Artificial Intelligence in Education

By Michael B Levy, Business Education Department Chair, La Salle Institute NY

When you hear the term Artificial Intelligence, you harken back to Hollywood with movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Terminator — supercomputers that go beyond their intention to dominate their environment. Fortunately, that is Hollywood, but the applications of AI go far beyond a Sci-Fi movie. I intend to discuss how we can start to utilize AI in the classroom.

With all that we’ve heard about AI, it is only natural that educators are somewhat apprehensive about its usage. We often think that students are going to utilize it to cheat. I experienced that myself by catching a couple of students using AI for that purpose on my final exams. My goal is to demonstrate to students how to use AI as a learning tool and not simply as a pathway to an easy grade.

In a 2000 article in Invest Foresight Magazine, Timothy Messon wrote, “Educators find themselves at the forefront of industrial transformation.” No statement is truer. We are at the forefront since it will be up to us to show our students the value of AI and how to use it in an ethical and moral way. I truly believe that educators have lost sight of that, especially when they pursue alternative agendas.

Messon also wrote, “Students must understand and be able to collaborate with AI in school and in future professional roles.” The major concern I have as an educator, but also a twenty-seven-year business professional, is that AI can rob us of original thought, thus making us no better than animals in nature. It is that original thought that makes us unique among all creatures on Earth. The goal has to be educating students and ourselves on the proper usage of AI in the classroom setting.

During the business simulation, which I wrote about in the last article in Relentless, advertising students had to complete a business proposal that went to the fashion houses and retailers in the simulation. Once they completed their proposals, they were tasked with utilizing AI to rewrite their proposals or clean them up in a more professional format. This allowed the students to view alternative ways of presenting their papers and proposals. It becomes a tool to demonstrate proper communication, language, and skills.

When checking papers that students turn in, whether in a term paper format or a short-answer assessment, I propose you utilize more than one AI checker, such as ChatGPT, to review their work. By using three checkers, I can make a better assessment of whether a student utilized AI to do their work. In two such cases, I came across students who used AI on their final exams. Without checking, I never would have noticed it. The value of this is not making accusations without evidence to back them up.

As we move forward and discover more applications for AI, we will need to stay ahead of its usage in education. We must remain aware of students using it for the wrong reasons and develop solid ethical and moral approaches to using AI.