As a university professor, if you try to excite a student about your job, you must evaluate it later. However, if the assignment hits the right chord, it can inspire students and affect classrooms, the entire school, and more.
By adjusting the curriculum and assignments with standards and learning goals that may be established from teacher control, you can sap the creative aspects of the brain.
Here's how artificial intelligence can help broaden your horizons when creating tasks that make a lasting impression and excite your classroom to learn. (And for more information about the back-to-school season, check out CNET's guide on how students can use AI to manage their time, how to use AI to write emails to teachers, and how to use AI as a university professor.)
I used ChatGPT because it would require considerable refinement to create assignments that are fun to complete for students and enjoy reviews and ratings for educators. It allows you to navigate brainstorming ideas to generate conversational style answers to search queries using machine learning and large-scale language models.
(Disclosure: CNET's parent company Ziff Davis filed a lawsuit against Openai in April, claiming it infringed Ziff Davis' copyright in training and operating AI systems.)
Maintaining the sanity of students and teachers
My field of research is media and communication, so in this example I summarize my assignments about media literacy, or the ability to think critically and interact with everything from Tiktok content to front page news.
The goal is to create fun, supportive and impactful tasks for college students who are interacting heavily with digital media but don't wonder what is consuming.
The secondary goal was to create an assignment that I didn't dislike creating when the time came to grade it.
In my first attempt, ChatGpt gave me a fully built assignment for my specific learning goals on media literacy for university-level students, but I was as much fun as I think writing a 500-word essay on media literacy isn't fun at all.
Refining for fun, focus and collaboration
As this task is about actually interacting with the media in a more impactful way, not only hiding or liking from the digital shadows by students, but also hiding the prompts to include some form of use of the student's body, and with little emphasis on written analysis that is ultimately seen and evaluated by the teacher only.
This is what's back:
I was really impressed – ChatGpt created a multi-layered assignment where students not only interact with and analyze the media, but also allow students to see firsthand the impact media literacy has on their individuals as well as the community.
This challenge also makes your eyesight more enjoyable to get grades than 500 words analytical essays from 30 to 50 on whether Tiktok's Brat Summer Post source is reliable.
Finally, CHATGPT provided submission requirements (such as linking to social media content used to assign online interactions and complete screenshots), as well as some examples of grading criteria for assignments, as well as how assignments are performed.
The example of analyzing the role of political memes in particular was timely and felt like a new view of the evolving reality of campaign media.
I personally would like to watch videos of students working with their peers on their perceptions of President Donald Trump's existence across social media.
And who knows – maybe the students will actually enjoy it too.
