Schools, universities seeking ways to responsibly incorporate AI into curriculums

WASHINGTON -  If you’re a parent, chances are pretty good your kid knows about AI chatbots. 

We’re living in a world where you can copy and paste an essay question into a Chatbot and within seconds it can spit out multiple paragraphs.

 At its best, the student can compare that essay to one they wrote, find potential inaccuracies in the AI essay, see if the AI essay expressed something more clearly than an original essay. At its worst, that student could copy, paste and submit it.

"I don't know if it helps or harms"

Big picture view:

It’s a micro-hypothetical for a macro part of students lives.

 FOX 5 spoke with students at the University of the District of Columbia.

Camille Campbell is a student who doesn’t use Chatbots, but has heard of academic integrity issues.

"I don’t know if it helps them or harms them, because some people use that as the way to plagiarize their work," Campbell said.

 Miles Rosser is a first-year law student who doesn’t trust everything the Chatbot spits out.

"Besides the honor aspect of it, it just doesn’t give you the right information. I’ve known people who have used it for quotes and citations, and it just gives you the wrong information. And I can’t trust that. I can’t put my name on work that is untrustworthy," Rosser said. 

"We have a lot of ground to make up"

Dig deeper:

If you do a search for your school district or university and "AI Policy," it's likely that there’s something on its website, but how robust and comprehensive it is varies from place to place.

Dr. Amy Allen studies AI and education at Virginia Tech and says her research shows it varies from state to state, district to district, university to university, teacher to teacher.

"We see teachers and also education researchers who are viewing AI as either like this positive magical thing that's going to change technology in the classrooms for the better and it's going be a magical teaching tool, or it's going to be absolutely terrible and change everything we know about teaching. Students are going to cheat, there's going to be no way to really track what they're doing. And so my research came out of that place of like, maybe there's a middle because we know that not only is AI going to find a bigger place in classrooms, but it's already there," Allen said.

Finding that middle is the challenge. There’s unanimity that academic integrity is a top priority, and there’s generally an acknowledgment that AI can be a useful tool to learn. But years into this Chatbot era, there’s still more work to do to effectively integrate it into curriculums.

 The Virginia Department of Education has this five-page document as a guide for educators that lays out general guidelines and principles. 

In Maryland, Montgomery County Public Schools Superintendent Thomas Taylor says there’s been additional training for school leaders as recently as last week to help use AI to supplement learning, but says the district has more it can do.

"We have a lot of ground to make up with regards to guardrails and guidance, not just for our students, but also for our educators. There’s a tremendous gap we have to close in terms of educator awareness and educator proficiency," said Dr. Taylor.

"A tremendously exciting opportunity"

What they're saying:

Taylor says it’s a challenge to that quickly, especially given how fast AI is changing and evolving.

"To figure out where this fits into our learning environment, how we leverage the positive pieces while maintaining some guard rails and providing a safe learning environment for our young people, those are going to rule the day. But this also has a tremendously exciting opportunity to engage our young people," Taylor said.

Dr. Amy Allen says "catching up" will likely always be a challenge for educators given the speed with which AI is moving.

FOX 5 asked her what she’d say to a parent about making sure kids are using this for good.

She encourages parents to have kids show them how it works and it’s limitations, like when it gives incorrect information.

She also encouraged a more philosophical conversation with kids.

"There's a big conversation about like, 'what's the point of learning?' Like, sure, you can use AI to do this assignment for you, but why are you in school? And what is that shortcut going to cost you later?" Allen said.