Incorporating AI into education can be approached in many ways, and it’s natural to feel excitement, curiosity, caution, or even skepticism about its potential. AI holds the potential to assist and enhance your teaching, offering both opportunities and challenges.

OPPORTUNITIES TO EMPOWER TEACHING

AI offers unique opportunities to address the various needs you encounter as an educator, helping both you and your students thrive.

• Task Initiation Effort: Sometimes, the hardest part is staring at a blank page and getting started. By generating ideas, outlining lesson plans, and creating assignment guidelines, AI can spark the creative process that blends your vision with engaging teaching strategies.

• Personalized Learning: AI allows for more customized learning experiences, especially beneficial for students with diverse learning styles and/or abilities. AI offers educators the potential to address variability in students’ learning experiences by designing personalized student-centric educational content.

• Time-Saving Automation: AI can take over repetitive tasks such as generating feedback on low-stakes assignments and answering frequently asked questions from students. By lightening the load of administrative work, AI gives educators time to focus on teaching, curriculum development, individualized instruction, or student support.

• Education for Everyone: AI opens new ways to participate in the learning process. The support AI offers goes beyond what a single teacher can accommodate, creating a more inclusive and accessible learning environment where every student can thrive.

CHALLENGES TO ADDRESS

While AI offers incredible potential, it’s equally important to consider its challenges. By reflecting on these challenges, you can determine how AI best fits into your educational goals.

• Data Privacy and Security: In public AI models, the risks of data privacy and security exist. It’s essential to remember that our private UT Verse model protects shared data and is a secure, vetted platform for your university business and research use.

• Bias in AI: Based on the data input into AI models, the resulting outputs may be biased in nature. As bias is all our responsibility, the need to stay alert in detecting and rectifying biases in data and aim for fairness and impartiality is vital.

• AI Literacy: One of the key challenges in both teaching and learning with AI is AI literacy, i.e., the understanding of how AI works and the skill to use it effectively. Teaching students to critically engage with AI-generated content such as examining sources and recognizing biases helps build their AI literacy.

• Equity of Access: There is a growing concern that not all students may have equal access to AI tools. However, UT students have access to UT Verse at no additional cost, thereby reducing the digital barrier and creating a more equitable learning environment.

• Creating Safe Spaces for AI Use: As you introduce AI in the classroom, it’s important to foster a safe and open environment where students feel comfortable discussing their experiences with AI. This openness allows students to reflect on their AI use, share their successes and challenges, and reduce fear or anxiety while using AI in classwork.

AI is already embedded in many aspects of our daily lives, but how it fits into your teaching is entirely in your hands. You’re not merely adopting a new tool—you’re shaping its role in your students’ learning experience, just as past educators have done with every transformative innovation.

As you navigate these opportunities and challenges, remember that AI is not a replacement for the human creativity, insight, or connection that only you can provide. Rather, it can be a powerful ally in fostering these values in your classroom. The choices you make today about how AI serves you and your students will influence the future of education, ensuring that AI aligns with the values and goals that matter most to you.