Maybe the robots just want to help?
By: Laura Dux
From the calculator to the internet, new technology has always been an educational disruptor, and in the past two years, educators were pushed again to evolve with the release of ChatGPT–the generative AI-powered chatbot.
Hidden in the folds of the Pasadena City College extension program catalog is a class that was built with the help of AI. Business professional, Bob Cohen has been teaching adults how to better understand and learn new technology since 2009–when he taught a class on how to use personal computers. That first class led him down a path of creating dozens of technology courses. “Using AI Tools for Writing” is Cohen’s new course being offered at the PCC extension program. While the course description mentions the sinister image of HAL from “2001 A Space Odyssey,” the outlook is a seemingly positive view on how to use AI tools, like ChatGPT, for your benefit as a writer.
“I was a pretty early user of ChatGPT,” Cohen said. “I saw that a lot of people were struggling figuring out what [ChatGPT] was and how to use and apply it. So I thought a community education class would be a good idea.…A lot of people just don’t realize the capabilities that [ChatGPT] can do for them.”
ChatGPT is considered to be one of the fastest-growing consumer platforms of all time. In less than a year of being available to the public, the app has gained over 100 million weekly users, according to founder and CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman. It has taken other tech giants years to gain that level of user traction. To give an idea of how insane this amount of growth is, it took Instagram over two years to reach the same demographics.
After explaining what AI is to the class, Cohen dives into how to write a good prompt. The secret? Imagine you’re talking to a person instead of a computer. By being hyper-detailed in your initial ask, you can grow from basic outputs to sophisticated and hyper focused answers. For Cohen, using AI chatbots like ChatGPT now gives him extra time to take on projects that would have originally been too much labor. The internet’s huge reservoir of information is now being served back immediately in the exact way you want to consume it with no delay.
“I teach a class called, ‘live, work, and retire abroad affordably,’” Cohen said. “There are some topics like getting visas for other countries that I haven’t had time to do research on, but I get questions from students. I like to have an extra handout for them to use in class so they can get directions. I tell people, ‘I haven’t checked out these sites, so I don’t know the references,’ but I will use AI to help me do that research. Work that I might not have had time to do before [now] can be done in a matter of seconds.”
Cohen is not alone in using AI as an assistant in the classroom. A study from Education Weekly found that one-third of K-12 teachers have used AI-driven tools in the classroom. Teachers overall found it helpful with creating lesson plans, building rubrics, and giving feedback to students. However, in that same study, 37% said they don’t plan on using AI anytime soon, citing reasons such as they were unsure how to use these tools and had other priorities. But ignoring AI won’t keep it out of the classroom. According to Pew Research Center, 1 out of 5 teenagers who have heard of ChatGPT have used it for schoolwork.
The fear of ChatGPT quickly took hold in schools across the nation upon its release. Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) banned access to it on its wifi networks and district-owned devices. But now that time has passed, some schools have come around to ChatGPT and have walked back some of those early restrictions, partially because banning itself was ineffective and inequitable. A wealthier student, for example, could still access ChatGPT with a personal mobile device or an at-home computer. While the concerns of plagiarism with using AI chatbots haven’t fully diminished, educators are slowly becoming more open to teaching with ChatGPT. During the new academic school year, LAUSD decided to walk back its restrictions on ChatGPT and is even leaning into using more AI in the classroom with the announcement of their own tool, Ed, a personal AI assistant for students.
At PCC, faculty members are also navigating how to teach college education with AI. Last fall, Writing Success Center faculty members Giselle Miralles and Genesis Montalvo led a presentation on how to embrace ChatGPT in the classroom. Attended by just over 30 faculty members, Miralles and Montalvo went over how to reframe looking at ChatGPT not as the enemy, but as a learning tool for students and for themselves.
“For me, it became a matter of like, this is here to stay,” Montalvo said to the Courier. “I don’t want to be a police officer in my classes. I know students are gonna use [ChatGPT], so how do I teach them to use it effectively?”
In Cohen’s class “Using AI Tools for Writing,’’ the embrace of AI and ChatGPT is a handshake. The class is a quick three-hour course with adult professionals ranging from people in the medical field to real estate, government agencies, and college professors. While he shows examples of how to use ChatGPT for fiction and nonfiction writing, most people are looking for it to help their professional writing in the workplace.
“I do get some people that are afraid of [AI],” Cohen said. “I teach adult seniors and there are people that have fears. But if you understand it better, you can find a way to make [AI] useful. It can help not only with your professional life but with your personal activities too.”
