Artificial Intelligence and Student Equity Considerations

Katie Datko, instructional designer and distance education administrator at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut California, joins us to discuss student equity considerations when using AI for learning. This is part 1 of a 2 part interview.

Transcript

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Betsy Allen
Host
00:01
So welcome to Education by Design. I'm your host, betsy Allen Instructional Design Resource Faculty at Woodland Community College. This is a podcast where we talk about all things education, with an emphasis on higher ed. We're coming to you today from the WCC e-learning studio in Woodland, california. Today is part one of a two-part series on artificial intelligence and student equity concerns. For this episode, my guest is Katie Datko. She's an ESL instructor turned instructional designer and distance education administrator currently at Mount San Antonio College in Walnut, california, where she's the director of the Office of Distance Learning and Instructional Technology. Katie's worked in Czechoslovakia, japan and at various colleges in all three California state systems, as well as at private institutions. She claims to be a Luddite at heart, spins and dyes her own yarn from raw wool, weaves and knits, but loves the intersection of human processes and technology. Katie's here today to discuss teaching with artificial intelligence tools and the student equity considerations we should keep in mind when leveraging AI in teaching and learning so welcome. 

Katie Datko
Guest
01:10
Thank you, Betsy, for having me. I'm really excited to be here. 

Betsy Allen
Host
01:13
I'm so excited to have you and I just want to get back to your comment. You mentioned that you're a Luddite at heart and we're here to talk about AI, so please tell me a little bit more about your Luddite-ness. 

Katie Datko
Guest
01:26
Right, yeah, it's so interesting. So I, as you mentioned in your intro, I love processes that are that go back to where we began. You know where humankind began drawing on caves, you know drawing with pen and paper and all of that. So you know, one of the most interesting inventions to change humankind was the invention of the spinning jenny, which spun fiber into thread and yarn and wool and all of that. And then we had looms that created cloth, right, and so that really was a critical juncture in human history, right. 

02:14
And so I think there's a parallel to my interest in technology, because I grew up without computers. So I grew up old school typing on a typewriter in college, right. And so I've seen sort of you know, I was like the spinster spinning on my spinning wheel, you know, and then all of a sudden the PCs came out and it's like, ooh, there's a loom or there's an automated machine which is doing all of the work for us or helping us along with our work and changing processes and procedures. So somehow I've always been drawn to going back to the beginning sometimes, although you know I really I do have a typewriter, I actually have a manual typewriter, but I don't use it. 

Betsy Allen
Host
03:01
So I haven't gone back that far yet. Oh, I do love typewriters, you know. I think you know cause. So it is technology right, like the what you're talking about. 

03:09
You are playing with technology, early technologies, analog technologies, and I'm just thinking coming out of the pandemic or, you know, going through that pandemic where we were in these a lot of virtual spaces, we, a lot of us spent time, maybe for the first time, totally immersed in virtual spaces to communicate outside our homes. But how important for me anyway it was to get back to like really sensory rich activities as well. So those early technologies right are very soothing. It's sort of, you know, it's good, I think, to balance virtual space with these, you know, activities. 

Katie Datko
Guest
03:43
Absolutely, absolutely. And that's one of the things. During the pandemic, I actually spun up tons of fiber and did all sorts of very, very tactile things just to keep me grounded. 

Betsy Allen
Host
03:58
Yeah. 

Katie Datko
Guest
03:59
So yeah. So at heart, you know I'm there. You know if I have to live without a computer I can. 

Betsy Allen
Host
04:05
Yeah, well, that's good because you're prepared for all environments, right, I am. So I thought today it would be good to kind of lead off our conversation, you know, with a definition, or at least a baseline, so we're all on board with what we're talking about when we say generative AI tools. What do you mean when you say generative AI tools? 

Katie Datko
Guest
04:25
Right. So I think there are a lot of definitions that are coming up, but basically these are just what we call large language models, and so they're coming through and it's an algorithmic process that's looking at organizational structures of text or content or data and sort of using that and then generating new content from that. So the new thing about these AI tools, as opposed to other tools that we've had for several years now, is that they're actually using these processes to create content. So that's what's been revolutionary it's creating sort of human-like content. So, basically, if we think of them as you know, things that are going through and organizing information and then giving it back to us, we're able to give it an input and it's able to give us an output, and I think that output is what differentiates it from, you know, data mining, for example. 

Betsy Allen
Host
05:35
Yeah, yeah, and learning right and learning from like we also are shaping it as users. Is that right? Is that fair to say? 

Katie Datko
Guest
05:42
Absolutely yes. So that's an interesting thing too. So it will. If you have a chat, it will learn from our input, so it will continue to look at what we're putting into it, and that's again sort of a structure right, it's a process and then it's taking that process and giving us new output, so so that that's when we think, oh, it's learning, and we think of the Cyberman or the cyborg. 

06:12
You know, we're not there yet. So, basically, it really is just an algorithm or a series of algorithms that are used just to look at what we want and then giving that back to us. 

Betsy Allen
Host
06:29
You know, and I think a lot of society right now is just trying to explore industries, you know, trying to explore how to leverage what AI can do to benefit us right in some way, and I think a lot of discussions are on productivity. But we're here to talk about education and so how do you see, you know, instructors, educators, leveraging AI in teaching and learning in ways that are advantageous for students? 

Katie Datko
Guest
06:59
Absolutely so. You know, ai is just so amazing, this particular series of tools that are coming out. We haven't even gotten to the point where we really know what they can do and how they can help us. So I actually have a former colleague who just released a book. Her name is Lynn Dickinson and her book is how to Use CAT GPT as a Teaching Assistant and it's available on Amazon. And the cool thing about this is she co-created it with GPT, examining how GPT could be sort of like a tutor or a teaching assistant. So in terms of our teaching and learning, we're sort of changing that equation. You know, we had years ago wrote memorization content, I had card catalogs. 

07:52
I remember when the CD-ROM came out and we were so excited because, wow, you know, there's, there's something that can look up something for us or give us a citation, right, yeah, and we can search with an engine of sorts, right. And so we've had sort of access to content, and that was sort of a revolution in itself. But you know, with this type of technology we're moving from that stage-on-the-stage format where instructors were the disseminators of information. You know, we didn't have the information at our fingertips, and so we've been there for maybe the past 25 years with search engines and the internet and all of that. 

08:36
But now we're actually I think AI is getting us to go back to some of these Socratic methods of questioning and analytical evaluation, you know, and these aren't new approaches in teaching and learning I mean, montessori education's been doing this for decades, you know. So we're using these tools that can now push us more into critical analysis and maybe get us to look at text differently. So, instead of creating text, instead of thinking, of writing as thinking which is what we've done before, you know, write an essay on this topic, for example we actually we have the essays that are created and now we can look at that and we can compare it against other information, other sources of information that we know might be peer-reviewed, for example, a peer-re, a peer reviewed text, or something that we put into our courses, where you know we've given our students a framework or a rubric or something to look at, and we say, okay, take this text and analyze it. 

09:37
So I think, in terms of teaching and learning, ai is actually sort of moving us back to the Socratic method, but with our larger class sizes. Now, you know, socratic method was one-on-one. We actually have somebody who can do that. 

09:53
We have an AI Socrates. So you know, and we have a role, so we can actually have our students prompt AI. You know, you are a teaching assistant and in a humanities course and at the college level and I'm going to ask you a few questions about a topic, that sort of thing. So I think it's sort of an interesting way to give students access to those entry points that might not have been there before and might have been too overwhelming. Because, you know, as we remember, you know, the Google searches where we get 500,000, hits on one topic can be overwhelming for students, and so you know, and it's paid content, for example. 

10:40
So you know, gpt is actually this technology is actually bringing content into our classes where we can even look at it. We can say, hey, paste this into the text and paste this into our discussion forum. You know, give me a paper where you are actually annotating this text and telling me what's right, what's wrong, what your thoughts are, that sort of thing. So I think that's how we can really leverage. It is to get us back to that questioning, analytical evaluation aspect of teaching and learning. 

Betsy Allen
Host
11:11
Yeah, you know, as an instructional designer, one of the things that I'm excited about with students' ability to prompt and create content, you know, using something like ChatGPT, is that now, as educators, one of the things we often didn't have time for in the classroom is to really get in the sort of higher cognition levels where I just know, as a structural designer, you'd say, okay, well, maybe you want to have an activity where they're taking the rubric for that assignment and they're, you know, they're doing the peer review. But you know we as instructors haven't had time to get in there and coach students of how to appropriately apply a rubric right. You know, we might just have them run through the peer review, but we've got to get through the basics of the course, so we're not really spending our time there. 

12:03
So that's what I'm kind of excited about. It's shifting where we are in a course in terms of our expertise. Like you said, we've been shifting away from stage on the stage creating the only creator of content. Students are now co-creators of content. Even better, right, and now we can go more in the background and say let's look at your thinking, let's really look at your. So I think that's where, for me, as an educator, I'm gonna continue to grow is like how to coach students to actually critique and think and apply. 

Katie Datko
Guest
12:25
Absolutely, absolutely, and you know being very meta. I asked GPT this question, or I asked it. You know, what can you do in terms of? You know, these Socratic methods are getting us back to questioning and getting us back to analysis, and GPT said that I can help you generate questions and facilitate discussion and provide feedback and personalize instruction and provide resources, and that's a lot. And before that was our job as instructors in the courses, and now we've got a teaching assistant in a way, or a tutor or a guide on the side, and you know we're helping to curate these experiences for our students. We're, you know, using GPT in tandem with some of these structured activities and our oversight, you know, to create a richer experience for, especially for our adult learners, who might need that more interesting and engaging types of um, you know, schema building activities and things, um that can help them propel their, their learning goals further. 

Betsy Allen
Host
13:27
Yeah, I think you mentioned a lot of different roles that instructors are going to take. It's not replacing an educator, right, it's, it's enriching. Maybe the learning equation you think is that fair? Is that a fair comment, because I know a lot of people fear losing jobs and things that they absolutely absolutely. 

Katie Datko
Guest
13:46
yeah, I think we need to start really thinking of who we are now and and I think this is not a new topic I just think that these tools have brought it to the floor more, since, since we've had search engines in Google and and access to content at our fingertips, I think we really are. 

14:06
It's really turning us into more curators, facilitators of experiences, rather than content of learning experiences, and I think that that's sort of the shift when we think of. You know, our role really is to create these experiences, to guide students within our disciplines, and I think that that's what's really exciting. I'm not in charge of all of those things that GPT said it could do. 

14:32
I'm actually, you know, I'm the one who's thinking, hey, how can I use this tool to help facilitate those types of interactions? And that's really fun. I mean, it's such a powerful tool for us to start looking at and using in terms of getting our students to engage with our content more deeply or to engage with our disciplines, or, you know, each discipline has a certain thought process or a certain norm, and those are the things I think we're getting our students to look at. You know, we're sort of there's in writing instruction, there's this thing called cubing, where you ask you know why, how, what? And so we're getting our students to sort of almost cube their experiences. 

Betsy Allen
Host
15:21
They're asking the questions instead of giving us the of supporting students in developing AI literacy and literacy skills. So can you talk to us a little bit about what are some AI literacy skills I think you've already mentioned some and how do we help develop them in teaching and? 

Katie Datko
Guest
15:57
how do we help develop them in teaching? Sure, so you know, ai literacy is. I think it's similar to some of the other types of literacy that we've talked about and you know, in terms of digital literacy, information and media literacy. So it's really just getting our students used to using these skills teaching them the pros, the cons, how and when to use them, learning how to vet different tools, for example, looking at accuracy and reliability. So there's a lot of overlap between the information literacy skills that we've been incorporating in our classrooms for several decades now. 

16:38
I think one of the things that's really critical in AI literacy is also getting our students to look at the ethical implications of AI. So, really, what kind of data am I putting in? Am I putting in personal data? Am I putting in data that might influence my privacy norms or privacy of an organization, that sort of thing. So getting students to really look at why and how we're using these tools and then structuring activities so that they use these tools to build upon them. 

17:12
So you know, when we think about this too, it's like you know, a lot of these discussions sort of are falling on. You know, distance education or instructional designer shoulders. You know we get so many questions. You know, hey, I need an AI detector, for example. But you know, actually these are sort of larger discussions and I think some of the units on our campuses that really need to start engaging in this are, you know, our workforce development unit, different disciplines, where you know AI is becoming, will become the norm, sort of backwards designing, if you will, from various occupations and, you know, working with our professional development teams and then, most critically, our librarians. 

17:59
You know, sort of putting this as another sort of tool holder in our, you know, almost not a tool belt, but an actual, you know, tool holder, where this is one of those tools that's used in conjunction with information literacy and digital literacy and those sorts of things. So, yeah, so I think that's how we can start supporting students is just starting to incorporate some of these questions into our class. Why do we use this? When do we use this? Can I use this? And then you know how do we use it and eventually, I think, as we come out further what it's only been a little over a year since these tools were released we'll start having, I think, more guidelines, more structured activities, more ways of really integrating these activities into the classroom. So hopefully, at some point I think that they will feel like they're normal, like this is what instruction is now right. 

Betsy Allen
Host
19:03
Yeah, so if we're designing activities in our classrooms and we're using AI, let's talk a little bit about what are some of the barriers we could actually be putting out, because we're talking about all these fabulous skills, right, that students can learn and we can help them learn by leveraging AI, but what are potentially some barriers if we say, hey, use AI in this assignment? 

Katie Datko
Guest
19:32
Right, yeah, so you know, I don't know about your district, but in our district, one of the huge things that we consider is the digital divide and that gap. 

19:43
So this is just one other tool or skill or platform away from our students being able to succeed you know, we, we, we have a huge, we have a large district and we have huge pockets within our district where, you know, over 20% of the families may not have access to internet, right? So? So that's a huge thing is families may not have access to internet, right? So that's a huge thing. Is that access part of the equation is, I think, really important to consider and I think that that's a barrier so ensuring that our students, at the very least within our district systems, have access to some sort of tool that they can use where they can learn these skills. 

20:35
I'm thinking Microsoft Bing, for example, is what we have on our campus, so you know, we haven't blocked that. I've heard instances where some schools have actually blocked access to these tools, and so actually allowing our students to have access to these tools, to play around with these tools and to support that, I think it's really important. The other thing that I really that comes up a lot, and I've seen this in my own work with AI in my job and my role as director is bias. 

21:06
So, you know AI is trained on the existing content, trained on the existing content, and you know platforms can put restrictions in place and say, oh yeah, we don't discriminate or we don't use explicit or violent content, but there's no guarantee that that's going to happen and we've also seen AI hallucinate. So that can be a little concerning, although we've heard I think we're seeing that less and less as the bugs are being worked out of these systems. So I think you know one of our responsibilities is to start getting to actually get our students or our colleagues or whomever, to specifically prompt to consider these non-heteronormative and non-eurocentric viewpoints, you know, really getting them to think of equity front and center. And we sort of have to as instructors and as faculty and as support point. People really have to think about how we can start baking those into assessments and things, have to think about how we can start baking those into assessments and things. So you know that the bias, I think, is also something that can be an issue, because you know we want our students to see themselves in the content that's generated, for example, and you know, sort of along with access. 

22:26
I also think that you know a lot of AI tools have paywalls, so they start out as free and then all of a sudden you have to pay $20 a year or you get you sign up for a platform and you get a hundred tokens and eventually you pay it down. It's a little bit like, you know, my daughter uses on her phone. She has these games, you know, with farm animals, eventually pay out to get the food to feed the animal to keep the game going right, right? So I, you know, some of these tools are start out at and it seems like they're accessible. We incorporate them into our courses accessible not in terms of 508 compliance, but in terms of access and then all of a sudden, you know our students have to pay. So I think that you know that's another barrier, right? 

Betsy Allen
Host
23:16
now and paying for recency right, like you know like. Chatgpt. If you want a more recent, you know, draw from information. You've got to pay for that. 

Katie Datko
Guest
23:28
Absolutely, absolutely. So you know. So we want our students to be current and you know we don't want them to be hindered in that they get information that's already three years old. So, yeah, yeah, so those are some of the things I think are really, really critical to think about. I also think you know one of our greatest barriers for AI we're our own greatest barriers in a way. 

23:53
I hate to say that, but you know, I think if we don't, if we don't, if we turned a blind eye to this technology, we're actually doing a disservice to our students. You know, employers are looking for students to come out with AI skills and AI literacy, and I think that that's also we have to look at. Are we putting up any of these barriers? That's making this more difficult as well. So there are lots of different considerations, I think. 

Betsy Allen
Host
24:24
Thank you for joining us on Education by Design. Thank you to Katie Dacko for joining us to talk to us about artificial intelligence and student equity considerations. Next week we continue the discussion with part two of our interview with Katie. Join us then.