Category: _TEACHING-AND-LEARNING

“Black Wall” in Zoom: Students not using the video

Posted on by Helena Mörk

It is common for students to turn off their cameras during remote lectures. The teacher conducts the lesson in front of a screen filled with small black “stamps” with (at best) names underneath: a Black Wall.

But why don’t students want to keep their cameras on?

How can this be changed?

Students primarily turn off their cameras to protect their privacy and because they expect to take a passive role. They don’t want to be watched and assume they won’t participate actively anyway.

Simply requiring students to have their cameras on during lessons is rarely consistent with the GDPR privacy protection regulations. Instead, the solution is for the teacher to design, plan, and prepare the lessons so that students’ roles are active with frequent interactions with the teacher and other students. It needs to be attractive to have the camera on and to participate actively.

Online teaching requires more detailed planning of lesson flow, exercise setup, preparation of materials, etc. Unfortunately, teachers just have to accept this. However, studies show that students are largely willing to use their cameras when they feel it is justified to get a good personal benefit from the teaching.

In cases where the norm of having the camera off is already established in the student group, it may require a lot of patience and tolerance from the teacher to change this behavior. The teacher’s strategy should be based on small steps and encouragement, creating frequent situations where students don’t have to take significant risks of negative social exposure when using their cameras.

How to Talk to Your Students about ChatGPT: A Lesson Plan for High School and College Students

Posted on by Karin Thörne

This article by Ben Edwards in ArtsTechnica (April 6, 2023) is worth a read, “Why ChatGPT and Bing Chat are so good at making things up”.

Edwards explains in clear language, with lots of details and examples, how and why large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT make up content. As I read this article, it occurred to me that it could serve as a really great way to have pro-active and generative conversations with students about the impact of artificial intelligence for teaching, learning, assessment, and academic integrity. So, here is a quick lesson plan about how to use this article in class:

Education level

Secondary school and post-secondary (e.g., community college, polytechnic, undergraduate or graduate university courses)

Lesson Plan Title: Understanding ChatGPT: Benefits and Limitations

Learning Objectives

By the end of this lesson students will be able to:

  • Understand how and why AI-writing apps make up content.
  • Explain the term “confabulation”.
  • Discuss the implications of fabricated content on academic integrity
  • Generate ideas about how to fact-check AI-generated content to ensure its accuracy

Lesson Preparation

Prior to the class, students should read this article: “Why ChatGPT and Bing Chat are so good at making things up by Ben Edwards, published in ArtsTechnica (April 6, 2023)

Come to class prepared to discuss the article.

Learning Activity

Class discussion (large group format if the class is small or small group format with a large group debrief at the end):

Possible guiding questions:

  • What is your experience with ChatGPT and other AI writing apps?
  • What were the main points in this article? (Alternate phrasing: What were your key takeaways from this article?)
  • What are some of the risks when AI apps engage in confabulation (i.e., fabrication)?
  • Discuss this quotation from the article, “ChatGPT as it is currently designed, is not a reliable source of factual information and cannot be trusted as such.”
  • Fabrication and falsification are commonly included in academic misconduct policies. What do you think the implications are for students and researchers when they write with AI apps?
  • What are some strategies or tips we can use to fact-check text generated by AI apps?
  • What is the importance of prompt-writing when working with AI writing apps?

Duration

The time commitment for the pre-reading will vary from one student to the next. The duration of the learning activity can be adjusted to suit the needs of your class.

  • Students’ pre-reading of the article: 60-minutes or less
  • Learning activity: 45-60 minutes

Lesson closure

Thank students for engaging actively in the discussion and sharing their ideas.

Possible Follow-up Activities

  • Tips for fact-checking. Have students in the class generate their own list of tips to fact-check AI-generated content (e.g., in a shared Google doc or by sharing ideas orally in class that one person inputs into a document on behalf of the class.)
  • Prompt-writing activity. Have students use different prompts to generate content from AI writing apps. Ask them to document each prompt and write down their observations about what worked and what didn’t. Discuss the results as a class.
  • Academic Integrity Policy Treasure Hunt and Discussion. Have students locate the school’s academic misconduct / academic integrity policy. Compare the definitions and categories for academic misconduct in the school’s policies with concepts presented in this article such as confabulation. Have students generate their own ideas about how to uphold the school’s academic integrity policies when using AI apps.

Creative Commons License

This lesson plan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). This license applies only to the lesson plan, not to the original article by Ben Edwards.

Additional Notes

This is a generic (and imperfect) lesson plan. It can (and probably should) be adapted or personalized depending on the needs of the learners.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Dr. Rahul Kumar, Brock University for providing an open peer review of this lesson plan.

Share or Tweet this: How to Talk to Your Students about ChatGPT: A Lesson Plan for High School and College Students – https://drsaraheaton.wordpress.com/2023/04/07/how-to-talk-to-your-students-about-chatgpt-a-lesson-plan-for-high-school-and-college-students

Tips: Better technical drawing with peer review

Posted on by tomajans

Mikael Åsberg shares a scheme where future machine engineers trains each other in technical drawing. A system with controlled peer review provides less correction work for the teacher, more time with the students for dialogue and reflection and better quality of the students’ drawings. And the scheme is useful far beyond the subject of technical drawing!

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The tree-step-strategy for reading scientific articles

Posted on by tomajans

For the unaccustomed student, it is easy to drown in details when trying to read scientific text such as research articles. It ends in confusion. The student needs a clear strategy to stick to. Here, Kershav describes a useful three-step method to keep the reader’s head safely above the water’s surface.

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Tips: Systematic language training through a series of programme courses – an example

Posted on by tomajans

Here is an example of how systematic language training – reading, writing, managing academic texts – have been implemented in all courses of a 1-year study programme that concludes with an independent project. We hope it will inspire you.  

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Planning language progression throughout an entire study programme

Posted on by tomajans

A student with generally weak language skills is not likely to solve the issues over the time period of one single course. Measures to strengthen a student’s language skills therefore need to be planned using an overall approach that looks at the entire study programme.

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