As an educator, you can leverage ChatGPT to facilitate virtual office hours for your students. This platform enables students to seek clarification and ask questions, providing them with personalized attention and support. Depending on the subject matter, this approach may require some initial effort from the teacher. For instance, you could create a customized chatbot to address content-related queries and make it available online for round-the-clock access. This feature could be limited to specific content areas.a specialized chatbot to answer content questions for the students and place that online for 24/7 access. It could be restricted to specialized content.
Collaborative learning
Teachers can create chat groups for students to work together on group assignments and projects. This will help students to collaborate with their peers, share ideas and work together towards a common goal. Students are used to this type of collaboration, so there wouldn’t have to be great adjustments on their part.
Provide feedback
Teachers can use ChatGPT to provide feedback to students on their assignments and projects. This will help students to understand their strengths and weaknesses and work towards improving their performance. This would require the teacher to submit work to ChatGPT to solicit comments and critiques. We’ll look into this more in this blog and perhaps set up a “how-to” on it in a future post.
Engage in discussions
Teachers can use ChatGPT to create discussion groups where students can engage in discussions on various topics related to their subject. This will help students to develop critical thinking skills and improve their understanding of the subject.
Provide resources
Teachers can use ChatGPT to share resources such as study materials, articles, and videos with their students. This will help students to access additional resources and support their learning outside the classroom. Such resources can be targeted to lessons, but some up-front work will be required to train the ChatGPT model on the specifics of the lesson material. We’ll cover a “how-to” for this in a future post.
Learning to use the tools
Leveraging ChatGPT is much more than just a few query/response activities. It also might involve diving into the inner workings of the chatbot to train it with specialized material that you want students to access.
Leveraging ChatGPT is much more than just a few query/response activities
This can be a difficult process, but it is being made easier by tools that are constantly being developed to do just that. In essence, it can be as easy as feeding PDFs, web links, and document references into a tool to have their contents added to ChatGPT. But more on the particulars later.
Dr. Garrett is Professor Emeritus of Management Information Systems at Eastern Illinois University, where he has been on the faculty for the past 33 years. Now in retirement, he still teaches a course in advanced networking and also develops and teaches courses in online instruction for the University of Illinois at Springfield. He has worked in education as a high school teacher and administrator, a community college dean, and at various other administrative and faculty positions in higher education. In addition, he has extensive experience in networking and programming, having worked as a systems engineer for several years, He is the author of 6 books and over 4 dozen academic and scholarly articles.