Some of the greatest productivity benefits of AI can be found in tasks you are performing at the upper range of your skill set. AI can help you level up.
When you know enough to accomplish a task, but not enough to do it confidently or efficiently, AI can provide you with step-by-step guidance to speed up your problem-solving process.
The key is to ask for step-by-step instructions. ChatGPT often explains its reasoning by default, but you can also ask for explanations that meet you at your particular skill level.
An AI Breakthrough Example: Photo Roster
For three years, we’ve been facing the challenge of accessing a useful Photo Roster in Blackboard or Self-Service Carolina. As instructors, we need a page of images large enough to use for class attendance, while preserving the preferred names and pronunciation notes that these systems provide.
After doing some initial experiments, I knew the coding was simple, but not quite simple enough for my skills. No staff member with the right skill set had the dedicated time to provide the solution.
Enter ChatGPT
With ChatGPT, I was able to explain the problem, offer an example of my initial solution, then work iteratively to tweak the code until I had exactly the photo roster display I wanted. I could run a test and share a screenshot of the output to identify the right line to target in the code.
The end result is a Blackboard Photo Roster Bookmarklet available to anyone who accesses Blackboard Ultra courses through a web browser.
For me, javascript coding was the skill I was hoping to “level up,” but the same iterative, step-by-step process can be used for creating complex branching in surveys, automating data collection across Excel spreadsheet sources, or any other task that can be broken down and tested with images of outputs.
Without ChatGPT, I would have to study several more advanced skills to decipher the complete code for the existing roster page. Then, I could apply that knowledge to identify just the areas I needed to accomplish my goal. With ChatGPT, I was able to use GenAI to determine the targets for my very focused changes to the display settings. I can learn the rest of the details when I am ready to level up again.