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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.
You have to know the contextual accountability that what you're doing with AI could put you or your company at risk or your employer, and most importantly, that you remain the driver of that information that comes out of there because I can already see the disciplinary meaning of, well, the AI said it, and it's not gonna be an acceptable excuse.
Narrator: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 Doctor. Jared Pyles continue our series on AI literacy by chatting with Chris Prokes, the director of the AI Excellence Institute at Sinclair Community College. Thanks for joining us.
Jared:Well, Rob, we are here, continuing our series on AI literacy.
Rob:Yes.
Jared:And we have with us a guest. His name is Chris Prokes, Dr. Chris Prokes, Boise State alum.
Jared:He is at Sinclair Community College. He's the director of AI excellence, and we wanted to have him come on here at on the the podcast to help us shed some light on what they're doing at Sinclair for AI literacy and such. But, really, the question I wanna ask you, because I noticed on your LinkedIn, and I think I knew this previously, but you're the supervisor of baseball umpires for the Ohio Community College athletic conference. And I would like to know your thought on ABS and the MLB.
Dr. Chris Prokes:Well, there's two sides to the ABS coin. One is that it it shows the ones that are missed, and they are missed. You know, we're humans. We we're watching a a five inch projectile traveling at 70 to a 100 miles an hour crossing a three-dimensional invisible space. The other side is, you know, they it shows how many pitches are truly correct.
Rob:Mhmm. You know,
Dr. Chris Prokes:they're called my concern with it is if it's game seven of the world series and it's two strikes on the batter down to the last out and the pitch comes in and and it doesn't look like a strike and everyone watching goes, there's no way that's a strike and the smart pitcher challenges it and it nicks the strike zone by a millimeter. Is that how we want game seven to end? And some people will say, yes, because, it's the right call. But a lot of people will say it that didn't even look anywhere near a strike. What if it's a cutting, you know, fastball that just barely touches that corner?
Dr. Chris Prokes:So there there's two sides to it. I like it for a training perspective as a supervisor because it can make umpires better.
Jared:Do you think it's gonna trickle down to college?
Dr. Chris Prokes:I think it'll end up in college sooner rather than later. They already have some technology. There's one called Trackman that does a report of where pitches are. I think it'll end up there from a challenge perspective. I don't think it's gonna end up in the high school setting anytime soon simply because of cost.
Jared:Mhmm.
Rob:That's that's an interesting way to segue into a AI literacy because ultimately ultimately, we know these systems are being run by AI, even though I know they have. Mhmm. You know, it's just like the what is it? The VAR
Jared:Mhmm.
Rob:In Soccer. In soccer. And, you know, as a long time player as well as being a ref, a FIFA ref for a period of time when I was younger.
Dr. Chris Prokes:Good for you. Come back.
Rob:There'd be a lot of work that have to be done for me to come back. You know, I could also see how it would be frustrating.
Jared:Mhmm.
Rob:Because the game is long already. A lot of human, but they're also using AI to actually put down the lines to be able to see who was in front of who. And I I do wonder at what point AI will just completely
Jared:Yeah.
Rob:You know, instead of, like, they show the the booth, there's usually, like, four guys up in the booth
Jared:Yeah.
Rob:In the AR. Right?
Jared:Mhmm.
Rob:I think we're it'll easily end up with maybe one or two just to make people feel good.
Jared:Mhmm.
Rob:But they really don't need to be there because the video angles and everything, the VAR is gonna be able to
Dr. Chris Prokes:Right.
Rob:Make that call.
Dr. Chris Prokes:Right.
Rob:Immediately.
Dr. Chris Prokes:But then who do we argue with?
Rob:Each other.
Dr. Chris Prokes:Yeah.
Jared:ESPN exists because of stuff like that, So
Rob:Well, I mean, it gets us to the thing that I think we all face. Right? You're facing it. We're facing it. And that's how do we prepare our students
Dr. Chris Prokes:Mhmm.
Rob:For this new world. Because it's not only in sports. It's gonna be
Dr. Chris Prokes:Yeah.
Rob:In the jobs that that they're looking to full fill or or to a career that they're looking to get into.
Dr. Chris Prokes:Mhmm.
Rob:We've we've talked with several different folks. One from logistics, another from the medical side, EMS. And that's what we're hearing. Like, it's it's not just in one area.
Rob:It's pretty much everywhere. So your work at Sinclair, I'm just curious, how are you defining this for your students?
Dr. Chris Prokes:Yeah.
Rob:Well, it comes down to really kind of two paths. Are we teaching AI, or are we teaching with AI?
Dr. Chris Prokes:So if we're teaching AI, that's that's where your literacy comes in as a fundamental skill, teaching students that here is what AI looks like in this field, whether it's a a liberal arts field, like your English or your communications or all the way over to a technical field. And then within that context, are you able to ask good questions, have good prompts? Are you able to break that output down to be the human who's evaluating it?
Dr. Chris Prokes:Are you, understanding the ethics and the privacy of what you're doing? Are you understanding the bias that can come out of things, come out of hallucinations? Are you disclosing AI use appropriately, whether it's writing a paper or generating a report or within a tool that you have. The other side of that is, you you're teaching AI, but then you're teaching with AI. You mentioned EMS.
Dr. Chris Prokes:So feasibly an EMS professional who's learning could have exam questions that AI generated clinical scenarios or fake, you know, leads from an EKG for them to read. We do this already.
Rob:Right.
Dr. Chris Prokes:But it takes so many hours to do, but now you have access to an unlimited database of potential, you know, clinical scenarios. We've met with, to your point, so many different employers and faculty members from these different areas that it is kind of nice to see initially that there's such an interest in a drive for it in every potential area. We're working with our folks internally to make sure students have access to that ability to understand those those kind of meta skills, those literacy skills, and we're tying that back to workforce wherever we can in that context. Because it's here now.
Dr. Chris Prokes:This isn't like a, hey, This is coming down the road. You know, they didn't train ABS as if it just happened today. It was brought up through a system. We have students who need to know this stuff. Now we have employers who are demanding our students know it right now, and we have employers who wanna know it themselves.
Dr. Chris Prokes:And so we're kind of everywhere across the spectrum there.
Jared:How are your instructors, You said, teaching with or teaching AI, how are your instructors handling that?
Dr. Chris Prokes:There's been a really good level of interest for them to learn the basic literacy skills. We've created a lot of internal training programs and certifications that can help our faculty and staff, especially in academic affairs, our largest division of course instruction and all the support departments that go with it. We've created those opportunities so they can learn, they can be credentialed or skilled up first, and then that translates to their students. But we've also had a lot of folks who've created an ecosystem within their own classrooms to say, "I'm learning this as well as you are, but you're learning it, so let's find where that common ground is."
Dr. Chris Prokes:Because our students are reporting very different things than we assumed a year ago. Isn't this, you know, universal? I want AI, I wanna use it. There's actually a lot of hesitance in our students. I'm not sure what you're seeing here.
Dr. Chris Prokes:Yeah. We have a lot of students who are kind of like, I'm not sold because I still wanna make sure I'm trained and skilled for a job. Yes. But this being a skill to go with it is something that could help me, but I'm also not gonna put myself in a position where I'm gonna get caught cheating or I'm gonna be, you know, replacing a a potential career because of technology.
Rob:Mhmm. We have several students I've heard that from.
Jared:Mhmm.
Rob:So it's it's the one of the challenges has been helping them to understand the difference. I think there are those who see other students who seem to have no filter whatsoever, and they're very can, means, should.
Rob:So they can make it do the things that will get them because they're just there to jump through the hoops in their mind and get a piece of paper. Right. Not actually train themselves. So they see those students do that.
Rob:And and I think in response, they're like pulling back and, well, I'm not gonna do that. And anytime you say I'm not gonna do that, you usually end up throwing other things out
Dr. Chris Prokes:Right.
Rob:With it instead of saying, I wanna do this. I want to use it in this way. Yeah. To help me actually own those things and to to learn them in a much deeper way. Right.
Rob:So, yeah, we're we're seeing some of the same things. I am curious, though. What are those actual standards of literacy that you have put forward for your students and sounds like your faculty as well?
Dr. Chris Prokes:Mhmm. Yeah. We so we created a training program. It's it's it's a micro credential. There's a public version that the community can take.
Dr. Chris Prokes:There's a a formal paid version you can do. There's an internal version for our faculty and staff, and then we have a student version. And they're all created on the same literacy. So prompt engineering, ethics and responsible use, bias and hallucinations, evaluating output, keeping the human center or the center the human at the center of everything and realizing where, you know, AI use may be appropriate or not. And we've used those core skills to kind of drive not only then that learning experience, but also some of our policy suggestions for faculty.
Dr. Chris Prokes:And what's really interesting about the policy is we we have an acceptable use policy for all of our IT stuff, including AI. And then we have boilerplate language faculty can use in their classes. But what's come out in the last part of this academic year that we're concluding is there's also the the not to use policy. Students are actually saying, I wanna know where I can and can't use AI. Mhmm.
Dr. Chris Prokes:And I also don't wanna be made to be required to use AI. And so we're seeing a shift, a very quick shift from I wanna change some assignments or assessments to include an AI component to, it's now an option as opposed to being required in that assignment because so many students are saying, I want the skills, but I also don't want some of this replaced by, you know, an AI tool. Can enhance it, it can be part of it, but I don't want to be forced to use AI to do something if I can do it myself.
Jared:What do you think informs that? Do you think it's ethics or you think it's accessibility for students?
Dr. Chris Prokes:For us, it's Sinclair, just given the populations that we serve and where we are, it's both. It is largely the ethics and the concerns. We hear a lot from our students, the environmental and data concerns. They're very protective of their privacy. Even my teenager, my almost teenager is is cognizant of these things.
Dr. Chris Prokes:The other part is the access. We do not yet have a a campus wide tool because we're taking a more structured approach to get one. We've seen some of the other, you know, four years out there or even other community colleges who went all in right away, assuming students were gonna use it. They wanted it, and now they're having a little bit of almost buyer's remorse. We took the approach of the skills and literacy first to upscale to a tool.
Dr. Chris Prokes:But because of our population, a lot of them don't have access or they're only using, you know, your five free tokens or your your few queries until you can get there.
Jared:Mhmm.
Dr. Chris Prokes:Yeah. But our data does indicate that a a majority of our students, faculty, and staff do purchase at least one paid version of an AI tool of any kind, whether it's the first tier or all the way up to a large one. Or we got this data point recently, given our population of folks who are in the workforce and are working while they go to school, they're using a company or spouse AI access to help with some of their work, which I mean, that makes sense. I mean, if you have one Microsoft account for your at home use, everyone's going to use it. So why not share that potential resource?
Dr. Chris Prokes:So there's another data point to say where we can pivot some of the training to include that as an ethical conversation because I'm not gonna put something of mine into my spouse's AI tool. It also has her work stuff and there's privileged proprietary information there. I don't want those two mixing even though it's a paid account that's a little bit more locked down than a pro a public one.
Rob:Yeah. That's interesting. I haven't I think that's the first time I've I've heard of I mean, I I'm we're very aware that there are people here that I mean, most of our students we already we already know that was, one of the benefits when we went with OpenAI. Mhmm. They were able to show us who here on campus was already using it, and they gave us they didn't tell us what they were doing.
Rob:They just said, here are the folks that have been using it Yeah. You know, with your email addresses. Yeah. Which is it's there are email addresses. So if you use our email address to Yeah.
Rob:Sign yourself up for a service, most people don't know this. It's it you're then putting yourself in a situation where an institution can't actually Right. Have access to that information or to that service if they were pressed for it or they had some sort of reason legally to Right. To avail themselves of the information.
Dr. Chris Prokes:There was that story. I feel like it was somewhere close to the Midwest, but but I'm not a 100% sure of of students who were spray painting and vandalizing on a college campus. And they got caught not because they were on camera, but because their phones connected to the Wi Fi in campus buildings. And that's how they caught them. They synced up when the video showed to when their phones connected.
Rob:Yep.
Dr. Chris Prokes:And there was a whole bunch of backlash of, you know, privacy in the schools like, you signed up for our Internet. You agreed to, you know, we know just no different than if if a student tried to access, you know, Netflix and it was blocked. It's gonna get flagged. I accidentally clicked a link from a email to a Hulu at my work computer once and immediately know it was blocked and it's been logged.
Dr. Chris Prokes:So, obviously, they knew I was trying to go on there. I wasn't trying to watch TV, but it was for a preview of something a faculty member wanted to look at. And so there's there's all those data concerns. That's it.
Dr. Chris Prokes:But it is an interesting conversation in terms of literacy. Right? Right. I mean, you start talking about ethics is don't I mean, that's usually a thing that most IT folks put out there.
Dr. Chris Prokes:Right.
Rob:Most, you know, departments, they'll say, do not share. It is illegal for you to share your username and password to x system with Sure. Right? And so to think that there are folks maybe potentially using it because I do know, like like what you were saying in terms of Microsoft, like, a lot of times they'll say, oh, here you go. They have so many users.
Rob:You can use this in your your house. Right.
Dr. Chris Prokes:Yeah. Years ago, you could you could borrow the CD to sign out for the data to download, you know, version on your computer.
Rob:It's like, okay.
Jared:America online.
Dr. Chris Prokes:America online.
Jared:Forty free hours.
Dr. Chris Prokes:Oh. I think my parents are still mad because, like, many, many years ago, I signed up for one of those at home and they kept getting billed because I forgot cancel it. Yeah. I think my mom's still pretty mad about that.
Jared:So one of the reasons we're doing this is to really talk about workforce readiness. So what's Sinclair's approach? How have you guys been looking at AI literacy as not only an educational technology tool, but as a workforce readiness skill?
Dr. Chris Prokes:Early on in this process, one of the reasons we created the AI Institute was because of the demands from workforce. We are fortunate that given what we do and how long we've been doing that work in the community, we have a really good ear to the ground for workforce. I can't give you a number or even an estimate for how many advisory boards I've attended over the years. In fact, we just sent out a survey to all of our advisory boards to get some data on a number of things and AI certainly is part of that. And we're constantly getting data and feedback that this is a skill, a technology they want graduates to know.
Dr. Chris Prokes:But what's been really interesting is they're changing their prerogative to a large extent, not every industry, but a lot of them are coming in to say, you know, this is HVAC, for example. We want them to have basic skills in the field. But realistically, if you spend a few more minutes teaching them the technology, I can show them how to better cut sheet metal to install a furnace on the job because they're gonna learn that anyway from the guys doing it. I'd rather they know more about AI and understand how to use it because they're coming to us and our industry is seeing it, but we don't know as people in the field. So we kind of want them to be training us
Rob:Mhmm.
Dr. Chris Prokes:You know, on that use. We hear that from health care. We're hearing that from our early childhood education programs because the literacy push is is gonna begin at the lower grades here before we know it. We're hearing it from anywhere that we do some consults with. We we I give this example all the time, but we met with a sand and gravel company in the fall.
Dr. Chris Prokes:It was fascinating to hear their potential needs for AI and how we could help them.
Rob:That is that is kinda strange. I mean Yeah.
Dr. Chris Prokes:They were great. It was a great afternoon, but it was like we never thought in our wildest dreams that that type of a company would would would come to us for that.
Jared:Wow.
Dr. Chris Prokes:I was here in Clark County or in in Clark County about a month ago. I did a presentation on AI for nonprofits. Just thinking about the implications for an industry that's, you know, generally very limited on funds to purchase technology, but what it can do for grant programs or for communications for one or two person operations. That all kind of distilled down to the literacy cause of of understanding how to use this. And one of the comments that was made to me was by a a CEO.
Dr. Chris Prokes:He said, I'm convinced that in the next couple of years, you're gonna see this on job postings above the using Microsoft Office products because, realistically, we don't care about Microsoft Office. We care about documents, spreadsheets, and slides. And if you can use some other tool to do those, great. Same thing with AI. Right.
Dr. Chris Prokes:And very quickly, we shifted from learning tools to learning the skills. And I think that's an important distinction that a lot of places are not doing is we're gonna teach them how to use Chat GPT. Well, you're not really teaching them how to use Chat GPT. You're teaching them how to use this type of AI. Mhmm.
Dr. Chris Prokes:So if we shift the focus to the the type of AI and the skills needed, the tools because they pop up. Oh, my goodness. Are are become ubiquitous. Yeah.
Rob:I mean, the most recent one that came out of well, as I speak, there's probably one coming out today. Yeah. But, you know, like with OpenAI, personal finance is now a thing where you can literally link this thing up to your bank accounts. They've already enrolled a small group of of folks who have opted into this thing on the pro level account and they're testing it. They're sitting there looking at it.
Rob:They're seeing how it's doing in terms of personal finance. I'm like, oh, my word. Mhmm. That's gonna to, like, totally, potentially flatten so many pieces of software Right. And services that are out there right now even in the banking industry.
Rob:Yeah. Like, they're starting to threaten some of the softer services that, you know, the add ons that banking industry gives them and and not to mention your financial planning folks. You know?
Jared:Mhmm.
Dr. Chris Prokes:Well, that's why we have these folks because they have that understanding. I I I wouldn't even know where to begin with financial planning, but I'd be weary about going into an AI tool to do it. Right. Because
Dr. Chris Prokes:I'd rather trust the human who spends all day, every day living and and breathing this stuff.
Jared:Like imagine you have a financial planner and they tell you to do one thing and you're like, well, the AI bot says I should do this.
Dr. Chris Prokes:Oh, yeah.
Jared:So what would you recommend that I do and stuff like that? You know?
Rob:Well, I think you'll also be able to maybe find those who are maybe not as, what's the word, Ethical?
Dr. Chris Prokes:Oh, 100%.
Rob:Or as or as smart as you think they are.
Dr. Chris Prokes:Yeah. My number one rule for my financial planner with the limited funds I have is I've worked really, really hard for this, like, umpiring, sweating, squatting, running. I really don't wanna lose it.
Jared:Uh-huh.
Dr. Chris Prokes:But if you can make something, by all means, I don't know if I could ever, even a person in this field, go go to an AI to do that. I just can't Yeah. Trust
Jared:Yeah. That's fair. That's fair. So what gaps are you seeing? The biggest ones you see between how students are using it casually versus how they need to use it professionally?
Dr. Chris Prokes:Yeah, that's a really good question. And I wrote actually, as I was thinking about this, it comes down to, in my mind, really two things. Casual use is answer seeking. It's using it as another Google or search engine. Yeah.
Dr. Chris Prokes:I mean, I even look at my chat history, and I asked it to look at weather with, you know, with umpiring. We're in the middle of the high school postseason. Mhmm. Last night was monsoon where I was at, but not down here. So, you know, we've got a plan for those types of things.
Dr. Chris Prokes:I'm trying to analyze the weather today because, you know, we we can't just put anybody on tournament games. We've gotta have the right guys and and gals and make and and folks to make sure they're there. When it comes to professional use, they're not yet seeing that it is a judgment building tool, that it is there to be an aid, not an answer. It's different in the workplace to rely on an AI tool for answer seeking. You can certainly do it from time to time, but the majority of your use is going to be, I need to create an agent that can write my weekly team email to save me time.
Dr. Chris Prokes:I need to write an agent or be able to use AI to do a little bit different budget analysis, you know, maybe above and beyond what our financial folks are doing. The other big gap is verification, and that's where the literacy comes in. Most people will tell you that if I use AI for answer seeking, I'm gonna take the answer and go with it. Going back again to baseball, you get a lot of parents and coaches. Hey, AI told me this is the rule.
Dr. Chris Prokes:Oh, no. It's not the rule. Tie doesn't go the runner.
Jared:Uh-huh. And then the last one would be what I'll call contextual accountability. There has to be fluency in knowing what you can put into an AI tool versus not, not only ethically, but within the legal realm.
Dr. Chris Prokes:I mean, we're all in higher education. We're bound by FERPA. We're bound by HIPAA. We're bound by other things. Cedarville likely has its own rules as Sinclair does.
Dr. Chris Prokes:You have to know the contextual accountability that what you're doing with AI could put you or your company at risk or your employer. And most importantly, that you remain the driver of that information that comes out of there because I can already see the disciplinary meeting of, well, the AI said it and it's not gonna be an acceptable excuse. Those would be my big areas in that regard. So how do we flip the script to teach them how to be judgment builders and professional users of it as opposed to answers as a primary thing? So that can come through courses.
Dr. Chris Prokes:It come through faculty changing assignments to to teach those skills. And that's what we're seeing in a shift, and we're seeing a lot more of it already this summer, and hopefully we'll continue that into next year.
Jared:Are you having instructors come and say, how can I tailor this so that it fits better than what you're just talking about? Or is do they come to you or do they come to somewhere else at Sinclair?
Dr. Chris Prokes:So the institute is, we're technically a two person operation. I have myself as a director and I have associate director. She's great. She has workforce experience, so she does a lot of external stuff with our partners. And then I have four professors who serve as our faculty fellows, one from each of our divisions there, released to us through a number of their hours to do work.
Dr. Chris Prokes:They they are the figurehead of their division. They they run a lot of the work that happens there. Most faculty will go to them and then often they'll get together and collaborate. We provide all sorts of training and learning opportunities. I also have staff fellows.
Dr. Chris Prokes:I have instructional designers, a learning specialist, some of what you all have here in the CTL. And we work directly with our CTL. We're housed together in the same unit. And I have two students that I was able to hire who are fabulous. And so they provide a lot of that perspective and a lot of that experience.
Dr. Chris Prokes:What we're seeing is not so much the can you make this more contextually appropriate? It's I have an idea and we're able to refine that idea to help them make it build on literacy, but also connect to their their content or their industry Mhmm. And be more professional, in that case. I'll give you a good a good example. We have a political science class, American government, fabulous fabulous instructors who teach it.
Dr. Chris Prokes:It's award winning actually for some of the work they did online. They have a discussion that's absolutely wonderful. You take the role of a founding father or a founding mother of this country, and you have to interact in this discussion forum. Well, they've taken that out of it, and they've replaced it with an AI agent that assumes one of those roles for you. And now your job is not so much to engage if you were this person, it's to have a conversation with James Monroe, Dolly Madison and then you have to critique what the agent said as to its accuracy and validity.
Dr. Chris Prokes:So we've kept the intent of the assignment but we've given them an opportunity to practice AI skills that they're gonna need potentially in the workplace. And it's been extremely popular with students because you feel like you're talking to this actual person. And over time, it gets more and more trained. And so the students have more and more of a challenge to evaluate its out.
Jared:Or break it.
Dr. Chris Prokes:Or break it.
Rob:Yeah.
Dr. Chris Prokes:It's super it's fascinating to watch their responses. Some of them get very upset that, no, Abraham Lincoln was not alive in the war of eighteen twelve. What are you talking about? But even basic stuff that they can they can fact check and such, it's giving them that skill.
Jared:Gotcha. Interesting. I like that a lot. So one of the reason that Rob and I started down this path of doing a series like this is because we went to a conference and the keynote mentioned that what you said, that the workforce is expecting a level of AI literacy or AI skills. But the other side of that is they don't want to train them.
Jared:They expect the institutions to be the ones doing the training. And I always thought that was a whole, like, well, we don't have time to do it. But from what you've said, it sounds more like we don't know how to use it ourselves. Right. So we need graduates to come in to train us on that.
Jared:Right. So I think that's an interesting it it kind of to me, it fills out the the picture more where it's unnecessarily, we don't have time to do this. You need to do it. But more of a, we don't know how to use it well enough.
Rob:Yeah. Your Amazons, your your Microsoft's, your technology companies already have this stuff built in. They're training. Yeah. So for them, like, they expect you to know or at least been using it, but then they're going to train you above and beyond that when you get in there.
Rob:But what I think what you're talking about and what we're seeing is there are also other
Jared:Oh, yeah.
Rob:Other places where maybe it's the small mom and pop businesses, the, you know, the ones that are doing asphalt ceiling, the ones that are doing sand and gravel Right. HVAC, you know, plumbing, you name it. There's there's and even EMS, even though that's really being forced from the medical side. Right. And the doctors and the schools of medicine are I know, at least for the Ohio State
Dr. Chris Prokes:Yeah.
Rob:You know, they're they're pushing this stuff. And so it's actually coming into the clinical setting, and they're having to train on these things. But to think about these other businesses, they're saying train them because we don't even know how to use it. We need them to train us.
Jared:Yeah. Yeah.
Rob:That's really interesting.
Dr. Chris Prokes:There's a a weird web of of all this information that's out there on this topic. Whenever we do an external event, we're all we're also you know, we tell them we're also kinda gathering data from you so we can take it back to our fellows, to our faculty to inform them. Here's what we're hearing in any of those industries. In the past, if your institution had a workforce arm, it was like you're viewed as the subject expert on a certain topic. You're going out and training or facilitating those trainings.
Dr. Chris Prokes:Well, with AI, our workforce is no different than the workforce that's out there outside of our walls. We're all kind of learning together. So we have data on both of those fronts is how we can improve AI knowledge. But then we get that information that kind of flows back to us of, like you said, we're demanding that this be a skill you teach. We then have students who want to know more or coming from for more places that have done some with AI, especially in high school or their work workplace.
Dr. Chris Prokes:So we have to find that, like, perfect equilibrium of where does that all meet and how can we scale something so it's not so specific to an industry that it bogs everyone down. I think that the small business sector is is probably the most at risk only because one decision can destroy a mom and pop shop. We've spoken to a number of small business collectives just to get them some basic understanding of what they could do. And a lot of them have come back for one on one, you know, meetings or or consults, whatever you wanna call it, to learn more. And that data is just as valuable as going to Premier Health, Ohio State Medical Center, the base, you know, just just getting all that data put together.
Dr. Chris Prokes:I don't know the perfect answer, but we all we can do is is continue to try to find what's best, you know, for our folks. It's similar to how I'm sure you've seen this. After the pandemic, kids coming in from high school had far more online or elearning experience than their their predecessors. So their skills and their knowledge and their demand for elearning material went through the roof right away.
Rob:Yeah.
Dr. Chris Prokes:So I think we're in a few years, we'll see that from the high school population, but it's also happening now because some of the K- 12 districts are are starting to do more with AI.
Rob:Right. Yep.
Jared:So we like to close this with just kind of a practical question. And, you know, this series, we've been harping on the importance of this, but there's probably a lot of faculty that are overwhelmed with the idea of using AI. They know it's important, but they're not sure what those first steps are. So what would you share with a faculty member who feels overwhelmed?
Dr. Chris Prokes:We get this scenario a lot and I'll give the same advice I always give them is find a controlled way to try it. Find someone who you know is doing something with AI, pick their brain, take them to lunch, take them to coffee, and let them show you some possibilities. At the same time, think about something, one small process you could do that could be changed by AI. Maybe it's creating a rubric when you're struggling. Maybe it's writing the weekly announcement in your course or your weekly email and find small steps to go.
Dr. Chris Prokes:And then from there, build your own personal literacy because it's not just using AI for what you're doing, it's that AI is in everything you are doing. And so realizing that it's part of the world and take those small steps. And then as part of that, find a support system of your peers, whether it's in your own department or your own industry. Everyone's facing the the stress and the the overwhelmed feeling at times together, and the best way to learn is through the community. Don't try to take it on alone because you just can't.
Jared:Yeah. That's great. That's good. Well, we appreciate your time, man.
Dr. Chris Prokes:Yeah. Thanks for having me. This was great.
Ryan:Thanks for listening to this episode of Transform Your Teaching. If you have any questions or comments about our interview with Chris, feel free to reach out to us at CTLpodcast@Cedarville.edu. You can also message us or connect with us on LinkedIn. And finally, don't forget to check out our blog at cedarville.edu/focusblog.
Ryan:Thanks for listening.