AI chatbots are making waves in higher education, not just among students who use them to aid their studies, but also among professors who are exploring their potential. According to recent data from an AI company, educators are finding creative ways to integrate this technology into their academic routines.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
As college students increasingly turn to AI chatbots for tasks like brainstorming and essay writing, educators are also tapping into these tools. Lee Gaines examines the ways professors are incorporating AI into their academic lives, drawing from data shared by an AI company.
LEE GAINES, BYLINE: Professor Sue Kasun from Georgia State University is one example of a faculty member leveraging AI technology. She utilized Google’s AI model, Gemini, to generate ideas for assignments in a course focused on integrating culture and identity into language education for immigrant youth.
SUE KASUN: There were, like, suggestions of offering different choices, like having students generate an image, having students write a poem.
GAINES: Kasun, who instructs both current and prospective English language educators, represents a segment of higher education faculty utilizing generative AI models in their work, though the exact number remains unknown.
DREW BENT: When we looked into the data late last year, we saw that of all the ways people were using Claude, education made up 2 out of the top 4 use cases.
GAINES: Drew Bent, leading education research at Anthropic, reports that both professors and students are actively engaging with their AI chatbot, Claude. Their latest data highlights global usage patterns by professors.
BENT: Developing curricula and study materials was the top use case, but we also saw them using it for academic research.
GAINES: The data, however, comes with limitations. Bent explains that no human reviewed the professors’ interactions with Claude. Instead, a tool was used to analyze conversations tied to higher education email addresses, resulting in 74,000 interactions over an 11-day period earlier this year. Professors frequently automated tasks such as drafting emails and creating budgets, but for more intricate work like lesson planning…
BENT: The educators and the AI assistant are going back and forth and collaborating on it together.
GAINES: While Anthropic published its findings, it withheld the complete data, including the number of professors analyzed. Notably, about 7% of the conversations involved grading student work.
BENT: And it wasn’t the top use case. But it was one of the use cases where, when educators use AI for grading, they often automate a lot of it away, and they have AI do significant parts of the grading.
GAINES: How these interactions influenced actual student grades remains unclear. Marc Watkins from the University of Mississippi, who studies AI’s impact on higher education, is concerned about these developments.
MARC WATKINS: If you’re just using this to automate some portion of your life, whether that’s writing emails to students, letters of recommendation, grading or providing feedback, I’m really against that for a lot of reasons.
GAINES: Watkins argues that such AI use could erode professor-student relationships and diminish the value of higher education.
WATKINS: The sort of nightmare scenario that we might be running into is students using AI to write papers and teachers using AI to grade the same papers. If that’s the case, then what’s the purpose of education?
GAINES: Kasun, from Georgia State, believes AI should not be used for grading. While she finds AI beneficial with students, she advocates for more support and guidance from institutions on using this technology.
KASUN: We are here, sort of alone in the forest, fending for ourselves.
GAINES: Drew Bent from Anthropic suggests partnerships between tech companies and educational institutions could be beneficial, but he warns…
BENT: Us as a tech company telling educators what to do or what not to do is not the right way.
GAINES: Bent and educators agree that decisions made now on integrating AI into education will have lasting effects on students.
For NPR News, I’m Lee Gaines.
Accuracy and availability of NPR transcripts may vary. Transcript text may be revised to correct errors or match updates to audio. Audio on npr.org may be edited after its original broadcast or publication. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
