Teaching with/about AI
This page provides resources for instructors interested in engaging their students with generative AI as part of the research process. Exploring generative AI tools as part of the research process provides an opportunity to teach students how to think critically about information and the tools we use to discover and create it, which is fundamental to both information literacy and AI literacy.
Before Getting Started
- Consider your goals and how much time you want to devote to teaching with/about AI. Oregon State University’s AI Decision Tree is helpful.
- Consider FERPA and privacy considerations.
- Be clear with your students about what is and is not allowed and how they should cite and document their use of AI.
- If you allow AI usage in your course, consider asking students to research ethical, environmental or privacy considerations related to artificial intelligence and propose, based on their research and personal ethics, how they want to use it.
Assignment Ideas
- Students use ChatGPT to brainstorm a research topic. They then test that research topic by searching for appropriate sources for their information need (news, scholarly articles, etc.) on the Web or using library databases.
- Students use ChatGPT to brainstorm search terms and then use those terms to find sources in library databases.
- Ask students to engage with a generative AI chatbot of their choice. Give them all a specific prompt to use, regardless of what tool they choose to use. Ask them to evaluate the results based on the questions on the Evaluating AI Tools and Output page of this guide. Use this as a basis for discussing the benefits and drawbacks of generative AI, the differences between tools, and any ethical concerns they have.
- Students use ChatGPTt to generate background information on a topic. They then compare that information to what they have learned in class or find in a background source such as an encyclopedia. They may also reflect on what is and is not useful about the chatbot output or correct/edit it.
- Students ask ChatGPT to generate a list of sources on a topic related to the class. They then search for those sources to determine if they are real or hallucinated, which helps students develop search skills. They may also reflect on whether the sources generated were helpful to their research - if they were real, were they specific or relevant enough? If they were hallucinations, were there elements that helped them find good sources such as journals or authors covering the topic?
- Students use ChatGPT to develop an annotated bibliography on a course topic. They then develop their own annotated bibliography and compare the two. What was useful and what wasn’t? Were any sources hallucinated? Were annotations correct, helpful or specific enough?
- Students use a literature search visualization tool such as Research Rabbit to discover new scholarship and understand connections between scholars and how research develops over time, known as the “scholarly conversation.”
Selected Assignment Repositories and Toolkits
Information Literacy and AI:
AI Literacy:
Limitations to Keep in Mind
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Generative AI chatbots are designed to be plausible rather than credible. They often hallucinate, which means they make up information, including citations to non-existent scholarly sources.
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Generative AI chatbots do not have access to and have not been trained on the vast majority of scholarly materials, which are behind a paywall (available via the Library's subscription databases). Although this is beginning to change with some scholarly publishers selling access to journal content to train large language models, most scholarly information is not available to train models.
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Because generative AI chatbots create original responses to prompts, the information they provide is not reproducible. In addition, you may find that multiple users supplying the same prompt to a chatbot simultaneously will produce different responses.
