As colleges grapple with AI’s pitfalls, U. of Delaware uses technology to transform faculty lectures into interactive study aides

The University of Delaware a couple decades ago distinguished itself by being one of the early adopters of recording and storing professor lectures.

It now has on file more than 300,000 videos and text transcripts of lectures from its faculty who opted in.

Now, it is on the cutting edge again, using artificial intelligence, or AI, to pilot a new method of transforming that text into interactive study tools, such as practice quizzes, guides and outlines.

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It’s starting small, partnering with Agnes Ly, an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences, and using the lectures she’s recorded over the last 12 years. The tools created from her psychology course lectures, under her guidance, will be tested with students over the course of the semester.

Eight more university professors, spanning fields from geography to marketing, also have signed on, likely beginning to participate during winter session.

“So rather than going out on the internet and finding flashcards on general psychology or borrowing a friend’s notes, it’s directly coming from the content of the course,” said Erin Sicuranza, director of academic technology services.

The move at Delaware’s public flagship university, conducted in collaboration with Amazon Web Services — the company’s cloud technology division — comes as colleges across the region and nation are grappling to get their arms around the vast potential and pitfalls of AI, with new educational uses and programming surfacing across the country every semester.

Some have called for embracing the technology for all its benefits while also accounting for the challenges it presents, such as students using it to write papers and then passing off the work as their own.

As is, students are ahead of professors. A study last year by Tyton Partners found that nearly half of college students were using AI tools while less than one-quarter of faculty were doing the same.

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“This technology is here to stay,” Ly said. “We are not going to be able to hold back the flood of AI, but what we can do ... is teach [students] what it is and how to use it responsibly and also for us to be models of how to use it responsibly.”

Examples are emerging elsewhere, too.

The University of Pennsylvania earlier this year announced it was the first Ivy League school to launch a new undergraduate degree in artificial intelligence, a bachelor of science in engineering in AI. The program starts in fall 2024 with classes such as Control for Autonomous Robots, Tiny Machine Learning, and Trustworthy AI.

Also at Penn, Duncan Watts, a computational social scientist, and his colleagues built the Media Bias Detector, which uses artificial intelligence to scan news articles for tone and bias at a time when the country is keenly focused on the presidential election.

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“We wanted to equip regular people with a powerful, useful resource to better understand how major events, like this election, are being reported on,” Duncan told Penn Today in June.

Some colleges are creating digital teaching assistants. At Morehouse College, a historically Black school in Atlanta, the virtual assistants, which are made to look and act like their live counterparts, are seen on a screen, standing in a classroom, using slideshows and other tools, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, which recently featured the effort.

At Gwynedd Mercy University, Cindy Casey, assistant professor and program coordinator for computer information science and mathematics, gives students an assignment to complete on their own and then repeat it, using ChatGPT. They are then asked to look for ChatGPT’s accuracy.

“Students love to find mistakes,” she said. “When they find errors, they can let the program know. This helps to train the model and teaches the students that AI can make mistakes.”

AI can be used in every subject, she said, and she expects more college classrooms to take part.

“There is no other choice,” she said.

At the University of Delaware, the priority, said Jevonia Harris, an educational software engineer whose idea it was to launch the project, is “to keep the human part in AI.”

“Once we have AI create whatever it creates,” she said, “the humans have the final say.”

She explained that Ly reviews topics that AI filters out from her transcripts, keeping those she wants, and then analyzes the content AI creates about those topics.

“So now she has the assurance that what her students are using is something that came from her and she has approved,” Harris said.

Ly and Joe Naccarato, an educational software engineer, demonstrated how the new project works, using the topic of “institutional care,” or how children’s brains are impacted, for example, if they live in an orphanage and are not hugged or held.

“So I can pick that topic to get flash cards” from Ly’s previous lectures, Naccarato said.

Out popped this one: “Correlational studies allow researchers to compare developmental outcomes between children who experienced institutional care and those who did not, or between children adopted out of institutional care and those who remained in care.”

Ly then can approve or reject it.

The fledgling project already attracted interest from other universities — with University of Texas at Austin, Carnegie Mellon, Notre Dame, Cornell and the University of Chicago and others sending representatives to a Zoom presentation the university held in May — and Sicuranza presenting at conferences and on panels.

Both Sicuranza and Harris emphasized that they will use recordings and texts only of those professors who opt in, and students only will be able to access material with permission. The project has been presented to both the board of trustees and members of the faculty senate, Sicuranza said.

Faculty Senate President Vickie Fedele, an associate professor, said the executive committee planned to ask project leaders to address the full senate in the fall.

“Until this address occurs, we will not have enough information to comment responsibly on the project,” Fedele said.

Harris noted: “Consent is one of our highest priorities. Anything we do with faculty data or content, we ask permission.”

Because the technology is so new, said Sicuranza, “we are learning as we go.”

Ly says it can help reinforce what she teaches to about 1,200 students annually.

“Tools like this can definitely help the students who have questions,” she said, including those who need to study at times when she isn’t available to answer.

She appreciated having a voice in how AI is used, she said.

“This is akin to a master’s craft person being given power tools,” Harris said. “She has the expertise. She has the knowledge and now she has the ability to create things quickly.”

How fast the program can be scaled up will depend in part on financial resources; so far most of the work has been done on existing staff time, Sicuranza said. It’s too early to even know what it will cost, she said. Staff need to see how heavily it’s used and the costs associated with using the computer hardware.

“We are trying to scale very thoughtfully,” she said. “That’s why we started with one really good course and one really good faculty member.”