Generative AI P1: Collaborative Inquiry Into AI and Higher Education - Study Aims and Methodology

This study was shared on May 4 at Middlesex University Dubai at the 2nd International Conference on Technology, Innovation and Sustainability in Business Management (ICTIS 2023). 

Find more information: https://www.mdx.ac.ae/ictis2023.

AIMS OF STUDY
The aim of this auto-ethnographic study is to provide insight into the lived experiences of higher education faculty in their attempt to design a new educational module with an advertising/marketing specialism making the best use of  Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). This is in light of increasingly prevalent social robots, such as ChatGPT4, Dall-E, Designer etc., which are particularly disruptive within the field of advertising. The acceleration of A.I. applications across various fields of content creation has elevated the importance of a graduate’s self-efficacy in working with A.I. in terms of employability. 

The auto-ethnography will be presented in the form of an evocative narrative and will share feelings, hopes, aesthetic reactions, and moral dispositions.  

As befitting a rigorous institutional auto-ethnography, the study will aim to explore the following research questions: 

• Can AI be used to help develop teaching and learning materials?  
• How should we teach AI to advertising students?  
• What are the most effective and useful programs that infuse AI concepts within an advertising curriculum?  

The authors are both affiliated with Middlesex University Dubai:

• Stephen King, Senior Fellow HEA, Senior Lecturer in Media
• Judhi Prasetyo, PhD Candidate, Senior Lecturer in Computing, Informatics and Engineering

Correspondence via s.king@mdx.ac.ae.

Chapters

• 1:40 Introduction Podcast
• 3:00 Start of Podcast

Transcript

Hello and welcome to our podcast about AI in higher education. I'm your host, Judhi Prasetyo from Middlesex University in Dubai, Robotics Lab. In this podcast, we'll be exploring the ways in which artificial intelligence is changing the landscape of education from the viewpoint of a lecturer. 

From personalized learning to chatbots. AI is being used to improve students' outcomes and streamline administrative tasks, but there are also concerns about ethical implication of using AI in education and upon the initial impact on teachers and their roles. Over the course of this Limited Run podcast, we will explore the experience of one lecturer, co-researcher Stephen King as he attempts to enhance his current teaching, using and integrating various AI tools.

Whether you are students, teacher, or just someone interested in the intersection of technology and education. We hope you'll find our podcast informative and engaging. If you enjoy the content of our podcast, please be sure to subscribe and comment .

Your feedback is greatly appreciated and will help us to continue producing high quality episodes. Thank you for tuning in and let's get started. 

Thank you Judhi. So, the overall aim of what we are working on is to provide an insight into the lived experiences of lecturers who are trying to enhance their curriculum and teachng pedogy with artificial intelligence. I have a programme which is due to be reaccredited this summer. So my thought process was what would happen if we put AI into the programme, we used AI to design the programme, and see where that goes. I wanted to share my emotions and feelings as we navigate through Chat G P T 4, Dall-e, designer and the countless other apps out there. AI is accelerating across all different fields,not just in STEM subjects. Advetising is another data hungry industry, and I think it's an appropirate alternative course to a traditional IT course to begin. It has so many Generative-AI tools - design or text - that have an impact on us.

So you think because, with the recent, rise of, the use of ChatGPT Dall-E, you think this is the best time to do this? 

Yes, I perceive this to be similar to the Covid-19 pandemic's impact on education. We've heard of something happening somewhere, we haven't necessarily seen it directly impact us. But then it's going to whack us straight in the face. We will have to jump imediately. And I think we are approaching this inflection point where we will be forced to adopt AI and change many things to accomodate how it has become so omnipresent in our lives.

For this research, what's the hypothesis? What kind of approach, what kind of questions that you would like to answer? 

So a lot of this is related to employability, which is something that drives me personally. I want to graduate students with skills the industry wants. And this study arises out of the teheoretical framework of capital - or techno capital. This develops from Boudieu's theories of cultural, social and economic capital. If we give our students sufficient literacy in the use of AI. If we build their Media literacy, information literacy, digital literacy computational literacy then they will build their technocapital. This can be exchanged and converted to other forms of capital including economic capital through jobs or through entrepreneurship. The aim is to investigate how to enhance quality of the learning experience and the education that we are giving our students for a better outcome for all.

So have you thought about the way how you want to collect the data, how you design the study? 

Sure, the trigger and inspiration for this came from a colleague of ours Sameer. He was presenting about AI from a technology perspective. This was regarding the quality of the tools and what they could currently do. During this presentation I asked him where the blue ocean was. And he prompted us to try action research based methodologies. And so from this I researched the methodology of autoethnography. And having researched what an autoethnography requires, I invited you to join with me to create a collaborative autoethnography to help make something academically rigourous. This to ensure we are meeting academic standards of ethics and rigour.

All right. So we are researching about artificial intelligence, but definitely we need real intelligence as well. The human participants here, who are they? 

Well there is two of us. The boundary is myself and my teaching. I am preparing a daily journal in the run-up to the ICTIS conference. So it is an artificial, accelerated deadline, but I think it is suitable because of the urgency of AI and the need is right here and right now. This is a physical test of AI. The discourse expresses the benefits of AI to make things faster and more efficient. So let's see if I can adapt this in such a short period of time. I am journaling this in One Note, which I'm sharing with you my wonderful co-researcher. I invited you for a number of reasons, one that we have a long relationship already, but also because you an expert in robotics.

Thank you. The way I see it, just like any technologies, it can go the way that we don't expect right? 

Which is one of the reasons we are having these podcasts. According to academic literature descriping the methodology on autoethnographies, we have to take treat the autoethnographer carefully. We have to look after my self care. Whilst I am diving into this content, my emotions are going to be effected by something I didn't expect. I am likely to identify something about myself or the situation that I might not have wanted to encounter. The end output will be something will be practical, it will be a discussion hopefully on a new course, and the processes that were implemented to design that course. 

So since it involves, human participants, although it's ourself would it still need an ethics forms to be submitted? 

We have submitted ethics forms and received approval. Autoethnography is a complex methodology. Because we are offering our own informed consent, and and we are informing ourselves on.what the research is. As we are briefing ourselves, we do not know what we do not know. So the conundrum is how do we ensure the care of the participant when the participant is the researcher. How does the research take care of themself. Another aspect is that there is a lot of power of delivering research through your own voice, so this needs to be assessed on an ongoing basis with a colleague. This will make sure there is no narcisistic outcomes, because we have to take responsibility for the words that we say. These words have power over other people. And this is where I count on you, as I have all the passion but you have to reign me in, and also keep me sane.

Thanks for counting on me. Is this your first time doing autoethnography? 

It is, I am enjoying it. We are through the first week and it has already opened my eyes to new processes and new tools. For example One Note. I have never used it before, and now I am using it various areas of my life. I see the power of how tracking what I am doing on a day-to-day basis, helps me keep productive. It's an exciting new methodology. I have done a number of qualitative techniques in the past. It's another string to my bow.

 Have you used any other tools related to AI?

We are recording this using Descript, an AI-enhanced recording tool which has so many different functions. I have also looked at various graphic design tools over this period. I expect to be using Runway.ML and Tome.App which appears useful for creating slides. We have 30-40 tools identified that need to be assessed, but these are two that have attracted my attention. I've also used a lot of Chat G P T as you may imagine, and even tried to use this for predicting football scores.

Talking more a little bit about ChatGPT how far you have taken this ChatGPT, related to your research? 

So I've done a variety of tests over the first few days, so I have gone from ZERO to level 12. Before the study I had almost no knowledge. No clue. I had attended a couple of talks and seminars organiseed by our colleagues. I had never used it and I was a denier. I was like what is this? I didn't belive it would have any impact. And since then I've gone round a couple of circles, to the point where I agreed with Elon Musk and the Italian Government to cancel everything and now I'm going around again. This is a proper Alice in Wonderland journey, and I'm a few days down the rabbit hole but still excited.

Did you find it, scary at any point? 

Yes. On the same day that Elon Musk and his colleagues wrote stop AI, I was very much in a position where I was imagining all the negative consequences that it could bring. 

Yeah. He, also called for, a pause in development. I think the reason is because, With the help of AI itself, the development can be rolling very fast. Like a snowballing effect become a very big, which actually we don't know where this will be heading. It could help us or it could harm us. But particularly in, in the curriculum development, in what way do you think this could benefit us? In what way this could harm us? 

I don't necessarily see there is any harm in higher education. Elon Musk is talking about taking things beyond where they currently stand. And where they currently stand is very advanced. I have started screen capturing tools that I've been using. We went for breakfast and I'm paying on an App, I'm ordering on the App, paying on the App and the only thing people are doing is bringing food to the table. I'm going to the gym. My gym is monitoring my heart rate and telling me that I'm fitter now, so my targets are higher. We all know Google Maps and Wayz and we are grateful for these tools for helping us navigate the Dubai traffic. It's now a case of from morning to evening, every single step of my life is touched by AI. And therefore any business is being effected as well. And in the classroom, we have to incorporate it. We have heard a lot about Chat G P T being used for cheating and all these other tools. As we go through this study, we may find that trying to ban all this software outright may become like trying to ban the Interent 20 years ago, or a calculator 40 years ago. This is that kind of paradigm shift and we have to accept and deal with it. And I am very confident that at this very early stage that we are going to come up with a fantastic solution.

If you put yourself, in the shoes of student, let's say you're your student, once you use Chat GPT to help doing all your courseworks or assignments?

I think there is a misconception of what is possible with this technology. I think that people who have not conducted the studies and are only listening to it second hand or third hand through media, is just a kind of prejudice against computers. What are we really assessing - their knowledge? And if it's knowledge, what do we need that knowledge for? What about independent or life-long learning, research and study skills? Chat G P T, Tome, Dall-E,Designer are tools to collaborate with to make better work. They are not to replace the work of humans, it is to enhance the work of humans.

Even the new Chat G P Ts that have fantastic results won't be a problem. Because we need to use that to upgrade our learnings. So what we may do on Chat G P T 4 that may achieve 95% of the Bar. But that leaves humans to complete and work towards 96, 97 or 98%. And that one or two additional percentage may not seem like a lot, but that is where the really transformative change happens. So we are already leapfrogging so far, allowing humans to invent new things, which is our role. 

Let's take a look at another AI tool, Dall-E for example. Oh, yeah. A graphic design students using Dall-E probably is not appropriate. Because they are, they're supposed to come up with their creation, but in your domain, advertisement, probably it's okay. For them to use this?

As with any technological enhancement, whether it's the printing press or what have you, it changes jobs it doesn't remove everything. We are looking a new jobs like AI Graphic Designers and Prompt Engineers. These graphic design tools do not magically create perfect images. You need to be able to type in the prompt to help the computer come up with the image. You still have to apply human theories of graphic design, which are many.The old knowledge of graphic design stull apply, and it is the human's jobs to ensure that whatever the computer generates meets those criteria. The AI tools will enhancing what we can do, creating new forms of art, new forms of communication, but students still require the old knowledge so they can programe and prompt. And also make a sanity check to make sure that the output is going to work. And this would be based on the theories that we already know. The computer is just a machine and doing what it is told. It has no empathy, it doesn't know what is happening in current markets and trends.

So that's interesting. , I think that's, all for now. Hopefully next time we will hear more from Stephen King about, To enhance your current teaching using AI and, various tools.