AI tool time: Professors teaching students to augment their skills, not replace them, with AI
Friday, November 1, 2024
Media Contact: Terry Tush | Director of Marketing & Communications | 405-744-2703 | terry.tush@okstate.edu
Dr. Rick Wilson, head of the Department of Management Science and Information Systems (MSIS), is quick to point out that he and his colleagues have been teaching AI in Stillwater since the 1980s.
Just like Wilson’s students decades ago, today’s MSIS students work with large data sets, but AI and machine learning algorithms have helped students perform tasks in seconds that previously took days.
While not every Spears School of Business faculty member has been teaching AI for as long as Wilson, almost all of them are now integrating AI in creative ways.
Business communication has been transformed by AI, and MaKenzie Norman is teaching her students to stay at the forefront despite the obvious pitfalls.
“Well, it’s a little scary,” Norman said. “If the students don’t have the right perspective, they can misuse it to their detriment. If they do have the right perspective, they can use it to increase their abilities. So, I think we proceed with caution, but we acknowledge that this is something that’s going to be used in the real world and in the classroom, and so we need to embrace it and teach the students to use it.”
The Department of Management lecturer has her students conduct AI exploration activities in groups. These activities dive inside some of the major AI language models — Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity — to explore and compare the programs. The students enter similar prompts into each program and then interact with the responses. Sometimes, the students ask AI to expand on a point. Other times they ask it to simplify its response. Norman can follow along with the students thanks to the “track changes” function of Microsoft Word.
Norman has also instituted the C.R.A.P. Test to help students decide if responses given to them by an AI program are trustworthy. Not just a humorous acronym for currency, relevance, authority and purpose, the C.R.A.P. Test arms each student with the ability to navigate the minefield of AI responses long after they’ve left campus.
“If Perplexity gives you a source, you need to look and say, ‘Is this current? Is this reliable? Does this have authority and what is its purpose?” Norman said. “Is the purpose for me to buy every product that they list on the website? Then maybe it’s not something I want to use for my report. Can I use Glassdoor as a source? Maybe. It depends on what data you’re pulling. You just have to make sure it passes the C.R.A.P. Test.”
Faculty members across the country are constantly learning when it comes to integrating AI in the classroom, and OSU’s Dr. Justin Lawrence is no different. The associate professor and William S. Spears Chair in Business Administration in the School of Marketing and International Business read a Wall Street Journal article that likened AI to a person’s second brain, and a lightbulb came on.
Lawrence decided that he would use this same analogy to help his students understand how AI could be implemented in their academic careers and professional journeys. AI shouldn’t replace a student’s brain but should augment it and be another source of knowledge they can tap into. AI, he cautions, still has to be guided, while the human brain remains indispensable.
“Comparing, understanding and utilizing AI is now a fundamental skill like writing or reasoning,” Lawrence said. “Every young person has got to learn how to use AI in their field. I think the sooner we take the approach that we’re going to embrace AI and not try to stop students from using it, I think we’re going to be better off as a school, and our students are going to be better off as well.”
Lawrence teaches classes in marketing strategy, which dive into text mining and predictive analytics. He has his students use AI to build their own custom chatbots so they learn the capabilities and inner workings of similar programs. He also teaches students to use ChatGPT for tasks like understanding sentiment analysis, survey data, monitoring potential channel conflicts and channel management.
His overarching goal is to teach the fundamentals of marketing, and then have his students ask, “How does AI relate to this? How can I use AI as a tool while applying these concepts?”
“I think Spears should be at the forefront of integrating AI into, really, every course that we have,” Lawrence said. “I can’t imagine a single course that couldn’t benefit from adopting and incorporating AI into it at this point.”
Photo by: Artificial Intelligence
Story by: Stephen Howard | Discover@Spears Magazine