Harnessing AI to Co-Create OER with Students
In Unit 9, you learned about the principles of Open Pedagogy, a series of practices which involve engaging students in a course through the development, adaptation, or use of open educational resources. These practices might include creating renewable assignments, textbook replacement and enhancement, and open course design, among others. AI may be especially suited to an open pedagogy approach because the technology is new to both students and teachers.
AI and Open Pedagogy
With how quickly AI is evolving, we are, in some sense, going to be discovering alongside students for the foreseeable future. So, there can be a sense of camaraderie: as humans, we are grappling with the nature, ethics, and future of AI. Mills, Bali, and Eaton, in “How do we respond to generative AI in education? Open educational practices give us a framework for an ongoing process,” argue that Open Educational Practices, including Open Pedagogy, can be a “shock absorber,” “providing a rich start to helping educators find their way through generative AI and other future shocks” (2023):
Shocks in education, like the COVID-19 pandemic or the advent of ChatGPT and other AI text generators, create a need to respond quickly, even though we often have insufficient local knowledge to take action. Open and public scholarship becomes a space for us to find and support one another as we build expertise through a turbulent time.
Supporting AI Literacy through Open Pedagogy
The technological advancement of generative AI and the related discussions surrounding fair use and copyright (see Lesson 7) present a unique opportunity to raise awareness and increase student knowledge around open licensing and the ethical use and attribution of AI-generated content. Just as digital literacy is key to both college and workplace skills, critical AI literacy is becoming key and must be taught in college, and to some extent, every course must help to build critical AI literacy as it applies to the subject matter. Maha Bali, in “What I Mean When I Say Critical AI Literacy,” defines it as “the basic skill of how to use AI” + “the capacity to know when, where, and why to use it for a purpose and, importantly, when NOT to use it.”
Using AI to co-create instructional materials with students could be an opportunity to teach critical AI literacy and course content. If we invite students to use AI, we will be helping them practice a healthy skepticism about AI outputs and inviting practice critiquing such outputs for accuracy, bias, and depth of insight. For example, in spring 2023, instructor Emily Pitts Donahoe offered students the opportunity to either write a traditional final paper or collaborate on a piece with her about the ungrading experiments they undertook together. This “renewable assignment” allowed them to reflect on the potential use of AI to support and/or complete writing assignments. They published the piece in the blog “Unmaking the Grade.” (And