Teaching with Custom AI Chatbots

What can you do with a custom AI chatbot in your teaching? This blog post outlines five types of education-focused chatbots: course assistants, assignment coaches, tutor bots, feedback bots, and conversation simulators.

Educators at the University of Sydney developed Cogniti, a tool for building custom AI chatbots for use in higher education. In this podcast interview, one of the developers and two of the faculty using Cogniti share their experiences.

This article by Tim Lindgren of the Boston College Center for Digital Innovation in Learning details several examples of teaching-focused AI chatbots created by his BC colleagues.

Dan Levy and Angela Pérez Albertos have shared Chapter 10 from their book Teaching Effectively with ChatGPT on their book's website. This chapter provides very practical steps to take for using ChatGPT to design an AI agent for your course.

The ways that major generative AI systems are trained leads them to exhibit sycophancy, "the tendency to flatter rather than inform." This article explains the origins of AI sycophancy and offers prompts to direct AI chatbots toward more useful behaviors.

This study by Jacob Steiss and colleagues looks at the relative quality of feedback on student writing provided by well-trained humans and well-trained AI chatbots. The upshot is that for structured assignments and criterion-based feedback, the AI does about as well as the human experts in providing feedback.

This study conducted in the Harvard University physics department looks to see how learning from a custom AI tutor bot compares to a group active learning experience. Greg Kestin and colleagues report that students using the AI bot learned more in less time than the students in the active learning session.