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Deep Thoughts by CHAT GPT

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Me: Can you write to me in different cultural styles?

CHAT GPT:

Sure! Here are a few examples of how I can write in different cultural styles:

  • In a formal, business-like style: “Thank you for considering our proposal. We believe that our approach will bring significant value to your organization and look forward to the opportunity to discuss it further.”
  • In a casual, friendly style: “Hey there! How’s it going? Just wanted to check in and see if you had any updates on that project we talked about. Let me know if you need any help or have any questions.”
  • In a more formal, polite style common in East Asian cultures: “Greetings, I hope this message finds you well. I am writing to express my sincere appreciation for the opportunity to work with your esteemed company. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or concerns.”
  • In a more formal, respectful style common in Middle Eastern cultures: “Assalamu alaikum (peace be upon you). I hope this message finds you in good health. I am writing to request your assistance with a matter of great importance. Your kind cooperation in this matter would be greatly appreciated.”

I hope these examples give you a sense of how I can adapt my writing style to different cultural norms. Let me know if you have any other specific cultures in mind and I’d be happy to try writing in that style as well.

assessment, Teaching

CHAT GPT

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I’ve been using this tool since it became publically available to mess around with, and boy oh boy is it a game changer.  For me, I am trying to wrap my head around how this forms the future of education.  I’m not as concerned about how we will stop cheating – but of course that is the immediate question that many of you will have.  Rather than paraphrase what is already out there; I’m going to share with you a recent response that I think sums it up nicely from the EDUCAUSE Connect listserv:

“There are a few responses to ChatGPT (besides panic) that I’ve seen and walked folks through, and it kind of goes by what level of intervention you want to work with.

By tool:

  • Huggingface.co’s output detector: https://huggingface.co/openai-detector
    Also developed by OpenAI, and it’s not 100% effective, but will at least be a somewhat efficient method if there’s something suspicious

 

By question:

  • Ask questions that are very, very specific or require application of a concept to a unique problem or phenomena. The more specific, and more recent, you can be the better. ChatGPT’s data is about a year old, so asking about something more recent means it won’t have good information about it. In addition, asking for specific information from a tool meant to give general information increases the likelihood of misapplication (which would be easy for an instructor to notice).
  • Ask questions ChatGPT can’t discuss. It’s programmed to be limited (for now at least) to avoid controversial topics like the current war in Ukraine. If the course material allows for and it’s appropriate, adding in questions that the bot can’t respond to will mitigate its use.
  • Focusing on process questions rather than informational ones. “Which applies better and why”, “explain a statement and why you think it means that”, “which solution to a problem is more appropriate and why”. The chatbot can’t coherently explain its rationale to specific problems the way a human can.

 

By activity:

  • Authentic assessment can get over some of this by engaging students in activities that the bots can’t experience and draft a response. And there would be (typically) multiple components as part of the demonstration of mastery. This can be accompanied by application essays, “What I learned doing X”.
  • Scaffold work so that written papers are only a component of the final assessment. Even if its including initial and final drafts of work so a paper can’t be generated quickly.
  • Involve ChatGPT. Ask students to generate a paper from prompts about a topic and use their knowledge about the topic to correct it. This could include identifying and correcting misinformation, including citations, etc… Hopefully this would also discourage their use of the tool for academic cheating as they see how easy it is to find problems.

Long term, I think it’s going to take a lot of thinking about what it means to study and assess learning in the age of the chatbots.

As a fun test, I also gave the prompt “What should instructors do to prevent cheating using ChatGPT?” to ChatGPT, and this is the response it gave:

ChatGPT is a chatbot that uses natural language processing (NLP) to generate responses based on a given prompt. It could potentially be used to cheat on exams or assignments by generating answers to questions. Here are some strategies that instructors can use to prevent cheating using ChatGPT or other similar tools:

  1. Make it clear that cheating, including the use of chatbots or other AI tools, is not acceptable and will result in consequences.
  2. Use a variety of assessments, such as open-book exams, take-home exams, or oral exams, to make it more difficult for students to cheat.
  3. Use plagiarism detection software, such as Turnitin, to detect copied work and ensure that students are submitting their own original work.
  4. Monitor students closely during exams to ensure that they are not using ChatGPT or other technologies to cheat.
  5. Consider using proctored exams, in which a proctor monitors students during the exam to prevent cheating.
  6. Educate students about the consequences of cheating and the importance of academic integrity.

Overall, it is important for instructors to be proactive in preventing cheating, including the use of chatbots or other AI tools, and to take appropriate action if they suspect that a student has cheated.

Best,
Dan

—
Daniel Cannity (he/him)
Team Lead, Instructional Design, Engagement, and Support (IDEAS)
University of Massachusetts Amherst
e: dcannity@umass.edu”

I too actually asked the ChatAI about running submissions through plagiarism checkers and got some interesting answers as well.  Also, I love an AI that has been designed to detect whether a writing was written by another AI.  It is all very interesting.  Hold on to your seats and enjoy this rapidly changing world!

 

Teaching, tutorial, Video Creation

Automatic Speech Recognition – Now Available in Different Languages

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New feature!

Echo360!

Change you ASR to be something other than English at the course section level!!

Log into echo360.org

Go to your desired Course, then to Settings and then Features.

and find ASR Language Settings

Then select the new language that you would like your section transcribed to.

Obviously this is fantastic news for language courses.  Let me know in the comments what other courses you will be using this for!

 

Teaching, tutorial

Uses of Groups in Brightspace

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Here is some regular info on creating groups. 

Additionally: 

You can restrict the quiz to be available to a specific group. So if you had five different versions of a quiz, you can assign each group to their own quiz.

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You can set up each group to access quizzes at different times. Here’s a link to the article that has steps on how to set up special access in quizzes, https://community.brightspace.com/s/article/000017306

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If you had everyone doing the same quiz at the same time, but in groups, you can sort your gradebook by group, and then when you see the first grade come in from a group, manually assign it to the rest of the students in that group.

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I hope that helps.  Feel free to send your ideas for how you use groups!
Teaching, tests, tutorial

Brightspace Grading Columns – Part 1

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Setting up an organized gradebook isn’t the same as in Blackboard.  If you are used to Bb, there are going to be some headaches and confusion.

Some things are organizationally nice.  For example, you can assign items to belong to grading categories, and they stay grouped that way in the grading spreadsheet.  Not only that, but items in a grading category will get a subtotal column auto created for you, which I think can be particularly helpful if you are keeping track of attendance in your gradebook. (Note: the attendance tool in Brightspace does not report into the grade book. This is something I manually setup.)

To create new categories or items (columns), you will want to go to “Grades” -> “Manage Grades” and then “New”.

To decide on your categories, you should refer to your course syllabus.  You should have something like:

Class Participation/Attendance – 15%
Quizzes – 20%
Midterm – 20%
Project(s) – 25%
Final – 20%

You can see that every item listed that has multiple items nested (Class Participation/Attendance, Quizzes and possibly Project(s)) will be your categories.  Since there will only be one midterm and one exam, you cou hold them as just singleton items that are not in a category, OR you could make a category called exams and add them both to that.

First make the Categories, then the Items inside the categories.

Since you indicated in the Category that all items would have a total value of 100, the maximum points fills in automatically for all associated items and is a graded out field.

Resulting spreadsheet with grades filled in:

Note: I manually filled in these grades and you are able to do that.  If you want these grades to auto populate from an actual brightspace exam, you will want to go to your Exams/Quizzes area from the NavBar and create or find the exam you want to use, and associate it with the right Grade Item.  

Warning: This is one of the places where Brightspace can be … shall be say, confusing?   When you go to edit your exam/quiz, you will see this:

That Category pull down… even though. yes, we were just calling things items and categories in the Manage Grades area, has NOTHING to do with categories in Grades.

Instead, you will want to switch to the Assessment tab and find the pull down for Grade Item.

If you haven’t already setup the Items in your grade book, you do have an opportunity to select [add grade item] and throw in the item into an existing category.

Now it knows that this Quiz is  from the Category “Exams” and will grade it and submit it into the grade spreadsheet appropriately. It also knows that it will be worth up to 100 points and will be equally weighted with the other exams to the 20% total value of the final grade, because that is how  the category Exams is setup.

End of Part 1

 

 

 

 

 

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Brightspace Training Options

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SUNY CPD’s Brightspace Training Options

As the Fall 2022 semester approaches many SUNY faculty and staff are preparing to design and/or deliver their digital course materials in the new SUNY Brightspace Digital Learning Environment (DLE).  The SUNY Center for Professional Development (CPD) is pleased to support SUNY faculty and staff by providing a variety of Brightspace training opportunities and asynchronous resources.  These training workshops and resources are available for free to all SUNY campuses and are detailed below.

Training Options:

The CPD offers a variety of training opportunities to provide as much flexibility and choice to our SUNY faculty and staff.  Registration for August sessions is open and new sessions are released based upon registration demand.  If you don’t see the workshop you want at the time you need, please continue to check back, the registration site is updated regularly.

Asynchronous Online Modules

• SUNY DLE’s Asynchronous Brightspace modules are a convenient way to progress through the Brightspace training at your own pace.  Progress in the recommended order, or pick and choose which topic(s) are most relevant to your purposes.
• There are optional knowledge checks at the end of each topic sections. Participants who successfully complete all assessments will earn a Brightspace Fundamentals Certificate and Badge from the SUNY CPD.
• Access to asynchronous modules will be staggered to accommodate the priority needs of Cohorts 1 and 2, as well as the availability of faculty accounts in the new Brightspace environment.  When your campus Brightspace account has been created, your campus will provide your login instructions.

Scaled Webinars

• Targeted for larger audiences, these scaled Zoom webinars offer live demonstrations of the Brightspace learning environment and other training topics.  There are opportunities to ask questions of Brightspace experts at each webinar.
• These webinars are open to all SUNY faculty and staff, regardless of cohort.

Remote Synchronous Workshops

• These live “point & click” workshops are offered via Zoom and will cover the Brightspace Fundamentals training materials. Select a training session based upon your preferred training pace (see Training Levels, below).
• These sessions are limited to 10-15 participants per session.
• Currently, Remote Synchronous Workshops are available to Cohorts 1 and 2.

Illuminations

• These advanced Brightspace workshops are offered in the scaled webinar format and feature Brightspace tools and topics not covered in the Brightspace Fundamentals training.
• These workshops will commence September 2022.

Training Levels

We offer multiple training levels to help ensure that faculty and staff receive the style and pace of training that works best for them. Registrants are encouraged to take a brief self-assessment to help identify their training preferences. Upon completion of the self-assessment faculty and staff will be provided a recommended training path. All training opportunities are available, however, regardless of the recommendation.

Recommended paths:

• Spark – Synchronous remote workshops at the “Spark” pace, with supplemental Scaled Webinars and Asynchronous Modules, as desired.
• Ignite – Synchronous remote workshops at the “Ignite” pace, with supplemental Scaled Webinars and Asynchronous Modules, as desired.
• Blaze – Scaled Webinars, supplemented with Asynchronous Modules, as desired.
• Bonfire – Asynchronous Modules, supplement with Scaled Webinars, as desired.

Recordings

• Recordings of all training options are available to SUNY faculty and staff on the SUNY DLE website behind authentication. Log in using your SUNY Federated ID (your campus username and password through single sign on) and you will be granted access to the recordings.
• As new workshop topics are introduced, new videos will be released.

Resource Guides

• Faculty resource guides will be available by August 4, 2022 on the DLE website.
• These guides will provide written instructions for all topics covered in the Brightspace Fundamentals workshops.
• In addition to written instructions, the resource guide page contain links to videos that demonstrate specific tools and actions within the Brightspace environment.

Registration

We look forward to seeing our SUNY faculty and staff in our upcoming SUNY DLE Brightspace programming. For questions regarding programming, please reach out to Jamie Heron, SUNY Online Program Manager, SUNY CPD (jamie.heron@suny.edu).  For technical questions regarding the registration process, please reach out to Viktorya Mirzoyan, Program Coordinator, SUNY CPD (viktorya.mirzoyan@suny.edu).

 

Jamie Heron
SUNY Online Program Manager
SUNY Center for Professional Development

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Brightspace: e-mail the whole class

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So, in my last post, I showed how users can opt in and out of notifications.  In this post we get around students being able to opt out of announcement notifications and also help keep your course site a little cleaner.

As opposed to sending an Announcement, you can email the whole class by going to “Course Admin” in the NavBar -> Learner Management section and click on “Classlist”.

Then select from the top “Email Classlist”

Click on “Send Email”

and compose your email to the whole class here.  Click “Send”.

 

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Brightspace Notifications

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How to setup your alerts  and register your mobile device on Brightspace:

Find Notifications under the location where it says your name.

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Under Contact Methods:

Register your Mobile Device

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Set your SMS and eMail notifications:

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When you have everything setup, click Save at the bottom left corner of the page.

Remember to check your email inside of Brightspace.  You can see that by clicking on the icon that looks like an envelope.

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Name Change – Sorta

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Turning Technologies, our polling/clicker system was purchased by Echo360, our capture system.

What we referred to as Turning Point or Turning Point Anywhere, has been rebranded PointSolutions.

In Brightspace in order to link the course to polling, the instructor will need to make a link available for the students  to be able to register their devices and/or licenses.  To create this link you will go to the Content Menu item, then click on “Existing Activities” -> “External Learning Tools” and select Turning Account Registration.

You may see some overlap between it being called Turning Something-or-other and Pointsolutions for some time, so I wanted you to be aware.

 

 

Emerging Tech for a Changing Edu

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