Teaching With AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning by José Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson

Custom bots have a lot of advantages. The big one is that they let you control the content. Typically you take all of the content for your course and put it in a folder. You then instruct your custom bot to use it as your knowledge base. Most platforms give you the option of creating a custom bot. ChatGPT has GPT and Gemini has Gems. A custom bot might be designed to give custom tutorial help to each of your students. There are even faculty support bots to help teachers make custom bots.
A custom bot can turn AI from an answer machine into a question machine. A bot can present itself as a avatar. This can be an historic figure like Nelson Mandela or Rosa Parks. It can also represent the teacher. You can even make it act like someone of the student’s age. You can also have multiple avatars converse. You can have students make custom bots as part of your efforts to promote AI literacy. Meta-prompts are prompts that you ask AI to create before you edit them and turn them lose.

As you can imagine, there are more questions regarding AI in education than answers. While some teachers have returned to in-class work for the purposes of grading due to a fear of students cheating with AI, the authors feel that this time has passed. Teachers need to work with AI rather expecting AI to work for them. Every teacher, however, needs to start playing and working with AI, and there are lots of ideas to help them in this book.
It’s safe to expect AI to get better and more ubiquitous. There is already some evidence that AI teaching assistants come across as more human and responsive than human ones. New tools arrive every week, but they may soon be replaced by a small number of big winners. You can’t block AI, but you can be part of the discussion and decision-making.

José has been leading innovation and change for over 40 years at Stanford, Georgetown, and the University of Southampton (UK), He has been a dean at Miami University and SMU and the President of Goucher College (voted a Top 10 Most Innovative College under his leadership). He now runs The Bowen Innovation Group L.L.C., and does innovation, pedagogy and D&I consulting and training in both higher education and for Fortune 500 companies. His website is josebowen.com.
C. Edward Watson, Ph.D, is Vice President for Digital Innovation with the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) and formerly Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Georgia. Dr. Watson is nationally recognized for expertise in general education best practice and reform, evidence-based teaching and learning practices, and as a futurist for higher education. He is also an expert in artificial intelligence in higher education, faculty development, open education resources, ePortfolios, and digital equity. His website is edduewatsio.net.

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