Enhancing Instructional Technologies with the Power of Generative Artificial Intelligence
November 2022 saw a shift in the trajectory of the Faculty of Instructional Technologies at HIT, led by Dean Prof. Gila Kurtz, as well as in Prof. Kurtz’s own research. The release of ChatGPT to the public that month and the ensuing Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) hype crystalized the understanding that this powerful technology is set to revolutionize human practices, in general, and instructional approaches, in particular. The main innovation of generative AI lies in its ability to create new content—including text, images, music, and videos—based on simple human instructions called prompts. Excited to not only join but actually lead this transformation in her field, Prof. Kurtz oversaw major changes in her faculty’s curriculum, which now position it as a blueprint for emulation by other tertiary institutions, which are only now following suit. We met Prof. Kurtz to learn about the new GenAI developments in her department and research group.
Our mission is to teach students how to introduce changes in organizations, mainly in the way they learn and train their workers. Our undergraduates learn how to solve problems organizations face, develop appropriate technologies and pedagogy, implement the solutions, and evaluate implementation. In our graduate program, we focus on business management, with a unique specialization in GenAI recently launched. We are the first and the only ones in Israel to offer such an academic specialization track.
In all our tracks, we have added GenAI to the tools our students gain, and they learn how to implement it in real-life scenarios. We teach them how to produce videos using AI for training, how to produce presentations, all kinds of technologies for training.
When it comes to developing technologies, and particularly ones involving GenAI, our guiding principle is that it should be human-driven, meaning that the idea should come from the human. You cannot let the technology control you. And it is this understanding that we instill in our students.
All our tracks are very hands on, with our students working with companies like EL AL, IBM and Bank Leumi, hospitals, education institutions, NGOs and government agencies to offer new solutions to their operational and training needs. There is great interest in Industry in collaborating with us, and we are constantly approached with requests for starting projects.
One project we are particularly proud of is a unique AI agent we call “AI buddy” that basically answers student questions. So instead of trying to figure out where they can get the needed information on campus, students can simply ask the AI buddy, and because it draws its knowledge from an internal HIT database, it is highly reliable, and can provide answers that the Internet or ChatGPT cannot. Beyond significantly reducing the daily number of inquiries the staff and faculty receive, it can also readily provide answers to esoteric questions, like “Where are the recycling bins located in the dormitories?”.
I specialize in implementing advanced technologies within learning and teaching. I was one of the first to suggest that Social Networks like Facebook can be part of the learning environment. But now my main focus is on generative AI. I am involved in international research on student readiness for implementing GenAI within learning. This is very important, because most institutions, and I am talking on the global scale, have yet to formulate an appropriate policy, because they simply do not know what to do. There are many ethical considerations, and I have recently published a paper on this issue, which surveys the opportunities and obstacles in higher education institutions implementing generative AI. This paper has already been viewed 15,000 times and downloaded 5,000 times, which clearly reflects the great interest in this topic.
I think the main takeaway from the article is a wakeup call to decision-makers in higher education institutions. Students are already using GenAI in their studies, for example, to summarize papers. Faculty simply don't understand how widespread it is becoming and that their style of teaching and assessment method have to change. Teachers will lose their relevance, and eventually their job, if they do not go beyond simply imparting knowledge.
I have also initiated several new research projects in our lab that explore the potential and challenges of GenAI. One challenge has to do with authenticity. GenAI excels at creating fake images, making it hard to determine with the naked eye if an image is real or AI-generated. So how can we teach students to critically look at images? We tackled this by using eye tracking to explore what cognitive process is involved in this decision making. Before showing the participants a set of pictures, one group of participants received guidelines on how to delineate fake images from real ones, whereas the other group did not. Our preliminary results show that it took much longer for the group who received the guidelines to decide whether an image was AI or not. This finding exemplifies how endowing people with the knowledge they need to think critically can make them better prepared to cope with the new challenges that AI is introducing. We are now examining the data to see how the groups fared in terms of identifying the AI-generated images.
In another project, a huge collaboration with the Israeli Ministry of Education, we are working to understand why some teachers adopt GenAI within their teaching while others do not. We hope to use the knowledge gained to formulate strategies that will help teachers adapt to an environment that contains AI and hopefully use it in their work.
In the last project I will mention, we are developing social robots for educational purposes. The idea is to create robots that can mimic characters in plays or stories, which would allow children to engage with them and ask them questions. In this project, we created a Don Quichotte-look-alike robot for a children’s book club. Because the robot is connected to AI, the children can receive answers to questions like, “How would Sancho Pancho act in different environments?”. A teacher would not necessarily be able to answer such questions, and, of course, the robot would never lose its patience or get tired.
It is through these and other diverse projects that my group and faculty are harnessing the power of GenAI to revolutionize organizational learning, by improving the efficiency and effectiveness of learning processes. And I believe that as GenAI matures further, so will our impact on learning processes grow.
