AI in Academic Support and Mentoring

What do you know about AI?

My understanding of AI:  AI stands for artificial intelligence and simply put, it is a program that is capable of performing tasks autonomously, without the intervention of humans, which can be achieved by a varied supporting technologies like machine learning algorithms, natural language processing, and neural networks to include a few. The only thing that is different in humans from what can be the best constructed AI is that humans can make decisions based on gut feeling, emotions, or out of their own will even if the information/facts say otherwise – while AI can make decisions only based on a lot of machine learning, statistical parameters, essentially data and its metadata.

How can AI be helpful: I think AI can be used to perform tasks that are repetitive in nature, follow a specific pattern, and can be basically trained to be performed by a machine, when that task can be broken down into simpler operations and decisions. So, any task which can be trained to a person where they wouldn’t need to be making decisions despite absence of all the information necessary, we can use AI to automate such tasks, save time, and resources.

Read about AI

Will using AI remove the potential for Academic Support, and the potential for the students to think critically about the content?

Using AI does not remove the potential for Academic Support, since giving answers/performing certain tasks is not the only duty of tutors, writing consultations, or Supplemental Instruction leaders.

All these people play an impressive role in making a person a better learner and a better student in more than one way – and as you might have guessed, it involves making some decisions based on emotions, feelings, and abstract concepts which AI could not excel or mimic a human.

As long as humans seek other humans to obtain help, or go about in their lives, we can use AI and tools like this to make our lives easier and perform tasks faster, and inevitably create and find bigger problems to solve using the human mind.

And, yes, if the student is dependent, or uses AI even before learning the content in the traditional ways, then it can possibly remove the potential for them to think critically about the content.

Could biased or inaccurate information be provided by this tool based on the question you have input? How might the bias affect the student you are working with?

Yes. And, if you do not know what you are looking at, or could not verify what any AI tool outputs to you, there is a high chance that there could be biased/incorrect information being passed on to the student.

So, it is highly important to understand this, and use AI as a tool and a companion, and be judgemental of its use and understanding the consequences which include: incorrect information, incorrect answers, lower grades/ranking/positions, loss of trust.

Let’s Practice!

Use ChatGPT (or another open-source AI platform) to come up with:

1. An example problem and solution for a class you’ve recently tutored for

2. Find a new reference material (video, text, graphic) for a topic you’ve recently tutored for

3. Come up with a way to teach a topic you’ve recently tutored for students with a:

• Visual Learning style

• Auditory Learning style

• Kinesthetic Learning style

My take on these prompts and results: 

I feel that theses results are satisfactory can be used in a tutoring session to get to know the topic better, or serve as a starting point to get started on a topic, and I also feel that it is very important to know prompt engineering to construct better prompts before asking AI for responses, as the results might vary based on the prompt asked, since the prompt is the only information we give it. The example given was legitimate, the resource provided was a legitimate and an actual textbook, and I also found the data about inflection point useful, where it provides reasoning as to why all points of zero valued second derivative are not inflection points. I also like the ways to learn using different learning styles provided.

Vishal Dhatrika

Writing Consultant, UMKC Writing Studio

Computer Science and Math Tutor, UMKC SI and Tutoring

UMKC Academic Support and Mentoring

University of Missouri - Kansas City