• NotebookLM is a free Google product that offers you a "blank bot" that you can train using notes from coursework, conferences, professional development training and more.

• The platform will train itself on your notes and produce study guides, quizzes, podcasts and more to help students study.

• The concept of NotebookLM is a great way to talk about the reliability of generative AI training data: Put garbage notes in, you'll get garbage out. 

• Note: As of November 2024, students must be at least 18 years old to use. 

• Complete Google Cloud's free Introduction to Generative AI online course and get a swanky certificate for your Promotion & Tenure portfolio or to show off during your next staff review. The course can be completed in less than an hour.

• Next, complete the Google Generative AI for Educators Course. It's a more applied overview of how you can use new tools in and out of the classroom.

• The national AI for Education organization offers a great free course -- one of the key benefits of which is its peer-to-peer approach to upskilling you around AI in the classroom.

• LinkedIn Learning's Career Essentials in Generative AI by Microsoft and LinkedIn is a lengthier training (~4 hours) but it goes more in-depth into the application of important AI-related topics. You may have free access to LinkedIn learning through your library or career services center. 

• Please be careful when opting for paid AI training programs. Anything AI-related is an ever-evolving state of flux, and some curricula are not built to last. The Vanderbilt University Prompt Engineering Specialization via Coursera, however, is recommended.

• Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick is a great read that can help you shift your perspective of "human versus AI" to humans and AI co-existing peacefully and productively. This would be a great university common reading or a faculty center book club pick.

• For a more practical guide, Teaching with AI by José Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson serves as a handbook for any educator in need of guidance on lesson planning, speed grading and more.

While you work on becoming the Next Big Thought-Leader in higher ed AI, learn from some pioneers:

• Wharton Interactive's Faculty Director Ethan Mollick and Director of Pedagogy Lilach Mollick offer a helpful YouTube series for both teachers and students -- I highly recommend viewing! Wharton, overall, offers various teaching AI resources. 

• The American Association of Colleges & Universities provides this a recorded webinar and a related list of teacher resources.

• Although the AI in Education Project serves K-12 educators, its teacher toolkits are full of fantastic resources that could be used in first-year courses. 

With new AI models launching frequently and an abundance of apps and tools launching daily, it can be hard to stay current. 

That's why WhatAICanDoToday.com is such a useful resource. 

Think of it as a search engine just for AI apps, widgets, and tools. Search for a task and you will be directed to tools that can help you complete that task more efficiently. 

Some important tasks to use:

• create lesson plans

• develop group activities

• assignment ideas for ____ class

Runner up: Be sure to scope out ProductHunt on the regular, too, for great apps to experiment with and use in your courses. 

This tip is pretty cut and dry! 

The World Economic Forum reports on some shocking stats, including this one: "84% of workers who use generative AI at work said they have publicly exposed their company’s data in the last three months (1/16/2024)."

• Users should understand the terms of service of all AI tools used -- especially free tools. Often, a user's input (prompt) and output (generated content) can become part of an app's training data.

• FERPA, then, could be unintentionally violated if the user does not have a certain level of competency or literacy on these topics.

• This guide on AI compliance with FERPA and HIPAA is a great resource to start a conversation on your campus.

• Also, understanding hallucinations. and not using hallucinated content, can help you keep your job, too.

Help students (and all users) understand that most generative AI tools are "garbage in, garbage out." 

For example, I work with marketing students on crafting very thorough prompts that answer these questions:

• Who are you?

• What are you creating?

• Where will it live (website, social media, brochure, etc.)?

• Why are you creating it?

• For whom are you creating it (audience)?

• How would they use it/why do they need it/how will it help them?

• What should it look like?

• What else will make it “good?”

• What are some examples or frameworks (attach PDFs & include web links if using tools that can access these items)?

Pay for Prompts? Um, No.

I know we are never supposed to use absolutes (like the word "never") in higher ed, but, please, NEVER pay for prompts. Instead, ask a chatbot how best to prompt it or follow the links below.

Prompt Libraries

Access the prompt libraries and related resources from big players in the generative AI space:

• OpenAI (ChatGPT) Prompt Guide

• Anthropic Claude Prompt Library

This is an important exercise that all educators should complete regardless of whether or not they plan on using AI in the classroom (but, hopefully, they are 😀). 

Review your list of assignments for a course -- a mix of formative and summative assignments -- and use Claude, Gemini, Copilot, etc. to complete them. What comes next? Grade your work! 

Some tips:

• To be fair, use the same rubric or standards you would use if you were grading a student.

• Note your findings -- what worked and what didn't. 

• Take screenshots of everything!

The benefit of this is to assist you in onboarding the students to future assignments. It also demonstrates you are aware of AI's uses, benefits, and challenges. For a major project in my introductory digital marketing course, I spent an entire class session on how it took 10 re-prompts to get just a C+ paper. 

The Faculty Center at Baldwin Wallace University -- my employer -- offers many resources and trainings each year. A success from the most recent school year was the Faculty AI Champions program in which each School on campus designated a point-person to lead internal (faculty and staff) trainings and create discipline-specific resources. 

The result is a more engaged faculty who have access to content and tools that speak to their research areas and their students' career goals. 

Shout out to Associate Provost Lisa Henderson for developing this program. 

Not every AI assignment in a course has to involve using AI. 

Instead, you can discuss it, explore it, or debate it.

Here are some suggested assignments you can use AI to further flesh out your courses:

• Short paper or group presentation: "How is AI affecting our [profession/community/world/society]?"

• Annotated bibliographies of discipline-specific AI news and practices

• Timeline construction: "The rise of AI in our [industry/institution/favorite social media app...]?"

• Weekly/regular journals on current and emerging events

• AI-related topic for a major, summative paper

Bring it on! 

Chatbot Arena is a leaderboard that also lets you pit one AI tool against another on a blind basis. 

Enter a prompt and watch two randomly selected chatbots finish the job. 

Vote on which did a better job.

Reviewing the outputs of generative AI models can help students develop critical thinking skills. 

Some suggested approaches: 

• TikTok Generator: Enter details about our campus. Have the tool generate suggested video scripts. Are they realistic? Would you watch this video if it were posted to TikTok? 

• Open AI Sora: Does the video live up to the prompt? Why may some videos appear to be more realistic than others?

• Chatbot Arena (see above): Explain which tool you chose as the winner, and why. 

Another great activity is to use a very basic prompt to have generative AI produce an article with statistics and data. Have students fact check the content. They'll find outdated info and hallcuinations, seeing firsthand some of the red flags you;ve warned them about.

Once you brush up on your prompt engineering skills, help students hone theirs.

• For every assignment in which the use of generative AI is permitted, require students to submit their prompts.

• Some tools offer a "Share" feature, which makes this easy!

• If the student is using a tool that does not enable sharing, have students create a doc with screenshots of their prompts and re-prompts.

• Create an "assignment wrapper" in which you ask the student to reflect on their use of the AI.

Job interviews can be anxiety-inducing for even the most successful students. 

But Interview Warmup by Google uses some sophisticated technology to help students prepare. 

The tool offers near real-time feedback on interview answers and coaches students on not only what's wrong, but what they did well.

• Runner up: LinkedIn also offers some helpful AI-powered career prep tools.   

Some have dubbed Perplexity as a "Google killer." 

Now, I don't think that's the case -- yet. Perplexity is a research assistant that can search the live web, unlike many generative AI chatbots that can only draw on their training data. 

You can also have students build a Perplexity Page and have teams of students use Perplexity Spaces for groupwork. 

Perplexity does a fantastic job of helping you narrow a query to find the right information. 

• I suggest it to students looking for interesting topics for research projects. 

• Sales reps can use it to better understand their clients. 

• Instructional designers, ahem, can use it to understand a faculty stakeholder's research area. 

• It also has tremendous value for personal use ("how to buy my first home" or "what to look for in a graduate program").

I am a proponent of using AI in the classroom (in case you haven't picked up that yet). There's just one catch: AI must be used purposefully.

Sometimes we learn about a new ed tech tool or a hear about an innovative assignment and we want to incorporate it into our courses. That's great, as long as it makes sense to do so.

That's why I developed this App & Tech Inventory Worksheet (make a copy). The worksheet can help you explore ANY technology (AI or otherwise) to see if it's right for you, your students, and your campus.

Soapbox moment: Faculty, staff, and students need to have open dialogues about the use of AI on their campuses.

This can be from the department level or up. Some things to consider:

• Who's using AI?

• Who's not using/opposed to AI?

• How is AI being used?

• What will the Help Desk support?

• What's the Honor Code policy on AI?

• What's int the staff/faculty/student handbook at AI?

All classes should have an AI policy that clearly explains what students can do, can't do, and why.

We need to evolve beyond generic "don't use it" statements and take things to a more appropriate level.  

• Brandeis has compiled an amazing repository of syllabus statements on AI -- those that are permissive, prohibitive, and everything in between.

• This listicle of more AI syllabus policies from Daniel Stanford is also a great resource.

Yes -- you can cite AI-generated written content in papers and projects!

How you do it, of course, depends on the style you follow. 

• APA 

• Chicago

• ML

Uh-oh: Another soapbox moment!

I understand the inclination to use an AI detector. You want students to be their best and achieve their goals. You want them to meet the course learning outcomes. You want them to be successful.

And, for some educators, it is hard to reconcile the use of AI tools with being successful. Sure, some bad actors use the free version of ChatGPT inappropriately. But AI is changing every profession. Seriously -- all of them.

Instead of defaulting to "if AI is detected, you fail" get up to speed on using AI in the classroom. You can still set rules and boundaries, but if you really wanted to ban AI, you would prohibit spell check, Grammarly, Excel functions, and other productivity tools.  

The AI you use today will be better tomorrow. New tools launch all of the time.

Being an AI advocate means keeping up as things evolve. What that means for you will be specific to your field, but I highly recommend the weekly Artificial Intelligence Show podcast which covers news, ethical issues, and technology.