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The Transform your Teaching podcast is a service of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio. Join Dr. Rob McDole and Dr. Jared Pyles as they seek to inspire higher education faculty to adopt innovative teaching and learning practices.
This is the Transform Your Teaching Podcast. The Transform Your Teaching Podcast is a service of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio.
Ryan:Hello, and welcome to this episode of Transform Your Teaching. In today's episode, Dr. Rob McDole and Dr. Jared Pyles chat with two students, Kaiya and Jude, about how they're using AI during their time as college students. Thanks for joining us.
Jared:Alright, Rob. Alright, Jared. We invited some more students into our studio. This is our fifth episode of no. Actually, more than that because we did this previously with some previous students.
Jared:So this is like In
Rob:our what? Twenty some years of doing
Jude:the podcast?
Jared:Doing this podcast. Yeah. We've got
Rob:We're starting this new trend of Yeah. Saying things that aren't true.
Jared:Yeah. But just to give some context, we are one semester in to having the ChatGPT enterprise license on our campus where all users, staff, faculty, full time students, have access to ChatGPT. And this is something that our department at CTL has been helping with the initiative, faculty, supporting staff in their usage of it. And we thought it would be beneficial to have some students on to talk about their practices. Now these are two students that I had in my Intro to Lit course last semester, and they survived.
Jared:The other one, the ones that didn't survive, we
Rob:Couldn't bring them on.
Jared:Couldn't bring them on. Right. Obvious reasons. Obvious reasons. Yeah.
Jared:But I'm going to let them introduce themselves, and we'll start to my right.
Kaiya:Hi. I am Kaia. I am a graphic design and theater major, and I had intro to lit with doctor Piles last semester.
Jude:I am Jude. I'm an IT management major from Barboursville, West Virginia.
Jared:Thanks for your willingness to come on. I emailed both of you. No nothing related to your grades whatsoever motivated you. We talked about intrinsic and extrinsic There was no promise of grade lift or anything like that. You guys didn't need it anyway.
Jared:Okay. But we wanna talk about AI usage. I know I talked about it in my class a bit. We another student and I put together a bot. We didn't roll it out until near the end.
Jared:I'm not sure if anyone even used it. I haven't even looked at the
Rob:Well, that's a good place to start.
Jared:Yeah. How about that? Yeah. Did you guys use it at the end of the
Rob:Kai, want you take that take that question. Did you use his bot?
Kaiya:I attempted to use the bot. However, it was not working when I tried to use it. And by the time that we got to the exam, I had already done all the prep by the time the bot had started working. That's about
Jared:right. Yeah. It was in very early stages by the time we rolled it out.
Jude:Okay. Jude? I used the bot relatively minimally. I was kind of in the same boat as Kaya getting all the prep done right about as the bot was prepared. But it was very helpful for the little usage I got out of it.
Jared:The the bot was to help them with the biblical integration of of the course where let's let's relate the themes of this text to Scripture. What can we affirm? What can we eject? What can we transform from this text? And it was to help them because so many times in the Course we'd be like, well, there's this idea, and I know it's in Scripture, but I don't know where.
Jared:Like, can paraphrase. It was really helping them, number one, find Scripture references, but number two, help them take the next step in making those connections between the Bible and telltale heart or something like that. So that was the whole point of it.
Kaiya:Okay.
Jared:Outside of that, let's explore your AI usage over the last couple months this semester. Let's start with you, Jude. What have you been using Generve AI for? Or if at all?
Jude:The the biggest way that I've used ChatGPT in my work is I've been taking professors' PDFs of either PowerPoints or homework assignments or, like, lab sheets, and I'd I'd put them into a bot so that I could easily pull and find material out instead of having to go search it out myself. And it was really a time saver. And I'd be able to say, like, hey, I need a study guide for this college algebra test. Could you pull from so and so of these different files? Because those are the ones that the test is on, and that was super helpful to me last semester.
Jared:Okay.
Rob:So you found success out of that usage?
Jude:Okay. Good.
Jared:Yeah. It was super helpful. How about you, Kai?
Kaiya:I did I would say I did something similar to what you did for ChatGPT usage. I found that specifically for intro to lit, it was helpful to have ChatGPT summarize some of the big points. Or every once in a while, if I found the you had asked a question about one of our reading assignments and I wasn't necessarily making the connections right away, I could put the question into ChatGPT and ChatGPT would normally give multiple answers as to what it could be. For example, with a worn path talking about Phoenix oppression, it would give me multiple different examples. And some of them I would agree with, like talking about life and death, or others would be talking about racism.
Kaiya:And I'd be like, Well, I didn't necessarily draw that connection, so I'm going go with the connection that I now see. So sometimes that was helpful for me to just make connections that weren't necessarily obvious to me at first due to people reading assignments differently. So I was able to come to the conclusions that you were wanting.
Jared:What was your motivation for doing it? You know, the question, the response, all that stuff.
Kaiya:Well, I think partially it really is time saving. I mean, AI is a tool. And so, I mean, the Bible talks about we should be subduing the earth. And so there were times that I found AI was actually helpful in subduing these projects that I had to get done in a short period of time. So when I couldn't necessarily read some of the assignments that I wanted to to the fullest, or I wasn't able to do the multiple rereads that you would need to make connections, AI was helpful to give those connections.
Kaiya:And then I could go back and read and be like, oh, okay. I can see how this connects. And then I could then write about it. So it really served as a good stepping stone.
Jared:Okay. What about you, Jude? What was your motivation for uploading those PDFs and all that?
Jude:I think I would agree with Kai. My biggest motivation was time and saving time. But I think on a lesser note, there was a big motivation for me of just experimenting with ChatGPT because I think AI is really interesting and honestly something that I would love to work with later in life with, like, my IT management degree. But I think it was, like, a fun idea to me to to pull out ChatGPT and give it PDFs and try and pull from it and just see what it could do and how it could be used. And that was that was a motivator for me too as well.
Jared:Just kind of experiment, see what can be done. Mhmm.
Rob:In your usage of ChatGPT, let's also talk about what you don't think you should use it for when you used it and you're like, yeah, that probably wasn't a good way to use it or this is probably something. Because I could understand finding connections between things, but I could also understand feeling cheated sometimes that you didn't catch some of that on your own when you were reading because there is a certain level to which, you know, internally you want, I think, know, I know how to catch that myself. Did you think it helped you do that? But also, you know, are there things are there boundaries where you two have that where you're like, yeah, no, I'm not gonna use it for that.
Jude:I was in college algebra last year, and it was definitely maybe that class was the biggest temptation to just use it for the answers rather than for studying to
Rob:use how to get the answers?
Jude:Yeah. And sometimes just just being lazy. I'm like, man, want this answer. I'm frustrated at this math problem. It made it difficult for for sure to not use it as as a way of cheating.
Jude:Mhmm. And there were a few times till the beginning of the semester where I was like, man, that was probably a little too far. Like, I and some consequences later in the in the class of I maybe was used too much to add GPT in this in this topic that later in the course, I kind of had to go back and relearn a couple basics because of the way that the course kind of built on itself. Mhmm. Mhmm.
Jude:That was just a consequence of of maybe not asking for the answers, but just not seeking them out so much myself that I didn't really learn the material fully.
Rob:Okay. Thank you.
Jared:Yeah. Thanks for saying that.
Kaiya:I think my take on it would be with the first question about the, like, reading comprehension and feelings slated. I just wanna say I wasn't necessarily using it to avoid the work. Mhmm. I would say it was helpful where, for example, I would read a worn path. I would have my own connections and then get a question and say, oh, I didn't necessarily view it that way.
Rob:Mhmm.
Kaiya:So I feel like the temptation would be to just plug it in and say, okay, answer the question for me, copy and paste, put it in plagiarism. But just saying. But I feel like it can be helpful as giving a different perspective Mhmm. Because doctor Piles and I are very different people. So he would read A Warned Path and have what are you what are you why are you looking at me like that?
Jude:No.
Kaiya:We read I
Jared:don't see that at
Kaiya:all. We read differently. So That's true.
Jared:That is that's very true.
Kaiya:So the way he looks at a story wouldn't necessarily be the way that I look at it. Mhmm.
Rob:But
Kaiya:I think the temptation would definitely be. And I think that there were a few times where I felt this, especially as life was getting busier, where it was easy to just throw in a prompt and not do the work. But similar to what Jude said, all of our actions have consequences. Mhmm. And so the action of taking the shortcut earlier led to having to do more work later.
Kaiya:So
Jared:You reap what you sow, as they say. Yeah. Possibly.
Rob:What what are you looking forward to next for both of you in terms of how you might use it, or do you have some ideas of how you might, you know, iterate on your experience so far? What would you like to try out? What what do you think? What's out there for you? Kaya?
Kaiya:Well, I think there are a few things. I am, I think, really excited to use ChatGPT for more of my own personal interests. I really love playing the guitar, and I found that ChatGPT can actually
Jared:No way. Yeah. I didn't know that.
Kaiya:Yeah. We are alike. We I have found that ChatGPT can actually generate some pretty cool chord sheets. So, like, just plugging in the lyrics and putting chords above it. So that's something I'm interested.
Kaiya:I know that's not necessarily academic related. But I think academically no. This is less chat p t and more just AI in general. I'm really interested to see how it's gonna affect my major specifically in graphic design. One example that I got to use this semester was Photoshop has some generative AI stuff.
Kaiya:Mhmm. And at first, I was very hesitant to use it, because I do have opinions about AI specifically in the art field. But one of their tools that I love is the background remover. And just hold on. Just hold on.
Kaiya:So what it does is it will remove the background of the image. But rather than taking the shortcut of just deleting the background and letting you deal with the consequences, it it creates a clipping mask, which is what you would be doing to remove a background in general. It's doing the steps that you could have done of selecting the individual and fine tuning it and then deleting the background yourself. And it masks it for you and does it in a way that you can then go and edit it. So I'm really excited to see some of the other tools that AI is able to be used for with art.
Rob:So it's speeding up your because I know what you're saying. I know what you're talking about, seeing as I've used Photoshop fairly extensively in a former life. And those who've used Photoshop probably knows know what she's talking about. For our listeners, though, it it's this kind of, like, layer type of process that you have to do in order to functionally take the background out. And then if you wanna continue to use the background, you know, it's just tedious.
Rob:It's a tedious process. And so with this AI, I think basically what she's saying is it's like made that tedious process almost instantaneous and and puts you back in the driver's seat in terms of design and what you're gonna do
Kaiya:Yes.
Rob:With the image.
Kaiya:It essentially sets it up as if you had done it. So it means that it's then editable. So it makes it as if I had done it. If I had spent the thirty minutes trying to do it and I did it
Rob:in That's thirty really cool.
Jared:So do you see that changing, the learning process for, like, for the training for graphic design majors? Or do you think there's value in learning how to clip and create a clipping mask for students?
Kaiya:Oh, well, I mean, similarly to ChatGPT, where it's learn how to do it yourself and then learn how the tool can help you, That was one of the things I really appreciated that Professor Cam Davis did, is he taught us how to use all these tools and how to remove a background. And then at the end of the lecture, he goes, Okay, so now I want you to click over to this Remove the Background button. And then does it. And we're all like, so we could have done this from the beginning? And he goes, yes.
Kaiya:But now you know how to do it. And so when the AI messes up, you know how to fix it.
Jared:It's brilliant. Yeah. That's great. That's great.
Rob:That is that is excellent integration.
Jared:Alright, Jude. You're up. Do you
Rob:see
Jared:any any idea of having ChadGBT and IT anything? I mean, I feel like there's not much of a lift there. I mean, there's not much of connection though either.
Jude:I was trying to think while Kai was talking. There's a lot of area for AI. I don't know where specifically I might use it in my specific classes this semester other than very similar stuff to what I did last semester of creating study guides and giving it PDFs and and helping for actual studying. But I'm really intrigued. I'm in both a programming class and a cybersecurity class this semester.
Jude:And I've heard a little bit from my dad who's who's really involved in in the IT programming field. He's really good at it. But I've heard a little bit about from him about AI and cybersecurity and how they line up. And, like, it has me so intrigued to really dive into these classes and see kind of how the two are involved and see maybe what the professor will touch on or what he won't touch on as far as, like, general AI usage in those fields because they're really like, it's AI is bringing a lot of really big shifts into those fields. Mhmm.
Jude:And so I couldn't answer as much to how specifically I'm I, like, I think I'm gonna use it in a different way than last semester, but I am really interested to learn more about how it's gonna be involved and implemented into the classes I have.
Kaiya:You saying that reminded me. One way I have used ChatGPT is I will look up something, and if I get a site that I'm not so certain I should check, I will copy and paste that into ChatGPT and say, is this reliable? And then I'll get a yes or no answer. And that is, since you're talking about cybersecurity, I have used it as my, little personal defense bot to make sure I don't accidentally download malware onto my laptop.
Rob:Those out there would say AI is malware.
Jared:That's true. That's true. Now I don't want to get too specific here, but let me ask you about what do you think is the overall student body impression of ChadGPT? Like, do you see it weighing more on the, as you guys said, you talked about time saving, using it for academic work, making further connections and synthesis. Do you think that the majority of the student body here on campus are siding towards that?
Jared:Or you feel like you guys are maybe the outliers or the exception to the rule when it comes to usage and impressions, perceptions of ChadGPT on our campus?
Jude:Goodness. I feel like it's probably maybe even pretty even just because I have talked to a lot of people who are in the same boat as me and Kaia and and use it a lot for time saving and study guides. But I feel like I've talked to a lot of people, like, almost scared of it and and don't like the idea of it implemented and into Cedarville's campus. And I feel like I've met a healthy mix of of people who both kind of stay away from it and think it really hinders learning and people who would would line up with us and and see it as a as a tool to be used with wisdom. Okay.
Jude:I think you can even kind of see that the student body opinions, like, reflected in some of the professors because you'll come across a lot of professors who are like, don't touch AI for this class. Don't use it at all. Like, hardly even have your laptop out. Like, do paper notes. And then it was it was refreshing coming into doctor Pyle's class because he was really willing to experiment with it.
Kaiya:He demanded we use AI.
Jared:Yeah. Did demand.
Jude:Will use it. But even in that difference in professors, I feel like you can you can maybe see it. I feel like it reflects the student body opinions.
Rob:So you feel like it's pretty even between faculty and students in terms of just their overall Yeah. Perception?
Jude:Yeah. I would say so just in my interactions and experience. Mhmm.
Rob:Kaya?
Kaiya:I think I would definitely agree. I also think it depends on how it was explained to people. Because when I first heard about the Cedarville integration with AI, I had it explained to me by a former alum who thought it was the coolest thing. And he was explaining about how so many job fields now are turning to AI and that this is an invention we can't ignore. And Professor Hoffman talked about it in our history of design.
Kaiya:He was talking about how things like the cotton gin changed the field forever, and it didn't matter if you wanted it to change it or not, it was going to change. So having that explanation and being told AI is going to change the workforce, Cedarville should be on top of it, preparing our students for this changing workforce, really helped my perspective. And everybody who I've talked to who has been for the AI is for it because of that reason and because they had it explained to them as being prepared for a changing workforce. Whereas some of the people who I've met who had their own opinions of AI before or didn't have it necessarily explained and just saw Cedarville's post about it, they had a very negative attitude toward it because there was fear about their major being watered down with people who were just gonna use it inappropriately or people who were I've met people who were angry about it. And I think some of it comes also to stubbornness and stubbornness to change.
Kaiya:But I would definitely agree that I think there is a pretty good split.
Jared:Yeah. Well, you said professor Huffman, right? From graphic design? Okay. Now I have to do this because I feel like since you guys are both adopters, that's what they call it, of Chad GPT and everything else, I have to do this to kinda qualify them as users because this isn't in my head.
Jared:Are you guys ones that usually pick up technology pretty quickly and wanna use it? Like, you grab the new iPhones when they become available, Or do you wait. Is that the new iPhone?
Rob:S e I s e 17.
Kaiya:I don't have mine with me, but I have the twenty twenty version s e, and it is dying rapidly
Jared:on me. It's got COVID because it's from 2020.
Kaiya:That's why it doesn't work now. That must be it.
Jared:Probably. Long COVID. Jude, you would say you're an what's called an early adopter of technology.
Jude:Yeah. I would say so. Okay. As long as it's not too expensive.
Jared:Oh yeah, obviously. Kaya, would you say, do you tend to wait until everyone else adopts something new or are you one of the first people to pick something up?
Kaiya:It depends. I mean, I would say I'm more on the early adopter because my dad works in the technology field, so I've always been surrounded by it. However, there are some things where our family is more hesitant about, like the Apple Vision Pro goggles.
Jared:Oh, sure.
Kaiya:Like, I'm not picking one of those up. Sure. It'll make me motion sick.
Jared:Yeah. I I can see that. I was just curious because, you know, your tendency to adopt JADGBT could be based on that, but it seems like it's about yes and no answer for that one. So anyway
Rob:Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think one of the things I would kinda wanna end our conversation with is, what would you say to those who are listening? You know, we have faculty who who are listening in higher ed. We also have folks who listen who are in k through 12.
Rob:What would you want them to hear in terms of how to approach AI for students in your classes? What what do they need to say to you? What do they need to keep doing for you?
Jude:I would just tell them to first take everything with a grain of salt and to be wise and discerning and prayerful about new technology in general, but also specifically generative AI like ChadGBT, and to not be scared to use it. Be open and honest with students and and say, like, hey. This is, like well, first of all, could hallucinate. It might not be it might not be right all the time, so you can't use it as fact or as truth. But but be open with students and offer it to them as a tool.
Jude:And like Kaya said, as something to help you stay on top of the workforce and to be ready to kind of be thrown out into the wild on your own because I don't think I don't think AI is going away. It's only gonna get more and more popular. We're only gonna see it in more and more fields. And so just take it with wisdom, but don't be afraid and and dive in getting to know how to use it and how to use it well.
Rob:Mhmm. K?
Kaiya:I think for the students and teachers who are listening, approach AI with a sense of humility because there is the tendency for humans to be prideful of their own work or prideful of their lack of doing work. So don't be don't be prideful about the fact that you can prompt AI to do whatever you want, but then also don't be too prideful to not be willing to use it. I think a good example of this would be, like, if you're asked to dig a hole, don't be too prideful and only do it with your hands because you refuse to use a shovel. The shovel is a tool for you, it's there for you, and it's something that you can use. And just like a shovel isn't going to take over the entire world, AI is not going to take over the entire world.
Kaiya:So I think coming to it at a place of humility and trusting that the Lord gave us AI for a reason. And so that means that we need to be using it appropriately. And I think just a good good standard would be, if you're using ChatGPT or any form of AI, asking yourself, Is this something the Lord would be pleased by? Because if you're putting in a prompt to understand a reading assignment, maybe the Lord is glad that you are trying to understand it the way your professor wants. Or if you're putting in a prompt so that you don't have to do the reading assignment, maybe the Lord isn't happy that you're doing that.
Kaiya:So I think, yeah, just humility and understanding that everything we should be doing should be under the Lord's power.
Jared:I'm just imagining shovels becoming sentient and starting to run amok in our society and
Rob:AI shovels. AI shovels. I'm sure they're I'm sure they already exist.
Jude:Yeah. Let's not combine them too.
Rob:AI backhoes.
Jared:That's the worst. AI plus shovels into the world. Alright. Well, thank you both for coming on. Yeah.
Jared:We appreciate the time. Yeah. It's been great. Provide some good insights for us, so appreciate that.
Ryan:Thanks for listening to this episode of Transform Your Teaching. If you have any questions or comments about our conversation with Kaia and Jude, you can send us an email at ctlpodcast@cedarville.edu. You can also connect with us on LinkedIn. And finally, don't forget to check out our blog at cedarville.edu/focusblog. Thanks for listening.