I encourage students to use this stuff. One of the rules of thumb I’ve seen thrown around is you need about ten hours worth of practice with ChatGPT to really start understanding what it is good at and what it is bad at,” he added.
The concept of abuse while using ChatGPT is still being understood on what it should and should not be used for. “That’s something you can really only learn through experimenting with it and learning more about it over time; the concern that a lot of faculty have including myself is are students learning what we want them to learn and are we not just teaching a bunch of AI’s,” Cook said.
He said that the worries he has seen expressed are students submitting AI-generated papers which then are graded by AI. He said he is trying to avoid it by “cutting down papers in my class and moving more toward exams for assessment and high-involvement projects like this one to let students learn through interactions with others, work in the classroom and learn through creating…doing things rather than completing tasks that the AI can easily make trivial.”
“Trying to make it so students are still challenged, still engaged, still doing their own work in some form…my baseline assumption is that whatever ChatGPT can be used for, it will be used for,” Cook said.
Since the beginning of the semester, Cook has had his students use ChatGPT to help assist them while making their business projects.
The first group’s business was “Revive Back,” a coffee shop and thrift store. They reported that they did not heavily rely on ChatGPT. “We really only looked for an idea of the thrift store and ended up coming up with it as a group and for the name,” said Emely Pena, a student in the group.
The second group’s business was “The Chameleon Club,” a nightclub which would have weekly changing themes. “Honestly it helped with 80% of this project. There were a lot of things that we couldn’t just figure out by ourselves or it would take a lot more time,” said Kelsey Higgins, a student in the group. “Using ChatGPT did not necessarily give us the full answers but it gave us a really good outlook on where to start, especially on even how to start a business,” said Higgins.
The next group’s business is “Pro Performance Athletics,” a baseball training company. “We used chatGPT for a lot of it; we asked for critiquing whether it’s enhancing what we’ve written or writing things for us. Definitely our vision and mission statement were enhanced by ChatGPT,” said Austin Pagliettini. “We would put questions into ChatGPT and see what it would say based on our business idea, and then we would use our knowledge and combine it,” he said.
Cook’s goal was “trying to make it so students are still challenged, still engaged, still doing their own work in some form while assuming that whatever ChatGPT can be used for, it will be used for,” he said.
When asking Professor Cook about the success of ChatGPT in the classroom, he said, “based on my conversation with students, based on the work I’ve seen them produce, it’s very impressive and I am pleased with what they’ve been doing; again, these are first year students and they’ve been able to assemble a good quality full business plan in one semester.”
“I’m seeing great ideas and problem solving come out of the student projects in this class. I’m seeing a lot of originality, I’m seeing a lot of stuff emerging through conversation with one another that’s really great,” said Cook.
Professor Cook said he still focuses on traditional teaching and is fond of incorporating a mix of exercises, projects, collaborative work, and light lecturing, as well as focusing on discussion-based classes and integrating new case studies in his other classes. “I am still doing those things, but I am also instructing students on how to use ChatGPT to augment their projects, and I’m trying to make projects in all my classes more challenging, more intricate, push students more, understanding that they will use ChatGPT for that,” Cook said.
While using ChatGPT, it raises many ethical concerns, especially from faculty at the school. Most are worried because they believe ChatGPT is only used as a plagiarism tool. “It’s not really how this technology works for the most part; there have been concerns about what some of these models are drawing from, whether they are drawing from popularized content or misusing artist work and such and I think there are alot of valid concerns of that nature,” said Cook.
“The ethical challenge to me is how can I give students a high-quality education while also being fair to everyone,” said Cook. He explained that even if he reprimanded students, they may still use it for academic dishonesty. “There’s no policy you can use that will keep people from using AI–it’s undetectable; there are no good AI detectors out there, there are none that are reliable enough to be able to charge a student with academic dishonesty,” he said.
“What I think is ethical is to integrate ChatGPT in the classes even if it’s difficult for faculty, it’s a difficult thing to do. It takes a lot of work and it’s complicated to do it well, even for me who has been following the development of this stuff for a while,” said Cook. “This technology is going to change rapidly, it will be unrecognizable in just a few years; we’re at the early days of this stuff,” he said.
