These two weeks of ONL journey brought me through an impactful, challenging and encouraging ride on open education practices in the time of generative AI use.
It was impactful to dialogue with my PBL group and the larger community of educators connected through Dr Maha Bali’s talk, who shared our honest concerns and struggles with democratising learning while engaging meaningful pedagogy with our students. I found the intentional focus on sharing, opening, collaborating among educators across institutions and disciplines particularly encouraging. In discussing the framework for Open Education Practices (OER) in response to generative AI in education (Mills, Bali & Eaton, 2023), the authors shared many thoughtful ideas on engaging faculty, going beyond prompt design and understanding how students are using generative AI to bypass plagiarism detection and so on.
Personally, I adopt the attitude of working with technology and generative AI is a technology. The deeper implication of leveraging it is to engage students to consider responsible, ethical use, for their own cognitive development, for instance, with critical evaluation and independent expressions. I find the many sharing and discussion communities (Listservs, social media, google docs) Anna Mills (in the paper) referred to truly demonstrate how we can role-model the right learning attitude for students: start and express or share ideas at the stage of imperfection. Let it iterate and grow, with the community. Her attitude certainly reflects the ONL philosophy of taking the initiative of sharing insights and learning points, with candid show of imperfections as the sharing grows.
Reading and discussing about developing and sharing OERs in our disciplines, and sharing these to test ideas (e.g. Eaton on College Unbound) have inspired me to find a purpose and reason to share course designs, assignment ideas, reflections on pedagogy developments in response to changing students’ learning styles, industry and technological enablers. The immersive reflection these two weeks has made me less self-conscious of sharing and reaching out with vulnerability (brown, 2017) A current example is educators need to negotiate and respond to the use of generative AI (brown, 2017). It is an exciting time to learn how to harness its intelligence, adapt pedagogical approach and manage students’ experience. I have started enlisting generative AI support for class and workshops. And each time I used it, I informed students and participants as it is an opportunity to discuss fair and proper use of the tool. I’ve enlisted ChatGPT (3.5) to help simplify definitions (e.g. the concept of male gaze in media studies), develop role-play personas (for assertive conversations), expand on case scenarios (for communication courses), and develop marketing messages to cater to different demographic groups for the same products. The potential of generative AI is immense. Moving forward, aside from considering meaningful use, I will focus more strongly on facilitating fair and proper use among learners.
References
Bali, M., Cronin, C., & Jhangiani, R. S. (2020). Framing open educational practices from a social justice perspective. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2020(1), 1-12. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/jime.565
Bali, M. (2024). Towards Openness that promotes social justice. [Webinar]. Centre for Learning & Teaching American University in Cairo. Virtually Connecting and Equity Unbound. https://bit.ly/onl24bali
brown, a. (2017). Emergent strategy: Shaping change, changing worlds. AK Press.
Eaton, L. (2023a, January 9). College unbound – AI generative tools policy development plan. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w1NKdOM2UW359_XPdtyVhMq6pBEt2B5rPNIfs3HeZN0/
Mills, A. (Curator). (n.d.). AI text generators and teaching writing: Starting points for inquiry. writing across the curriculum clearinghouse. https://wac.colostate.edu/repository/collections/ai-text-generators-and-teaching-writing-starting-points-for-inquiry/
Mills, A, Bali, M. and Eaton, L. (2023). How do we respond to generative AI in education? Open educational practices give us a framework for an ongoing process. Journal of Applied Learning & Teaching, 6(1). 16-30. DOI: https://doi.org/10.37074/jalt.2023.6.1.34
