Kasun is one of an increasingly large number of teachers in higher education, using generative models of AI in their work.
One National survey Of the more than 1,800 higher education staff conducted by the consulting firm Tyton Partners earlier this year, it is found that about 40% of administrators and 30% of the instructions use generative AI daily or weekly – this is only 2% and 4% in the spring of 2023.
New research From anthropica – the company behind the AI Chatbot Claude – offers professors around the world to use AI to develop curricula, design lessons, conduct research, write proposals for grants, manage the budgets, to classify students, and to design their own interactive instruments for their own instruments for their own instruments.
“When we looked at the data at the end of last year, we saw that of all the ways people use Claude, education compiled two of the four best cases of use,” says Drew Bent, leader of education at Anthropic and one of the research researchers.
This includes both students and teachers. Bent says these discoveries have inspired a report on How students use AI chatbot And the most studies of the professorship use of Claude.
How Professors Use AI
The Anthropic report is based on approximately 74,000 conversations that users with the email addresses of higher education had with Claude for a period of 11 days in late May and early June this year. The company uses an automated call analysis tool.
The majority – or 57% of the conversations analyzed – are related to the development of curricula, such as designing plans for lessons and tasks. Bent says one of the more surprising discoveries is professors who use Claude to develop interactive simulations for students, such as web-based games.
“This helps to write the code so you can have an interactive simulation that you as a teacher can share with the students in your class to help you understand the concept,” Bent says.
The second most common way professors used Claude was for academic research – this included 13% of the conversations. Teachers also used AI Chatbot to perform administrative tasks, including budget plans, preparing recommendation letters and creating meetings programs.
Their analysis suggests that professors tend to automate more and more routine work, including financial and administrative tasks.
“But for other fields such as teaching and design of lessons, it was a much more joint process in which the teachers and the AI assistant go back and forth and cooperate with it,” Bent says.
Data comes with warnings – anthropic publishes its discoveries But they did not release the full data behind them – including how many teachers were in the analysis.
And the research filmed a momentary photo in time; The study period covers the caudal end of the school year. If they had analyzed an 11-day period in October, says Bent, for example, the results could be different.
Evaluation of Student works with AI
About 7% of the conversations analyzed are related to the assessment of student work.
“When teachers use AI to rank, they often automate a lot of it and have AI to make significant parts of the degree,” Bent says.
The company has partnered with the Northeast University for this study – examines 22 teachers about how and why they use Claude. In his answers to the University Faculty of Studies, he stated that working for students is the task in which chatbot is the least effective.
It is unclear whether any of the Claude’s grades is actually included in the evaluations and the feedback obtained.
Nevertheless, Mark Watkins, a teacher and researcher at the University of Mississippi, fears that Anthropic’s findings are signaling a disturbing trend. Watkins studies the impact of AI on higher education.
“This kind of nightmarish scenario we may encounter is students who use AI to write documents and teachers using AI to evaluate the same documents. If so, then what is the purpose of education?”
Watkins says he is also disturbed by the use of AI in the ways he says, depreciates professor-student.
“If you just use this to automate a part of your life, whether it is to write students to students, recommendation letters, evaluating or providing feedback, I am really against it,” he says.
Professors and teachers need guidance
Casun – Georgia’s professor – also does not believe that professors should use AI to evaluate.
She wants colleges and universities to have more support and guidance on how best to use this new technology.
“We are here, something like yourself in the forest, heading for yourself,” says Casun.
Drew Bent, with anthrop, says Companies like his should partner With higher education. He warns, “We, as a technology company, telling teachers what to do or what not to do is not the right way.”
But teachers and those who work in AI, such as Bent, agree that decisions now made on how to enroll AI in colleges and university courses will affect students for years to come.
