In the last year, I have realised that my three goals of teaching (Teaching Philosophy) provides a way to engage with students, engage with content, and engage students with content (Olszewska et al., 2021). I still need to integrate the third aspect more. Delivering the best, carefully curated content in an enthusiastic way is not enough: we need students to engage with the content themselves, to make it their own. I believe my variant of the flipped classroom (see Growth) might provide some insights. Using this as a starting point, I have made the following a core questions for future reflection: how can I “intentionally structure modules in a way which requires students to develop independent learning skills” (quote from Tobi Louw’s Teaching Philosophy, 2020).
Despite my optimism about the use of AI in our high-demand society (see Context), there are still major challenges. We will have to strategise about how best to teach these tools in our undergraduate courses, how to best encourage postgraduate students to use these tools for writing, and how to use these tools to accelerate research—while conveying that accountability remains a core principle.
In my own courses, I will also have to increasingly show the ethical pitfalls of blindly using machine learning. I am already doing this, e.g. in the in-class DatA414 lecture on house price prediction, we talk about the possibility that some of the input variables might correlate with race, \ and the implications of using such models for setting insurance premiums.
Finally, I think there will also be a challenges in convincing the university (and larger society) of the broad potential benefits of AI. There is a lot of fear and uncertainty, but this should not stop us from embracing these tools for what they are (and not more).
T. M. Louw, “Comprehensive teaching portfolio,” Stellenbosch University, 2020.
A. I. Olszewska, E. Bondy, N. Hagler, and H. J. Kim, “A humanizing pedagogy of engagement: Beliefs and practices of award-winning instructors at a U.S. university,” Teaching in Higher Education, 2021.
