Faculty Adventures in the AI Learning Frontier: Introduction

Associate Director’s log, stardate 4616.2. Temple University. While minding our own business over here, someone invented generative AI and made it readily accessible to the people of Earth, which includes our students. We find ourselves in a strange and unfamiliar landscape; computer probability projections are useless due to insufficient data¹.  Some faculty members have boldly entered this new terrain.

_______

We decided to call this blog series Faculty Adventures in the AI Learning Frontier not only because Google’s new AI tool Gemini suggested the title but because of its resonance with Star Trek. The original television series and its many reboots and spin-offs depict intrepid adventurers exploring the deep reaches of space, the “final frontier,” as we were reminded at the beginning of each episode. With the rapid evolution of generative AI, we find ourselves standing on the threshold of a strange new world. Teaching in the age of AI is, indeed, a new frontier; instructors are boldly going where no instructor has gone before. With great ingenuity, and at times trepidation, faculty members throughout Temple have begun to explore what it means to integrate AI into their class planning and delivery. 

Over the course of this series, we will showcase examples of activities and assessments that Temple faculty members used in their classes in Fall 2023. In our March 11th post, we will feature assignments used in First Year Writing courses. March 25th will focus on implementation of generative AI assignments and activities in the health sciences and our final post on April 15th will include examples of how instructors across different disciplines have addressed ethics in the use of generative AI. Some of the featured activities and assessments have been designed to help students practice implementing generative AI in their fields while others encourage students to critically interrogate the impact of AI. 

Whether we like it or not, generative AI is now part of our–and our students’–world. It is our responsibility not just to familiarize ourselves with these tools but to help our students make decisions about their use and, should they choose to use them, to do so effectively and ethically. We hope this series will give you some concrete and applicable examples of how to address generative AI in your courses.

_______