As the semester comes to a close, I often think about what successes I had in my courses, which students really surprised and inspired me, and where I might adjust my design and delivery to cultivate more of that excitement, potential, and promise among learners. If you find yourself feeling the same way, check out the suggestions below to bring your year to an intentional close and start looking ahead to Fall 2025!
Continue reading “That’s a Wrap! 5 Ways to End the Academic Year”
AI Spark Tips: Engaging Students’ Creativity with GenAI
Carol Denning-Broadus, Associate Instructor, has always used creative projects to engage her students with complex scientific concepts. In the past, her Introduction to Anthropology courses (ANTH U102) asked students to create analog board games to convey information about rites of passage in different cultures. Today, she uses Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools to enable students to envision new worlds.
In Environmental Science (BIOL U270), Broadus invites students to view Avatar: The Way of the Water through a scientific lens. Students analyze the fictional ecosystems in class, then they use Microsoft CoPilot, ChatGPT, or other GenAI image generators to create new creatures that could be at home in the environment of the planet Pandora. The students’ creations often look like they could step right out of a video game.
Students work with GenAI to describe the features that will make their creatures into apex predators, prey species, or vegetation within the Pandoran oceans or landscapes. Students then write a report describing their creature’s environmental adaptations, food sources, and other features that make their creations a productive part of the ecosystems on the world of Pandora.
Bonus Tip: If you regularly use ChatGPT to make images, your images are saved in one place, in your ChatGPT Image Library.
Thank you to professor Broadus, former Bill Drake Outstanding Adjunct Faculty Member of the Year, for sharing her inspiring assignment ideas!
AI Spark Tips: How AI Ready Are You?
New AI tools emerge every day. A recent Y Combinator podcast claims that 5 new Agentic AI companies will arise for every cloud-based application we use today. No conventional human could ever keep up.
Today’s tool encourages us to take a pause and reflect on how ready we are for the onslaught of opportunities we find in Generative AI and related apps. The approximately 20-minute AI Knowledge Check created by the University of Saskatchewan provides a guided tune-up of AI literacy skills. This Knowledge Check can serve as a launching point to open a class unit about AI ethics or a research-based project where you may or may not encourage students to use AI.
Bonus Tip: Throughout the AI Knowledge Check tool, users are introduced to tips and resources about “Being AI Literate.” These resources include the ROBOT Checklist for responsible AI, the UNESCO AI Competency Framework for Students, tips for evaluating GenAI Outputs, and an overview of Human-Centered AI.
AI Spark Tips: Generating Grading Rubrics with AI
Within your Blackboard learning management system (LMS) platform, you can use AI to generate rubrics specifically matched to your assignment instructions and the learning outcomes of your course. As you create an assignment, just click Add Rubric, then generate Rubric to reach the AI rubric interface.
Cut and paste assignment instructions, course outcomes, and even a Word document table of an existing rubric, then set the parameters for the ways you wish to assess your students’ work, such as points v. percentage, performance categories, number of evaluation criteria. Finally, edit the performance descriptions to make the rubric work well for both you and your students.
Bonus Tip: Grading assignments using a rubric can streamline your grading workflow and decrease the amount of time spent on grading. Use rubric performance descriptions to explain the typical issues seen at that level of performance to avoid repeating the same kinds of comments in your personalized feedback to each student.
Learn more about Blackboard’s Rubric Generation with AI Design Assistant.
AI Spark Tips: NotebookLM for Multimedia Research
Google’s NotebookLM can be an innovative partner as you design instructional materials. Upload up to 20 sources–including YouTube videos and audio files–then ask NotebookLM to create summaries, notes, assessment questions, and even an AI-generated podcast conversation based on the sources you select.
It is important to be attentive to FERPA, data privacy, copyright and intellectual property laws and policies as you select sources to load into NotebookLM. Open Educational Resources, publicly-available and public domain sources, and materials you design are all great options for sources to include.
Bonus Tip: Share your notebooks with colleagues and collaborators who can edit materials in a shared project, or share view and interaction access with students to create an interactive learning experience covering multiple course sources in different formats.
Learn more at NotebookLM.
For more information about Ethical Use of Artificial Intelligence, please check out the Instructor’s Guide to Generative Artificial Intelligence in the Classroom (login to Spartan Hub with your USC Upstate email username and password) and our university policies on Responsible Use of Data, Technology, and User Credentials.
AI Spark Tips: Personalize Student Coaching with AI
ContactNord’s AI Tutor Pro offers students opportunities to chat with AI to either check their knowledge and skills or deepen their knowledge on a topic. Students select their learning level (e.g., undergraduate or graduate), level of difficulty (introductory through advanced), their preferred language, and the topic or content they wish to explore.
AI Tutor Pro follows guidelines for coaching learners, not providing them answers, so instructors can trust that this interface will not write a paper for a student.
Bonus: At the end of their AI tutoring session, students can download their chat transcript and turn it in as an assignment in your course. Ask learners to add a reflection about the AI’s accuracy and/or bias to prompt students to think critically about the strengths and limitations of AI.
Learn More at AI Tutor Pro.
