With the use of artificial intelligence rapidly accelerating around the world, the controversial tool has become an ever present subject in higher education. Some professors have limited or banned its use in classrooms or on assignments – but not everyone sees it as a bad thing.
Murray State University associate professor of Spanish Robert “Moses” Fritz will present his thoughts on how AI can best help further students’ education in a lecture on Friday titled “Putting the Work Back into Homework: Principles of AI-Based Assignment Design.”
Fritz will discuss how he integrates AI into education, emphasizing its widespread use among students, the need to adapt to its presence without losing traditional teaching values and how he utilizes AI platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini as digital tutors in his Spanish classes.
The Murray State professor said AI is widespread and pervasive – and difficult to detect.
“It's also something that I think we need to address and incorporate into our understanding of what constitutes a good university education, because while these tools threaten the established way of teaching and evaluating students in very significant ways, I don't want to minimize that aspect of this issue,” he said.
“In other ways, they present new opportunities. And considering that these tools are now prevalent in society, I think it's important that university professors find ways to productively integrate this new technology into our way of doing things without losing the value of more traditional means of instruction and learning.”
When Fritz has instructed his classes to use AI for certain assignments, he has found many are already familiar with the technology. However, he’s also gotten pushback from some students who are concerned about using AI tools.
“Some students have outright refused. They're concerned about the environmental impact of AI. They're concerned about the intellectual impact of AI, and I share their concerns wholeheartedly. In cases when students have told me that they refuse to use AI on ethical grounds, I find alternative ways for them to complete assignments,” he said. “So I am very aware that AI is perceived as problematic, and with good reason. So I am not an absolutist in that sense.”
Fritz said detection of AI in homework assignments is becoming increasingly more difficult as some AI tools are getting better at producing content that reads like a student completed the assignment on their own.
“In fact, with the right prompt, you can make it seem even more real by saying, ‘hey, write this paper for me, but make it sound like somebody who isn't a professional wrote it,’” he said. “It's very tricky, and in light of some of its arguably useful aspects, I decided to find ways to make it educationally meaningful. I got to give credit to the Faculty Development Center here at MSU, because they have led a series of AI seminars over the last couple of years, in which they explain how AI works. They explain how faculty at our university and other universities are using AI tools in educationally meaningful ways to enhance instruction.”
Teaching Portuguese and Spanish, both in person and online, Fritz found that AI is able to, with the correct prompt, be a classroom aide for him outside of normal classroom time or with students enrolled in online courses.
“One of the problems of teaching a language online, asynchronously, that is you never have in person meetings with your students, is that they're missing out on opportunities to use the language in real time to communicate meaning, and that's how we as human beings learn languages,” he said. “In an asynchronous, online class, that's difficult to achieve. It's also very common for people to use AI to do homework. So I decided that rather than try to keep AI out, I would use its functionalities to interact with the user, to turn it into a digital tutor.”
Fritz said some of these AI platforms help students learn at their own pace.
“I task the students with using AI platforms like Gemini or ChatGPT as tutors. I provide them with a prompt, the initial instructions that they have to give the platform to define the parameters of the interaction,” Fritz said. “Ten I outlined specifically [in] the parameters [that] the AI is to stay within in terms of coaching students through revisions to a text. [A student’s] role is to copy and paste a text that they wrote under controlled conditions using a lockdown browser and then they go through that brief text and one by one, correct all the errors that the AI identifies.”
Fritz said he stresses to students that he provides full credit for the first version written of the assignment.
“A big reason people cheat is because they're scared of getting a bad grade. So I want to take away that fear and emphasize the learning aspect of the exercise. I tell them ‘go out there and make all the mistakes you want. You're not going to get penalized for that. Just do your best to use the Spanish that you know to communicate information about this topic, and so they get full credit for that first version,’” he said.
After going through revisions line-by-line with the AI platform, Fritz has students submit transcripts of the full exchange so he can review how they interacted with the platform. His students also write short reflections about what they learned about Spanish and what they learned about AI after going through those revisions.
“By giving them these weekly assignments, I'm giving the opportunity to engage with a competent tutor who gives very good feedback,” Fritz said.
He said that he has found that the student interactions with the artificial intelligence platforms are useful, so long as the context and prompt given to the AI tools is specific enough and the intent of its purpose is outlined.
Fritz’s presentation, “Putting the Work Back into Homework: Principles of AI-Based Assignment Design,” will be Feb. 20 at 2: p.m. on Murray State’s campus, in Faculty Hall 208.
