Tag: AI

AI Detection Tool Testing — Initial Results

Briana Fraser

We’ve limited our testing to Turnitin’s AI detection tool. Why? Turnitin has undergone privacy and risk reviews and is a college-approved technology. Other detection tools haven’t been reviewed and may not meet recommended data privacy standards.

What We’ve Learned So Far

  • Unedited AI-generated content often receives a 100% AI-generated score, although more complex writing by ChatGPT4 can score far less than 100%.
  • Adding typos and grammar mistakes or prompting the AI generator to include errors throughout a document can change the AI-generated score from 100% to 0%. 
  • Adding I-statements throughout a document has a dramatic impact in lowering the AI score. 
  • Interrupting the flow of text by replacing one word every couple of sentences with a less likely word, increases the perplexity of the wording and lowers the AI-generated percentage.  AI text generators act like text predictors, creating text by adding the most likely next work. If the detector is perplexed by a word because the word is not the most likely choice, then it’s determined to be human written.
  • Unlike human-generated writing, AI sentences tend to be uniform. Changing the length of sentences throughout a document, making some sentences shorter and others longer and more complex, alters the burstiness and lowers the generated-by-AI score. 
  • By replacing one or two words per paragraph and modifying the length of sentences here and there throughout a chunk of text — i.e. by doing minor tweaks of both perplexity and burstiness — the AI-generated score changes from 100% to 0%. 

To learn more about how AI detection tools work, read AI Classifiers — What’s the problem with detection tools?

AI tools & privacy

Briana Fraser

ChatGPT is underpinned by a large language model that requires massive amounts of data to function and improve. The more data the model is trained on, the better it gets at detecting patterns, anticipating what will come next and generating plausible text.

Uri Gal notes the following privacy concerns in The Conversation:

  • None of us were asked whether OpenAI could use our data. This is a clear violation of privacy, especially when data are sensitive and can be used to identify us, our family members, or our location.
  • Even when data are publicly available their use can breach what we call contextual integrity. This is a fundamental principle in legal discussions of privacy. It requires that individuals’ information is not revealed outside of the context in which it was originally produced.
  • OpenAI offers no procedures for individuals to check whether the company stores their personal information, or to request it be deleted. This is a guaranteed right in accordance with the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – although it’s still under debate whether ChatGPT is compliant with GDPR requirements.
  • This “right to be forgotten” is particularly important in cases where the information is inaccurate or misleading, which seems to be a regular occurrencewith ChatGPT.
  • Moreover, the scraped data ChatGPT was trained on can be proprietary or copyrighted.

When we use AI tools, including detection tools, we are feeding data into these systems. It is important that we understand our obligations and risks.

When an assignment is submitted to Turnitin, the student’s work is saved as part of Turnitin’s database of more than 1 billion student papers. This raises privacy concerns that include:

  • Students’ inability to remove their work from the database
  • The indefinite length of time that papers are stored
  • Access to the content of the papers, especially personal data or sensitive content, including potential security breaches of the server

AI detection tools, including Turnitin, should not be used without students’ knowledge and consent. While Turnitin is a college-approved tool, using it without students’ consent poses a copyright risk (Strawczynski, 2004).  Other AI detection tools have not undergone privacy and risk assessments by our institution and present potential data privacy and copyright risks.

For more information, see our Guidelines for Using Turnitin.

Getting Started with ChatGPT

Briana Fraser

Tips for writing effective prompts

Prompt-crafting takes practice:

  • Focus on tasks where you are an expert & get GPT to help.
  • Give the AI context.
  • Give it step-by-step directions.
  • Get an initial answer. Ask for changes and edits.

Provide as much context as possible and use specific and detailed language. You can include information about:

  • Your desired focus, format, style, intended audience and text length.
  • A list of points you want addressed.
  • What perspective you want the text written from, if applicable.
  • Specific requirements, such as no jargon.

Try an iterative approach

Ethan Mollick offers the following:

  • The best way to use AI systems is not to craft the perfect prompt, but rather to use it interactively. Try asking for something. Then ask the AI to modify or adjust its output. Work with the AI, rather than trying to issue a single command that does everything you want. The more you experiment, the better off you are. Just use the AI a lot, and it will make a big difference – a lesson my class learned as they worked with the AI to create essays.
  • More elaborate and specific prompts work better.
  • Don’t ask it to write an essay about how human error causes catastrophes. The AI will come up with a boring and straightforward piece that does the minimum possible to satisfy your simple demand. Instead, remember you are the expert, and the AI is a tool to help you write. You should push it in the direction you want. For example, provide clear bullet points to your argument: write an essay with the following points: -Humans are prone to error -Most errors are not that important -In complex systems, some errors are catastrophic -Catastrophes cannot be avoided.
  • But even these results are much less interesting than a more complicated prompt: write an essay with the following points. use an academic tone. use at least one clear example. make it concise. write for a well-informed audience. use a style like the New Yorker. make it at least 7 paragraphs. vary the language in each one. end with an ominous note. -Humans are prone to error -Most errors are not that important -In complex systems, some errors are catastrophic -Catastrophes cannot be avoided
  • Try asking for it to be conciseor wordy or detailed, or ask it to be specific or to give examples. Ask it to write in a tone (ominous, academic, straightforward) or to a particular audience (professional, student) or in the style of a particular author or publication (New York Times, tabloid news, academic journal). You are not going to get perfect results, so experimenting (and using the little “regenerate response” button) will help you get to the right place. Over time, you will start to learn the “language” that ChatGPT is using.

Get ChatGPT to ask you questions

Instead of coming up with your own prompts, try getting the AI to ask you questions to get the information it needs. In a recent Twitter post, Ethan Mollick notes that this approach produced surprisingly good results.

Ideas for using ChatGPT with students

For lots of great ideas and advice, watch Unlocking the Power of AI: How Tools Like ChatGPT Can Make Teaching Easier and More Effective.

  • Use it to create counterarguments to students work. Students can use the AI output to further refine their arguments and help them clarify their positions.
  • Use it to write something for different audiences and have students compare the output and identify how writing changes for a general versus expert audience.
  • Use ChatGPT for a first draft and then have students edit a second draft with critiques, corrections, and additions.
  • Use it to start a discussion. For example, ask ChatGPT why one theory is better than another. Then, ask again why the second theory is better.
  • Use it to generate a list of common misconceptions and then have students address them.
  • Ask students to generate a ChatGPT response to a question of their own choosing, and then write an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the ChatGPT response.

Some ways you can use ChatGPT

  • Use it to create a bank of multiple choice and short-answer questions for formative assessment. It can also pre-generate sample responses and feedback.
  • Use it to create examples.
  • Use it to generate ten prompts for a class discussion.

Further reading and resources

Heaven, W.D. (2023, April 6). ChatGPT is going to change education, not destroy it. MIT Technology Review.

Liu, D. et al (2023). How AI can be used meaningfully by teachers and students in 2023. Teaching@Sydney.

Mollick, E. R., & Mollick, L. (2022). New modes of learning enabled by AI Chatbots: Three methods and assignments. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4300783

Rudolph, J. et al (2023). ChatGPT: Bullshit spewer or the end of traditional assessments in higher education? Journal of Applied Learning and Teaching. Vol. 6, No. 1.

ETUG Spring Workshop 2023

Briana Fraser

The Educational Technology Users Group (ETUG) is a community of BC post-secondary educators focused on the ways in which learning and teaching can be enhanced through technology. ETUG’s mission is to support and nurture a vibrant, innovative, evolving, and supportive community that thrives with the collegial sharing of ideas, resources, and ongoing professional development through face-to-face workshops and online activities.

Spring Workshop

This two-day online and in-person workshop will showcase how instructors, education developers, and education technologists are approaching design. For example, we’ll explore how digital literacy, inclusive technology, and AI could be “baked” into courses and how instructors are supported in making design decisions around technology. We’ll also consider the ongoing communication and capacity-building at institutions around digital literacy, accessibility, and AI, such as how teaching and learning centres and libraries get the word out to instructors and students about new approaches and resources.

Join ETUG online in Zoom or in-person at Kwantlen Polytechnic University Lansdowne Road Campus in Richmond, B.C. for this 2-day hybrid event, sponsored by BCcampus.

  • Day 1: June 1, 2023: 9:00 AM to 4:30 PM Pacific Time
  • Day 2: June 2, 2023: 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM Pacific Time

Workshop Rates: 2-day Registration Only

  • Early Bird In-Person: $175 CAD + 5% GST (ends April 29 at 11:59 PM)
  • Regular Rate In-Person: $200 CAD + 5% GST
  • Online: $150 CAD + 5% GST
  • Students: Free

Childcare

Attending an event sometimes means choosing professional development at the expense of spending time with family, but for large, multi-day events hosted by BCcampus, participants do not have to choose one over the other. Please let us know when you register if you will require childcare. You can read more about our childcare program and provider here Childcare Program Information

In order to secure nannies in time, our childcare registration cut-off date is May 15, 2023. 

Registration

Register online to attend the ETUG Spring Workshop

 

Fostering Learner Engagement with ePortfolios

Fostering Learner Engagement with ePortfolios

susanbonham

EdTech is pleased to welcome Dr. Gail Ring and Dr. Melissa Shaquid Pirie Cross to campus to share their expertise on ePortfolios on November 21st from 11:00-12:00 (in person and online).

Registration Information

Here’s what they’ve shared about their presentation:

True learning ePortfolios provide students with multiple opportunities to revisit and reconsider the evidence of their learning experiences and present that learning to an external audience. As ePortfolio practitioners and evangelists, we have long believed in the power of ePortfolios to facilitate student learning, agency and engagement. We also understand that the practices of folio thinking, and the benefits that can be achieved by those practices, often requires a pedagogical shift from both faculty and students.

In this presentation we will share stories that demonstrate how portfolios can contribute a more learner-centered, process-oriented approach to teaching and learning supporting:

  • Reflection by giving students an opportunity to pause and reflect on their accomplishments, which often reveals new learning that can contribute to the development of their professional and digital identities.
  • Integrative learning over time, across contexts, and with intention (Patton and Reynolds, 2014) through Portfolio development and folio thinking practices.
  • Engagement of faculty in professional development applications and uses that lead to the integration of portfolios into instruction and assessment throughout the curriculum.

The result of these efforts include reflective, evidence-rich portfolios that have future value for both students and the university to showcase learning successes throughout/across the learning journey.

We will share a variety of examples that encompass everything from preparation for university to preparation for career. The examples presented will demonstrate holistic learning and lifelong folio participation practices.

Bios: 

Dr. Gail Ring, Director of Service and Partnerships for PebblePad, North America

Gail has had an extensive career in higher education. In addition to her work as an educator, she has founded and directed a number of teaching and learning centers. Formerly, she was the Director, Portfolio Program, Clemson University. For more information about Dr. Ring, including her research and publications, please see her professional portfolio.

Dr. Melissa Shaquid Pirie Cross, Implementation Specialist for PebblePad, North America

In addition to being an educator, Melissa has had roles as a public relations and retention specialist, a coordinator of dual enrollment programs, a director of student and academic services, and a faculty training and development coordinator in several community college and public universities. She has taught with portfolios extensively at Portland State University and is passionate about sharing her expertise with folio pedagogy.

Captions are now automatic on all new Kaltura media

Luke McKnight

New media content added to Kaltura MediaSpace will be automatically captioned, whether uploaded via the Langara MediaSpace website at https://mediaspace.langara.ca, or via My Tools > My Media in Brightspace. These captions are machine-generated and should be available within 30 minutes of uploading your file. All media, including screen recordings, file uploads, web recordings, and most YouTube imports, will have captions added when uploaded to Kaltura. These are closed captions that can be deactivated by the media owner and when available, toggled on and off by the viewer. Existing media—uploaded before October 18th, 2022—will not have captions automatically added but you can request captions for this media.

Keep in mind, machine-generated captions are only 85% accurate and will not meet the requirements of students with closed captioning accommodations. Students requiring an accommodation will contact Accessibility Services, who will inform you directly. If you have a student that requires closed captions, edit your captions to ensure they are 99% accurate or contact Langara’s Assistive Technologist to request assistance with human-edited closed captions. 

We developed a Closed Captions slideshow (below) to provide step-by-step instructions for all you need to know about captioning your media in Kaltura MediaSpace/My Media.

Turnitin and Student Privacy

Ari Crossby

Turnitin is a text matching tool that compares students’ written work with a database of student papers, web pages, and academic publications. The two main uses for Turnitin are: 1) for formative or low-stakes assessment of paraphrasing or citation; and 2) for prevention and identification of plagiarism.

Privacy Concerns

When an assignment is submitted to Turnitin for a text matching report, the student’s work is saved as part of Turnitin’s database of more than 1 billion student papers. This raises privacy concerns that include:

  • Students’ inability to remove their work from the database
  • The indefinite length of time that papers are stored
  • Access to the content of the papers, especially personal data or sensitive content, including potential security breaches of the server

Copyright Concerns

In addition, saving a student’s work on Turnitin’s database without their consent may put an institution at risk for legal action based on Canadian copyright law (Strawczynski, 2004). 

Guidelines for Using Turnitin

To mitigate these concerns, we recommend the following guidelines for all instructors using Turnitin:

  1. Be clear and transparent that you will be using Turnitin. Even if a course outline includes a statement indicating that Turnitin will be used in a course, we recommend not relying on that statement alone. Ideally, instructors should also explain to students that their papers will be stored on the company’s database and ask for their consent. If they don’t provide consent, have an alternate plan (see below).
  2. Decide whether or not students’ work needs to be saved on Turnitin’s database. The default is for all papers to be saved, but this can be changed. Not saving papers to the database means that those papers can’t be used to generate future similarity reports, but it does remove the privacy and copyright concerns.
  3. Coach students to remove identifying details. If the students’ submissions will be added to Turnitin’s database, make sure you get them to remove any personal information from their assignment, including their name, student number, address, etc. Meta-data that is embedded should also be removed (e.g. in track changes or file properties). If you’re having them submit to an assignment folder on Brightspace, their name will be with their submission so it shouldn’t be a problem if it’s not on the paper itself.
  4. Don’t run a similarity report for an individual student without their knowledge. Ethical use of Turnitin occurs when it is transparently and equally used for all students. Running a report only on a specific student’s work without their knowledge or consent is not transparent or equal.
  5. Consider whether or not the assignment is appropriate for Turnitin. If the students need to include personal or sensitive information in the assignment, Turnitin should probably not be used. If you do decide to use it, the students’ papers should not be stored in the database.
  6. If contacted by another institution, be cautious about revealing student information. If at some point in the future there is a match to one of your student’s papers in Turnitin’s database, Turnitin does not give the other institution access to the text of the paper but will provide the instructor at the other institution with your email. If you are contacted about a match, consider carefully before forwarding the paper or any identifying details about the student to the other institution. If you do want to forward the paper, you should obtain the student’s consent.

Alternatives to Confirm Authorship When Turnitin is Not Used

If a student objects to having their paper submitted to Turnitin, or if the assignment is not appropriate for submission to Turnitin because it includes personal or sensitive content, you can increase confidence that the students are doing their own work in other ways. For example, an instructor can require any or all of the following:

  • submission of multiple drafts
  • annotation of reference lists
  • oral defence of their work

Requiring students to complete any or all of these will increase the student’s workload which would mean that students who opt out of Turnitin aren’t at an advantage over students who opt in.

Helping Students Make Turnitin Work for Them

If you’re using Turnitin, it’s highly recommended that you adjust the settings to allow the students to see their similarity reports. You may need to teach students how to interpret the reports if they haven’t learned how to do so from a previous course. Turnitin’s website has resources if you need them (https://help.turnitin.com/feedback-studio/turnitin-website/student/student-category.htm#TheSimilarityReport) and you can also point your students to the Turnitin link on Langara’s Help with Student Learning Tools iweb (https://iweb.langara.ca/lts/brightspace/turnitin/). Finally, remember that these reports won’t be helpful to a student if they’re not given the chance to revise and resubmit after they see the report. In Brightspace, we recommend that instructors set up two separate assignment folders with Turnitin enabled: one for their draft and one for the final submission.

Have questions?

If you need support with Turnitin, please contact edtech@langara.ca

References

Strawczynski, J. (2004). When students won’t Turnitin: An examination of the use of plagiarism prevention services in Canada. Education & Law Journal 14(2), 167-190. 

Vanacker, B. (2011). Returning students’ right to access, choice and notice: a proposed code of ethics for instructors using Turnitin. Ethics & Information Technology, 13(4), 327-338.

Zaza, C., & McKenzie, A. (2018). Turnitin® Use at a Canadian University. Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 9(2). https://doi.org/10.5206/cjsotl-rcacea.2018.2.4

Zimmerman, T.A. (2018). Twenty years of Turnitin: In an age of big data, even bigger questions remain. The 2017 CCCC Intellectual Property Annual. Retrieved from https://prod-ncte-cdn.azureedge.net/nctefiles/groups/cccc/committees/ip/2017/zimmerman2017.pdf

Increasing accessibility of course content: How to create closed-captioned videos

Ari Crossby

Increasing accessibility of course content: How to create closed-captioned videos

What are closed captions?

Closed captions are a transcription of dialogue that is added to a video or digital presentation and, when turned on, appears as text on the bottom of the screen. The primary purpose of captions is to support people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing. However, captions have also been shown to support the learning of students who speak English as an additional language, students with learning disabilities, and students who are new to a discipline and may be unfamiliar with the jargon and unique terminology.

Share closed-captioned videos with students in four easy steps

Step one: Upload your video to Kaltura MediaSpace

Before you can add closed captions to a video you will need to upload it to your MediaSpace library. If you are unfamiliar with uploading videos, click through the steps below. If you have experience with MediaSpace, skip ahead to find out how to add closed captions.

Step two: Add and edit closed captions in Kaltura MediaSpace

The following video will walk you through the steps of ordering and editing machine-generated closed captions in MediaSpace.

Direct video link: Kaltura MediaSpace: Adding closed captions

Step three: Publish your video in Kaltura MediaSpace

Newly uploaded media is set to Private by default so after adding closed captions, you will need to publish your video.

Setting a video to Unlisted allows you to share your video with students but makes it unsearchable. Setting a video to Published allows you to share your video or make it available in a Channel or playlist.

""Save the changes, and then Click Go To Media to view the video, or Go To My Media to see the video in your MyMedia library.

Step four: Share your video with your students in Brightspace

You are now ready to share your closed-captioned video with students.  In Brightspace, you can insert Kaltura videos anywhere you find the HTML Editor.