The Alphabet of Prompt Engineering in Education

 Happy New Year Everyone!

Here is my New Year's Gift for you:

Prompt Engineering is one of the most important tasks in employing AI in your curriculum design.

I have listed some areas we must consider to design proper questions based on the pedagogic purpose. 

Prompt Engineering Alphabet in Education
Assessment	Design prompts that assess students' understanding and application of course material.
Bloom’s Taxonomy	Utilise this framework to create prompts that target different cognitive levels: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.
Critical Thinking	Craft prompts that encourage students to think critically and analytically.
Discussion	Use prompts to stimulate discussion and debate in classroom settings.
Engagement	Develop prompts that actively engage students with the material.
Feedback	Create prompts that facilitate meaningful feedback from both educators and peers.
Grading	Align prompts with grading rubrics to ensure clear and fair evaluation criteria.
Higher-Order Thinking	Encourage higher-order thinking through complex and challenging prompts.
Inclusivity	Ensure prompts are inclusive and considerate of diverse student backgrounds.
Journaling	Incorporate journaling prompts to encourage reflection and personal connection to the material.
Knowledge Acquisition	Use prompts to gauge and facilitate knowledge acquisition.
Learning Outcomes	Align prompts with specific learning outcomes for the course.
Motivation	Design prompts that motivate students to engage deeply with the content.
Novelty	Introduce novel and unique prompts to maintain student interest.
Open-Ended Questions	Use open-ended questions to allow for a range of responses.
Problem-Solving	Develop prompts that require students to apply problem-solving skills.
Questioning Techniques	Employ various questioning techniques to cover a range of topics and skills.
Research	Include prompts that encourage students to conduct independent research.
Skills Development	Focus on prompts that aid in developing specific academic and professional skills.
Technology Integration	Utilise technology to enhance and deliver prompts effectively.
Understanding	Ensure prompts are clear and understandable to all students.
Variety	Offer a variety of prompts to cater to different learning styles and interests.
Work-Related Topics	Incorporate prompts that improve students' writing and communication skills.
eXperimentation	Encourage experimentation with different types of prompts to find what works best.
Yield	Evaluate the effectiveness of prompts in yielding the desired learning outcomes.
Zeal	Instil zeal and enthusiasm in students through engaging and thought-provoking prompts.

Image Source: Why Robotics And Artificial Intelligence Are The Future Of Mankind (forbes.com)

SDGs and Authentic Curriculum in Higher Education

Sustainable Development Goals

 UN SDGs (Agenda 2030): Seven years left! Following Sustainable development goals was established after a successful and most-needed global collaboration to eradicate poverty, protect children, women, and vulnerable people, societies, and, more importantly, protect our planet. The SDGs, or Sustainable Development Goals, were established by the United Nations in 2015 

HE sector in general and higher education institutes in particular have a great responsibility in disseminating these ambitious goals. HEIs, by embedding them into the university curriculum, provide opportunities for students to become ambassadors of sustainable development across the globe.

Three-Step Model for Embedding the Goals into the Curriculum

I have created a model to embed the goals into the university curriculum in three simple and straightforward steps. 

Step One:

Considering the module/program of study learning objectives/outcomes

Step Two: 

On a light touch, go over those 17 goals and pick the most relevant goals to the module/program learning objectives. Depending on the subject discipline, educators might come up with a handful number of goals. Thus, they could reduce 17 SDGs into a handful number of relevant goals to their module/program, which in turn reduces 169 targets to a maximum of 30-40. Not all of these indicators are relevant to the module/program learning objectives, which again reduces the number. 

Step Three: 

Now, educators need to consider Social, Economic, and Environmental dimensions to design appropriate activities/classroom tasks for their students. 

This three-step model allows educators to create opportunities to promote soft skills alongside the subject knowledge. This provides opportunities for students to develop those skills and competencies they need to be able to tackle, engage and solve real-world complex problems. 

Authentic Curriculum and SDGs

Integrating the SDGs into the University curriculum makes the curriculum authentic for the following clear reasons:

1- Links the curriculum to the real-life

The SDGs, by nature, are related to those issues and problems that countries across the globe are struggling with. No single country can resolve them on their own, and it needs a collective and collaborative approach. 

2- Cognitively challenges the students:

By engaging students with tasks related to socio-economics and environmental activities, educators could cognitively challenge their students and push them out of their comfort zones.

3- Evaluative judgement and making feedback central:

Educators, by designing rubrics and appropriate instructions, could provide opportunities for students to evaluate the quality of their own work and also assess the quality of their peers. This approach makes feedback central and sustainable in students' learning journey. 

Two Waves and the Fifth Industrial Revolution

Two Waves and the Fifth Industrial Revolution

This morning I spoke about the future of higher education and new paradigms in the era of generative AI and the 5th industrial revolution today at the University of Sunderland in London Teaching & Learning Symposium 2023.

Soon I will share the slides.

#WeAreSunLon #UoSiL #TeachingandLearningSymposium2023

Slides are available here.

AI and HE Assessment - (Part 3) Continuous Assessment

Continuous Assessment

Following the previous two posts, the advent of Chatbots and their impact on traditional high-stake written submissions in higher education assessment left HEIs with no choice but to refresh and revisit assessments across university curricula. The sector has been reluctant and even lethargic to modernise the evaluation system appropriately in response to the wants and needs of the 21st century. ChatGPT in November 2022 delivered a wake-up shock to the plodding evaluation system in higher education to think about more exciting and meaningful methods of assessments. 

Assessment Distribution

In the previous post, I highlighted the importance of putting more emphasis on Formative assessments in the design and administration of assessment in higher education. In this post, I draw your attention to the distribution of assessment tasks as a combination of low, medium and high-stake assessment points. 

Distributed Assessment greatly elevates the quality of students' learning and reduces their anxiety and stress. It promotes students' evaluative judgement skills, bringing more elements of authenticity in the design and implementation of assessment as a part of the student learning journey. 

To be continued.

Are we ready?

 Are we ready? Artificial intelligence from scientific and research labs has stepped into everyday life since the early 1970s. Seymour Pappert's AI and Media lab at MIT was an excellent example of early research on AI. Artificial Intelligence has rapid and imperceptible growth in industry and business, and we have been using AI innovations in various applications of digital devices. Ironically, sometimes we are unaware that we use an AI product.  Until November this year, the sudden presence of ChatGPT and Chatbots in education was a shock for HE's traditional long-run approaches to assessment.  The sector has no option to revisit and refresh assessment and evaluation methods.  HE sector, businesses, developers and expert communities will also need to consider if we allow the machine to be unlimited to continue learning. It is not so far from the line we are progressing on that the machine will take control. 

Are we ready for this? 

Do we really want this to happen?

                                                                                   Image source: The Age of AI has begun | Bill Gates (gatesnotes.com)

Creating a classroom debate

A short guide for effective classroom debate

Image source: How to Facilitate a Classroom Debate - The Edvocate (theedadvocate.org)

AI & HE Assessment - (Part 2) Process or the Product?

The future of Assessment in Higher Education 

I mentioned in my previous post that after two waves of COVID-19 and Openai ChatGPT, the higher education sector is experiencing a transition to a new era. The era of embracing new teaching methods, learning and modern and innovative assessments. Higher education institutes should avoid using traditional standalone high-stakes assessments with a big percentage of the final grade and rely highly on written submissions. Now we know that mathematically, it is impossible to detect ChatGPT-assisted documents. There are even other bots like Bloomberg with 50 billion parameters! Compare it with just 175 million parameters of ChatGPT! This technology is fast growing, and the industry and businesses have used and dealt with it since the 1970s. The higher education sector was feeling secure and reluctant to AI progress in real-world workplaces until the break threat that the chatbots created for the credibility of the HE evaluation methods in November 2022. 

The Process or the Product

The sector should shift the main evaluation emphasis to the process rather than the product. That simply means moving away from traditional summative types of assessment. Emphasis on the process reveals the unique and vital role of the formative methods in HE assessment methods. Focusing on the process means evaluating students' performance on how they engage with the concepts, building a mental image of the concept and learning, and applying the concept in problem-solving. For those who are not familiar with the  In educational research terminology, assessment is divided into three major categories:

 

• Diagnostic - to evaluate student's prior knowledge and skills 
• Formative - to assess student's learning while it is happening
• Summative - to determine if students have achieved the intended learning outcomes

Diagnostic assessment 

Usually designed and applied by educators in an informal setting prior to instruction by quizzes or MCQ surveys. 

Formative assessments

 This type of assessment is designed by educators to monitor students' learning during the instruction and to check if the learning is happening and areas/learning outcomes that students are struggling with. During formative assessments, students could evaluate their learning and also evaluate their peers learning through some self and peer-assessment activities. Formative assessment will also provide the opportunity to adjust the teaching strategies to educators according to information they gather from students' performance. 

Feedback and feedforward are central characteristics of this type of assessment. Educators' roles during formative activities change to facilitators who observe students' performance and provide them with appropriate and instantaneous feedback while engaging in the activity (task). From this perspective, formative activities are more like performance tests. Based on the nature of the intended learning objectives, educators could use various assessment types for formative purposes. Some popular forms of formative activities are in-class short quizzes, MCQs, rich questioning, entry and exit slips, role-playing, simulation tasks, debates, group activities, etc. The nature of these formative assessments reveals the extent that educators could inject soft skills into the design of learning and assessment to provide space and opportunities for students to develop and enhance the skills and competencies needed to engage with problem-solving situations in real-world workplaces. 

Summative assessments

This type of assessment is designed and used by educators to assess students' achievement of intended learning outcomes at the end of the unit/module/course/programme against some standard benchmark. They are usually high-stakes and take place in formal assessment settings. Traditional unseen written final exams are very common and popular forms of summative assessments. 

The next post will continue this topic on continuous assessment: