Embracing AI in Education: Teaching Students to Navigate the Digital Era
In the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence (AI), education systems face the challenge of preparing students for a future where AI plays a significant role. Rather than pushing students to simply overcome their reluctance towards AI, one psychology professor suggests a different approach: equipping them with the skills to use AI ethically and critically.
Viktoria Tidikis, a teaching professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences, is spearheading a project funded by a TRAIL grant that encourages students to engage with generative AI in their academic pursuits. The initiative aims to teach students to brainstorm research questions, conduct literature reviews, organize information, and evaluate AI-generated content. Students will learn to fact-check information, consider ethical implications, and use AI responsibly in academia.
“Students are being exposed to powerful technologies without sufficient guidance or training in how to critically evaluate and appropriately use them,” Tidikis said. “My project approaches this resistance as something understandable rather than something students simply need to ‘get over.’ The goal is to help students develop informed, critical and ethical engagement with AI by increasing literacy, transparency, and confidence in how these tools can be used responsibly.”
This project is part of the Transformation through Artificial Intelligence in Learning (TRAIL) initiative, sponsored by the Office of the Provost, which awarded 10 instructional grants and four research grants this year. These grants are designed to foster innovative uses of AI to enhance student learning across various disciplines.
TRAIL Instructional Grant Recipients
- Alana Marta Kuhlman, College of Arts and Letters: Advancing Ethical AI Literacy Through Writing Center Innovation
- Allana Zuckerman, College of Health and Human Services: Teaching Students to Question the Machine: Integrating AI Feedback Auditing and AI-Human Faculty Workflow for Ungrading in a Health Sciences Course
- Benjamin Lucas, Dana Ernst, and Ian Williams, College of the Environment, Forestry, and Natural Sciences: The Pillars of Intelligence: A Foundational Mathematical Sequence for the AI Era
- Carla Nikol Wilson, College of Social and Behavioral Sciences: Queer Archives in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
- Catharyn Shelton, College of Education: Redesigning an Educational Technology Course to Expand Future Teachers’ Critically Conscious, Career-Ready GAI Literacies
- Marco Gerosa, Steve Sanghi College of Engineering: AI-Powered Interview Training for Requirements Elicitation in Software Engineering
- Misha Baltushkin, Dana Ernst, Monika Keindl, and Nandor Sieben, College of the Environment, Forestry, and Natural Sciences: Developing an AI Mathematics Grading Agent for Enhanced Student Feedback and Instructional Efficiency
- Susan K. Williams, The W. A. Franke College of Business: Create and Manage a GenAI Intern: Exploratory Data Analysis with a Human-in-the-Loop
- Viktoria Tidikis, College of Social and Behavioral Sciences: Reducing Student Resistance to AI Through Structured Literacy, Transparency, and Ethical Integration
- Xin Yi Bao, College of Social and Behavioral Sciences: More Human Than Ever: Filmmaking with AI
Integrating AI in Software Development Education
Marco Gerosa’s project at the Steve Sanghi College of Engineering introduces AI into the software engineering curriculum in an unexpected way. Instead of coding, students will engage in simulated client interviews with AI chatbots to define software parameters. This approach provides students with invaluable practice in soft skills, which are often difficult to develop in classroom settings.
“These skills are hard to practice in class because they require close attention from the instructor and practice with real clients who are difficult to recruit,” Gerosa explained. “We want to build a chatbot that would simulate the client of a project and reproduce common issues that real clients do, like providing incomplete, inconsistent and conflicting information.”
AI as a Classmate in Creative Media
Xin Yi Bao, an associate professor in creative media and film, is using AI as a peer in her classroom to demonstrate the unique value of human creativity. In her screenwriting class, AI will undertake tasks such as writing scripts and making shot lists, allowing students to compare their work to AI-generated outputs.
In filmmaking, AI will produce a short film, which students will then evaluate against their own creations. Yi believes this exercise will highlight the distinctiveness of human experiences in creative work—an aspect AI cannot replicate.
“The whole point is to get students to stop treating their own lived experience—their messy histories, trauma, complicated families—as baggage and start seeing it as their greatest creative advantage,” Yi said. “In creative fields, our wounds aren’t a liability; they’re the only thing that separates our work from the A-student who has no soul. AI is a useful mirror for that, because it’s the perfection of ‘correct and polished’ with nothing underneath.”
The top image was generated in MS Copilot. The initial prompt was: Can you create an image that shows people using AI in the classroom? Please do not focus on any individuals; I want it to show a classroom with lots of different people working. Show them using technology to create a writing project. It provided me with what looked like a photo; I wanted something that was obviously not real people. So I added this: Please make it more graphic-like–I don’t want it to be confused with a real photo. And add “made by Copilot” at the bottom. It then gave me a few style options, including the hand-drawn sketch style.
Heidi Toth | NAU Communications
(928) 523-8737 | heidi.toth@nau.edu
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