Streamline Your Course Prep With ChatGPT
A Helpful Pre-Semester Guide for Higher Ed Faculty
Ready or not, there’s a new semester on the horizon. In fact, it can feel as if there’s always a new semester on the horizon. And as a faculty member, you know what that means: course prep. Sigh. Whether you’re introducing a brand new course or updating or refining a well-worn one, the task can feel daunting.
Fortunately, ChatGPT is here to lend a helping hand, (or rather, an algorithm). You can use this natural language model as a powerful tool in your class prep toolkit, ready to assist you all the way from the early planning stages to the final polishing touches.
Not quite sure what that means? Let’s delve deeper. If you teach in secondary or higher education, here are some ways ChatGPT can make your life easier. (You can thank me later!)
1. Suggesting a List of Topics
Prepping for a new class that starts soon? Don’t want to make your students buy an expensive and/or soon-to-be outdated textbook — but don’t want to start from scratch and reinvent the wheel either? I’ve been there. One good use of ChatGPT is to get the ball rolling on what topics you’re going to cover.
HOW TO: First, tell ChatGPT a little about what class you’re teaching, and at what level. Include a course description and any desired learning outcomes, then ask it to suggest a list of topics for that class, for the upcoming session.
If the class is fifteen weeks long, you can ask for a list of fifteen topics. If it’s an eight week quarter, you can ask for eight. If you want to pick and choose the best of the bunch, ask it for twenty five or thirty suggested topics and grab the ones that you feel are most valuable to cover.
As an added bonus, after you have the list of topics you want to cover, you can also ask ChatGPT which order it recommends you cover them in and why. Which brings us to our next step in the process…
2. Developing Your Syllabus
Crafting a syllabus is one of the most vital steps in course preparation. Unfortunately, it’s not always an easy one. It used to take me several days or — if I was feeling particularly procrastination-prone — even weeks to craft a new syllabus from scratch, but not any longer. This is one task where ChatGPT can really come in handy.
Example: Regardless of what class you’re planning — whether it’s Quantum Mechanics or 19th Century British Literature — if you provide ChatGPT with your general ideas it will construct a syllabus outline with the learning objectives, topics for each week, and assessment methods.
Of course, you’ll need to fill in and adjust plenty of details to make it work specifically for your class, but having a great first draft to work from can go a long way and save a lot of time. For me it was like starting at step four or five, instead of staring at a blank page for a couple days!
NOTE: It’s important to remember that natural language AI is a creative *tool* and not a replacement for your knowledge. Your personal expertise in your subject is what makes it possible to use this tool in this way. If I were to use ChatGPT to generate a list of topics and a syllabus for a class in Organic Chemistry, for example, I would have absolutely no way to assess the accuracy, validity, quality or usefulness of the ideas it suggested. (And it does make mistakes sometimes, just like every human does, so you do have to know your stuff.)
3. Designing Assignments
Creating meaningful, effective and engaging assignments is another challenging part of course preparation. Luckily, ChatGPT is a terrific brainstorming partner in this area of course prep.
Example: If you’re a Biology professor designing a Genetics course, ask ChatGPT for a range of assignments — from lab exercises on DNA extraction to research papers on genetic disorders.
Meanwhile, for Philosophy professors preparing a course on Ethics, ChatGPT can suggest thought-provoking assignments like reflective essays on ethical theories or debates on real-world ethical dilemmas.
I’ve found that the more specific I get in my requests, the better the output and the more likely it is that I can find something I’d like to try. I also ask for more options than I actually need here and whittle it down to the ones I like. I can ask ChatGPT to suggest five or ten possible possible assignments for each topic on my syllabus, and then choose the one that sounds best to me.
HOT TIP!! I’ll write more about this topic in future articles, but remember that your students have access to all the natural language models as well. So if you ask them to just write an essay on X, they’re very likely to log onto ChatGPT and past your essay prompt into the model.
To avoid or at least minimize the likelihood of student AI-plagiarism, consider that element in your assignments. When you’re brainstorming ideas, try asking ChatGPT to suggest some assignments, “…that you could not do for my students!” I’ve gotten some interesting results in that way. (Be sure to test each one by trying it yourself, because sometimes… well… you know.)
4. Crafting Exam and Quiz Questions
I don’t know about you, but one of the most appealing aspects of adopting certain textbooks is the test bank of quiz and exam questions provided by the publisher. It can take a (very!) long time to read a chapter or an article and then generate a complete quiz or exam on your own — let alone an entire test bank with multiple choices of quiz/exam types for a course. Fortunately, ChatGPT can also assist you in creating robust quiz and exam questions that effectively measure your students’ grasp of the material.
If I have an article I want my students to read, I can paste the text of that article into ChatGPT and ask it to, for example, generate 15 multiple choice (or essay or short answer) questions based solely upon the information in that article. It takes seconds!
Once I have the list of possible questions, I can review them, throw out the weaker ones, and use only the ones that work best for my class assessments. If I need a few more, I can ask for them. Make sure you do that review though! They won’t all be winners!
5. Brainstorming Class Engagement Activities
In this era of VSAS (Very Short Attention Spans!), keeping students engaged in class activities can be a challenge. I find that ChatGPT is a great brainstorming tool in that way. It can supply a stream of creative ideas — many of which I can’t use directly, but some of which I can, and many of which spark even more ideas of my own.
Example: If you’re an Engineering professor teaching a course on Sustainable Energy, ChatGPT might suggest an activity where students design a sustainable home model using CAD software.
Alternatively, if you’re a History professor teaching World War II, ChatGPT may propose a creative role-playing activity where students debate key events leading to the war, helping them engage with historical facts in a deeper way.
Conclusion
With ChatGPT at your side, the daunting task of course prep might just become your new favorite activity. (Not likely, but maybe!) Remember, it doesn’t have to be a big leap; you can start small and see how this tool fits into your course preparation process.
So, why not give it a whirl? Let’s embark on this exciting journey together, exploring new frontiers in education, and revolutionizing the way we teach and learn. The new semester won’t know what hit it!
If I’ve overlooked any of the ways that you yourself use ChatGPT or other natural language models such as Bard, Bing or Claude2, please do clue me in with a comment on this article. I want to try all the things that ChatGPT can do to make my life and work easier.
Thanks for reading!
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