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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, welcome to this episode of Transform Your Teaching. In today's episode, Doctor. Rob McDole and Doctor. Jared Pyles continue our series on AI Resilient Course Design with part two of our kickoff. It was so good, we had to do it twice.
Ryan:Thanks for joining us.
Jared:Alright, Rob. We are doing part two of our kickoff on the AI Resilient Design series, like we said in the last episode, and if you haven't listened to that one, please go back and listen to it. Yes. Because it assumes that you have prior knowledge of the previous episode because we are building on it now. So today, in this episode, we are building on that framework by giving you a practical menu for resilient formative design.
Jared:Now, something we have, let's see, one, three, four, five, six, six components of this. Right. Don't think of them as everything needs to be included.
Rob:Are just layers in a cake that you could potentially use.
Jared:You could Correct.
Rob:Take some out.
Jared:They're more of, like, options to combine.
Rob:Yes.
Jared:Not as requirements for every assignment.
Rob:Yeah.
Jared:It depends on what your goal is of the assignment, what your course is, again, I mentioned prior knowledge, what do your students come in with? In the higher ed world, is this a 4,000 level? Is it graduate or is it a thousand level? Yep. Also depends on what type of evidence the students need to provide, stuff like that.
Jared:So what we'll do is we'll go through these six, but then I have an actual example that uses all six of them. So it's possible, but it's not required.
Rob:Yeah. I think that's a good way of saying it. Well, I mean, look. Yes. If everybody tried to do all six of these, I think you'd drive yourself up a wall.
Rob:I mean, just being honest. Yeah. I mean, if you get two or three, that definitely puts you in a better position than none at all. Sure. So hopefully, our listeners will just take that with a grain of salt.
Rob:Hopefully something strikes them as, oh, okay. I didn't think about that one. Because some of these might take a little bit more time to think about, especially when you get into some of them as as they will see. So first one, give students work that requires judgment. So instead of just asking them for, you know, reflection of the content that you've given them, Maybe you want to use a real situation or a defined set of materials or a particular audience, and then constrain it in such a way that only you know what those are and the students know what those are.
Rob:And it wouldn't be obvious to AI. Right. Right? So you're creating a scenario, essentially. And in that scenario, maybe you're asking your students to make judgments.
Rob:That's a possibility. It could be a real scenario. But you wanna to craft it in such a way that it's not something that AI would have just come across in its dataset easily. Yep. If it starts extrapolating, that'll become painfully clear to most people.
Rob:So do something that requires students to make decisions as to what matters in that scenario. Mhmm. And most importantly, tell you why. Yep. So that's really the first one.
Jared:Sure. I'll do the second one.
Rob:Alright.
Jared:For the second one, we're saying make the expectations around AI clear. Yes. So in this situation, you name what AI use is allowed, what they need to disclose, the students need to disclose, and which parts of the work are meant to demonstrate their own understanding. Clear expectations make room for honest practice and reduce that guessing game you feel like you have to make as an instructor and also a guessing game for your students to know whether or not they can actually use AI in that process.
Rob:And part of that that goes into number three here though is like explaining the steps. Yep. You could explain the steps as to why they need to do certain things in in their particular area, why you want students to use AI for something and not for other things. Because if as you break either assignments down or content down into smaller steps, into smaller pieces, that is extremely helpful. And it also gives you a way to identify where can AI actually be helpful and what part of this is something that students really don't need to know.
Rob:They are never going to use it. Mhmm. Now before I get math teachers, like, getting upset with me because students don't use algebra, you know, even I have a CPA daughter who says to me the things that she learned in algebra, she has not once used. Oh. That is not legitimate.
Rob:Mhmm. And obviously, I broke some things down before to help her understand it was teaching more than just how to do a a math problem. It was about solving for something that you didn't know. So solving for the thing that wasn't there. And that can be extrapolated.
Rob:And and I think as you break down the steps, you give the students, like, stages. For instance, you might have a question that then goes to a plan and then a first attempt on that plan and then, you know, feedback on the plan and then revision to the plan that started all out with a question and then a final product. That's that's a series of breaking something down into smaller steps. And then as I look at that, I can determine, okay, well, where could I use AI? Mhmm.
Rob:Well, I most certainly could probably use it in the feedback. Although, I would say human feedback is also very important there. Right. I would also say it might be helpful to maybe do the plan in terms of brainstorming, like, what are possibilities around this particular question as you're thinking about planning? Right.
Rob:That's just up to you, though, as the instructor. That's just an example.
Jared:You could also use it for the questioning part too. Because Oh yeah, sometimes the hardest part of that is getting started.
Rob:How do I know the right question to ask? Yep.
Jared:The fourth one of six, protecting core competencies. As an instructor, you build in a brief independent opportunity to apply, improve, or explain important learning. This could be something like a short in class task, an exit ticket, a new problem, a focused revision, or conversation. So it really does fit with the previous one about connecting the steps and breaking the assessment down into stages. And it allows you as an instructor to then go in and help them improve or help them apply what they're learning to these steps.
Jared:And this also is a great time for formative assessment as well. Each of these steps, each of these core competency ideas are incredible times for you as an instructor to figure out if they're hitting those marks, those milestones, as they go through this process.
Rob:Number five is keep a meaningful trail of learning. And we've already talked about connecting the steps. We've talked about protecting core competencies, and you could do that inside of those steps that we discussed. If you break something down, this one is really retaining the assessments or retaining, what students are doing in each one of those areas across a longer set of assessments. So you may have more formative assessments and you have multiple ones and then you have a summative assessment and you could do more of those.
Rob:And what you're actually then doing is you're pulling the scope out and looking more at a macro scale of where is the student. But in order to do that, you've got to you've got to maintain that database, if you will, of those particular artifacts. Yep. And so you wanna have a system. So that's why here we use Canvas.
Rob:And Canvas provides us with a ready made system to be able to pull that information out. We could if we gave a framework or we created a framework of of assessment that was more than just a course, but it spanned multiple courses like a program Mhmm. Which some of our our faculty do. Actually, I think quite a few actually now that I that I think about it, especially on the gen ed side, we have these things that get pulled out and evaluated across the curriculum and across years from students being here. That becomes a really good measure of where did the student come in?
Rob:So like if you have pretests when they came in early on as a first year, and then as they're leaving as a senior. So, know, you've got to keep a meaningful trail of learning.
Jared:Yeah. And also to add on to that, I think of student portfolios as an option for that as well. So maybe it's not necessarily the instructor's responsibility to keep that portfolio, but it's the student's responsibility. It gives them opportunities then to turn that in as the final assignment so they can see their growth. They can reflect on it through the different planning, drafts and feedback and revisions that they make.
Rob:Self reflection. That's excellent.
Jared:I'm always a big fan of self reflection, you know that.
Rob:Yeah.
Jared:And the last one is keeping human judgment in charge. Like we said, these LMSs and portfolios can help faculty notice patterns over time. Like you said, Rob, it can be over the course of a year or over the four years a student is there. This should support professional judgment and not replace it. Overall, just using AI with humility, recognizing its limits and risks, protecting privacy, verifying important outputs, and remaining accountable for decisions made with its assistance.
Jared:So really, it's just, again, don't let it replace, let it be a tool that comes alongside, but keep the human in the loop, as we've said before, and let the judgment fall on the human and not letting AI do that.
Rob:Alright. So one of the things that you said we would do in this, the second part of this episode would be that you would bring forward a an example, and I think you have one.
Jared:I do have one. So I emailed my sister who I've talked about, Anna. She is a STEM project specialist at the OHECC. And I asked her, Hey, I sent her these six planks of the practical menu that we have talked about. And I said, Hey, do you know of anyone that could provide, because to me, this sounds like STEM education.
Jared:I've said that from day one. When Ryan and I went to Ohio STEM and we showed the basic definition of AI resilient design, they immediately said, This is STEM education. We're already doing this. So I said, Alright, so do you have any STEM people, STEM coaches or whomever that I can call on and ask for an example of this? And she connected me to a lady named Ann Rebar, who is a STEAM building coach at Incarnate Word Academy in Parma Heights, Ohio.
Rob:Okay.
Jared:So here is her example, and I'm gonna go through and just here is, I'm gonna start with like, I sent her these bullet points that are basically those six ideas, but it put into more like, actually came up with seven. Taking those six planks and turning them into seven steps. So the first step was start with the focus question or challenge that includes real constraints, a particular audience or defined resources. So I'm just going to read her response back to So number one, she said, Students investigated how drones can act as emergency responders and collaborative efforts and safety responses, identifying an authentic problem emergency responders face and describing how a drone could help solve it. The unit is explicitly framed around equity as students consider the dignity of the individual and the rights and responsibilities of all in a community.
Jared:What barriers may prevent people from receiving timely help during emergencies? Students propose drone based solutions that address those barriers with a stated focus on communities lacking access to response and relief services. This authentic local context is framed by local news coverage of the Northeast Ohio Police piloting drones as first responders, plus case studies on disaster relief equity and drone assisted rescue missions. And then the students present their solution to local first responders. Wow.
Jared:Talk about real life. Yeah. Immediately right there. Yeah. It's incredible.
Rob:Well, and that requires the students to go out and interview these folks.
Jared:Yeah.
Rob:So they've got to discover the problem. So it's definitely it requires their judgment. Yep. A good example of an assignment that doesn't just say jump through this hoop. Right.
Jared:And it's not something AI could easily replicate.
Rob:No, I don't think so. I'm curious, how did they make their AI expectations clear to the students?
Jared:Let me go to that one. She didn't really say much about how they explicitly told them to use AI or not. She instead, I guess it was more she did, let me give you the example that she talks about. So she used Sesame, which we've talked about before, which has the two Maya and Miles that are two interactive AI speech bots that you can talk Yes, okay. Use that in a fishbowl exercise, discussing the equity and access piece to emergency response times and services.
Jared:They allowed them to use AI to generate questions, to question themselves during the research process and the revision process. They used AI to sort, count, or calculate proportions of their samples. They generated bar graphs with it, helped them write individual reflections, connecting their data to the beatitude on peacemaking. Thought it was interesting as well. So yeah, they use it throughout, but it wasn't necessarily producing it except for Well, it was producing it, but it was more of keeping that human and the judgment part of it and keeping the human in the loop.
Jared:So they'd have to analyze the bar graphs that they came out with and with the individual reflections that they go through.
Rob:So they had to validate what AI was doing with the areas in which they were working.
Jared:Yeah. And then the core skills they were working on, they had to independently program and test a drone or a drone simulation. They had to code it. They had to work on perspective taking, reflective perspective taking, communication, learning ratio and proportion, understanding maps and area for where the drone can fly, the limitations of where the drone can go, all this stuff.
Rob:So those are more like the core competencies that they had to How did they track all of this? I'm just curious.
Jared:So they did, they have something at their school that's a test and improve, or they call it a warrior design cycle. And part of it is a test and improve phase where they go through and they have a revision point where students collect and use evidence from testing to improve their design. And there's formative assessments and teacher feedback along the way. And they do collaborative sharing, big paper collaborative sharing, helping with this. So I assume big paper is a product that they use to help collaborate and share.
Rob:Okay.
Jared:So yeah, they go through these steps. They have three missions. Mission one, being considered. Mission two, imagine. Mission three, explored.
Jared:Where they have to go through each of those steps. They're collecting evidence. They're coming up with key ideas and questions. Test driving a physical drone. How cool is that?
Jared:Looking at case studies. And this is I wanna remind this is a k through eight school
Rob:Right.
Jared:Which is incredible to me. Yeah. I just I just love it.
Rob:Fantastic. I think it's I think it's pretty amazing, and and some of our listeners would be right on par with this.
Jared:Oh, yeah.
Rob:But I think we have to also be honest with the fact that there are those who are going to be listening to that example and be, okay. Well, wait a minute. I teach English.
Jared:That's exactly what I say all the time when it comes to STEM stuff.
Rob:Yeah. Because you're sitting there going, how in the world do I do this with English?
Jared:How can I teach 1984 in a drone unit? It's totally fair. Or maybe it's necessarily having to read the text. Maybe it's more of looking at the you focus more on the writing and the the reading aspect of other texts.
Rob:Well, it depends on what you're trying to right? It goes back to your goals. What are you trying to do here? Are you trying to oftentimes in English, I think we we do multiple things. We talk about prose.
Rob:Yep. And and the more you read, you see evidence of style and you soak that style in. And and I've I've heard people talk about that in terms of and I don't think they're wrong. You know, you it starts becoming part of you. I mean, anything you practice for a long period of time does become part of you.
Jared:Yeah.
Rob:So I get that part. But it could be you look at a text for grammar perspective and how it was written. Mhmm. Voice, is it active? Is it passive?
Rob:Those are grammatical issues and some tactical issues. But oftentimes, the things that change us and move us the most in in story are the themes explored Mhmm. Or the ideas that are put forward in that story.
Jared:Yeah.
Rob:I know for me, well, personally, you know, the Celestial Railroad
Jared:Mhmm.
Rob:By Nathaniel Hawthorne was fairly foundational in some of my thinking from a philosophical perspective because it painted a picture of a shortcut a shortcut to heaven. And it paralleled another piece of of fiction, which was John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.
Jared:Mhmm.
Rob:But you had to know these things and you kinda had have an idea of who they were. And so from that perspective, I can see, you know, somebody coming up with something like that, like a Nathaniel Hawthorne story to teach some of these things where instead of a flying a drone, maybe you're testing out an analogy. Yep. Do you see what I'm saying? Yeah.
Rob:Like, I think those are possibilities. Mhmm. But, again, it goes back to what are you trying to accomplish in the class? Is it just knowledge of a particular story?
Jared:Mhmm.
Rob:Or is there something more that you want for your students to know? Right. And then how do you capture that? I I don't disagree with you. It seems like STEM when you talk STEM, it's like, oh, this fits really well.
Jared:Right.
Rob:And super easy. But I would like to hear if any of our listeners could figure out ways to use any or all of these steps that we've talked about here on the podcast today.
Jared:So I will I'll add two things. Okay. One, Anne gives a fantastic definition and usage of the fishbowl discussion, which you and I have talked about and we enjoy. She mentions as part of the independent explanation or application for students, she said, The fishbowl discussion is specifically built into the lesson because of independent sharing within the group. Proposing drone based solutions that address barriers to timely emergency help in that format requires students to reason and defend ideas in front of peers, while also having the opportunity to rethink and communicate the rethinking in a space designed for productive talk and civic engagement.
Jared:That to me is the textbook example of fishbowl discussion. That's point one. The second point to go back to adding English into STEM. I had a good friend of mine who has asked me to be on his board at his STEM school. I asked him that exact question before I went on to the first board meeting and interviewed, or I put that in quotes, you can't see it because it's a podcast, but I quote interviewed for it.
Jared:I said, well, what about English? And he's like, let me tell you one of my elementary teachers what they're doing right now. They're taking Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and they've taken the seven dwarves and they're looking at the character traits of each of the dwarves. So there's your English,
Rob:right?
Jared:And then they're taking each of the, once they establish the character traits, they start designing the setting of each of those dwarves' living space and what they're going to need in that living space using character traits. And then they take those character traits that they build in their English section and they go to the science and the math and they start worrying about, okay, of like dimensions and the power that they would need, all that. So they're taking something, it's such a cool idea, taking the character traits that you wouldn't necessarily think about for a character, figuring out, okay, how do we pull that out? How do we apply it in a STEM space? So at the they have seven distinct living spaces for each of the dwarves that have to worry about, you know, dimensions.
Jared:They use geometry, they use science to figure out how they're going to wire it and what they're going to need specifically. Now there are some questions here at the end of this, I think the first one that's not on here is the English part of it. But I think English also, like the writing process has been this iterative process throughout. You can find writing and all that put together where you're figuring out something real life you want to talk about and you go through that drafting and brainstorming and revising.
Rob:Especially if you make it personal.
Jared:Oh, yeah. But here's some other questions. The first one's on access. You wanna answer that one?
Rob:Access to AI. What if we don't have it? I can hear that. I can hear some and I've had people Yeah. Say to me, hey, Rob.
Rob:So I just use the free version of fill in the blank. Yep. And I would say to them that's a good place to start. If you want to dig in more though, I think you're going to have to at some point pay for it. It was interesting.
Rob:Was having a conversation today with a colleague. We were talking about news sources, And he's like, well, if you get your news from FreeSources, you get what you pay for. He said social media, and there's a lot of people that grab things from there. Reddit. Yeah.
Rob:I think he was right. He's like, if you're going to go look for serious news now it's not gonna always be stuff you necessarily agree with. It will have bias, but the places that actually do put time and effort into reporting
Jared:Mhmm.
Rob:And charge you for it are probably more prone to give you things that are more valuable to you than otherwise. And and so I would say it's not too dissimilar from AI. Like, you can get things from free AI. There's no doubt, especially as the models continue to improve and they put more powerful models out for free use. They do have limitations, but I would start with a basic access that you can get.
Rob:But I think it's something we all have to actually talk about. Yep. Like, for those areas that don't have this kind of access, what what are communities doing to help each other out? You know, maybe there's some possibilities through libraries. Libraries in The United States have always been a great place for some of these things to be available to amass the mass public.
Rob:I think it's possible for that to happen here too. I just haven't seen anything like that yet. Have you? No.
Jared:I think that's So is a is a big thing.
Rob:Access is a big thing. But if you can afford it, I would say you need to try to get, you know, whether it be Claude or OpenAI. Those would be the first two I'd probably say should try to get a paid version of.
Jared:Just like in any education, differentiation matters, modality matters. So if you can find other ways of doing one of the questions, what if a student does not want to use AI? I think this is the same thing here. Start with their learning goal. Critical thinking and evaluation can often be demonstrated without using AI.
Jared:But if the student still objects to using it, you can find alternate pathways to get to the same spot. Another question I like is, will this create more grading?
Rob:It can.
Jared:Which is a legitimate thing.
Rob:Now it can.
Jared:Yep. If everything is a large grade, and we talked about formative, and formative always, doesn't always, but most of the time it means low stakes.
Rob:Should be.
Jared:So completion, incomplete. May help identify is a good one. That's where they put the onus back on the student to take and retake until they get to the point where they're obtaining mastery. So you're really looking at the end product for that response. But anyway, I think we've set the stage for this series.
Jared:I'm excited to get started. In our next episode, we're talking about backward design because as you know, if you've been a faithful listener, Rob and I eat, sleep, and breathe backward design. We are big proponents of it. That's how we design our courses here. So anyway, I'm excited to get started.
Rob:I'm looking forward to it because AI is definitely gonna change what students are able to produce. And we've got to start thinking more on the line of how do we design something that really gets at what we want, how do we set the guidelines and the boundaries up for students. And so I'm looking forward to what we have coming in front of us.
Ryan:Thanks for listening to this episode of Transform Your Teaching. If you have any questions or comments about our new series on AI resilient course design, feel free to email us at CTLPodcastcedarville dot edu. You can also connect with us on LinkedIn. And don't forget to check out our blog at cedarville.edu/focusblog. Thanks for listening.