ChatGPT shows face inside classrooms at CSU as creative aid for students – The Cauldron
Michael Swinarski stared blankly at his assignment. After being tasked with creating a survey for a sports management class, he felt that he was at a crossroads with the questions he had come up with.
With encouragement from his professor, Swinarski opened up ChatGPT and plugged in his questions, asking the AI tool to tune up his work and give him more ideas for his survey. In a matter of seconds, ChatGPT spit out a new prompt of Swinarski’s work, giving him new ideas for questions that he could use to revise and refine the survey.
“It does a great job of giving me ideas,” Swinarski, 23, a senior sports management major, shared. “A lot of my professors are one hundred percent for ChatGPT and let us use it for inspiration.”
Swinarski is one of many Cleveland State University (CSU) students encouraged by professors to use ChatGPT as an aid to generate and refine ideas for school projects.
According to a November 2023 survey conducted by BestColleges, 53 percent of college students say they have had coursework in which a professor required or allowed them to use AI for an assignment.
Chris Rennison, the interim senior manager of instructional technology at CSU who facilitates faculty AI literacy workshops, said that he encourages his students to use ChatGPT to help them refine completed work and generate creativity.
“I tend to frame their use as a supplement to the work we first produce in class,” Rennison explained. “We use ChatGPT to generate ideas for podcast topics, refine episode descriptions and quickly produce creative imagery.”
In addition to utilizing ChatGPT in his own classes, Rennison teaches other faculty how they can incorporate the use of ChatGPT into their own classrooms in different ways through the AI literacy workshops he has facilitated.
“Because courses span different disciplines and learning levels, each class is its own context,” Rennison added. “There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’.”
According to Rennison, utilizing ChatGPT is a learning curve, but with any new technology, he believes it will show its face in classrooms more and more in the next couple years as professors become increasingly comfortable with it.
“As we all become more familiar with what is a fairly new technology, you’ll see that develop further,” Rennison said.