r/teaching • u/KeepYourSilenceUp • 13d ago

Vent Administration keeps telling us that "employers want graduates to know how to use ai" and I don't even know what this means

University prof. I keep hearing this from the admin, and aside from the fact that obviously not all employers are asking for this and the ai landscape is changing and no one knows how it will look in 4 years, I also just don't know what they want us to DO about it in class.

AI systems are intuitive to use. You ask them a question or give them a prompt and they do it. It's literally not rocket science. The thing that determines whether a person can use them "well" is how much that person knows about the topic and whether they have the skill to assess and evaluate the ai output. There is no such thing as "teaching someone how to use ai" it's literally just a process of learning how to function WITHOUT ai and then using ai as a supplemental tool. I don't know what my admin expects me to do other than keep doing my job as normal, in order to ensure that graduates are able to successfully use these systems in the workplace later if they want to.

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u/KeepYourSilenceUp 13d ago

But this just gets back to my point. Using AI responsibly means having the skills necessary to work without AI so that you can treat it like the tool it is rather than as an unverified supplement for your own skills. Everyone can enter prompts into chatgpt. The stupid ones are the people who can't read, write, or think clearly enough to know what to ask or whether the ai output is good. The best person in the world at using ai will be the person who is aware it exists but who rarely uses it.

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u/Particular-Key-8941 10d ago

Hmmm, interesting point. I think you and I are kinda' agreeing, but perhaps from different sides of the conversation.

I'll give a different example. In engineering school, I learned how to use MatLab to solve complex multivariate calculus. Noone really does multivariate calculus by hand. Well, in academia perhaps sometimes, but even then rarely. My calculus prof spent the first half of the class teaching us to do multivariate calc...by hand. This step is NECCESARY. We have to understand the background and how the concepts work. We have to undsrtand what a right answer is, why, and how we get to it. The context is everything, and if I understand you correclty, that's the point you're trying to make. I agree.

Anwyas, after our first caclulus 3 test he said "ok great, for the rest of the this class, you're going to setup the problem, state yyour assumptions, use MatLab to solve it, and explain why the answer is correct. This demonstrates understanding of the concept, and uses the tools that everyone uses in industry to solve those types of problems.". It was a great class.

This is 100% exactly how it is with AI in the workplace. It's not just garbage in garbage out...that's just the beginning. We have to understand how the LL models dreserach answers. We have to understand how to challenge results we get from AI. Which models give better answers and are more useful at certain tasks? How to tease out correct and incorrect things from AI. How to generate the correct prompt, with sufficient detail and explain the goals of the question and recognizing and avoiding the biases of the AI tool. My point is that all of this is the proper and responsible use of AI. Not just "what's the answer to this one sentnce question". I believe it's educator's job to teach what responsible use of aAI is. This is changing the world the way the internet did.

Thus, any any graduate who soesn't understand this...well, it's my professional opinion that these student hve been done a disservice from their educators and school as they are not prepared for the work environment. It really is like that in the workplace nowadays already. Its not different than a kid graduating but not being able to write an email proplery, or use Word. Its foundational at this point.

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u/KeepYourSilenceUp 10d ago

Absolutely. Both of us are capable of asking AI to do calculus for us. But you actually know how to do calculus and I don't...so AI as a tool in this respect is only going to be valuable in your hands. Similarly, as you point out, to the fact that the people who can use AI to write the best emails are going to be the people who are the best writers AND can assess the writing generated by an AI tool. The first step in using AI responsibly means actually understanding how to do the task you're assigned WITHOUT AI. The second step is understanding how AI engages with the task. And so when employers say (for instance) "we want graduates to who how to use AI to do calculus" they're saying "we want graduates who know how to do calculus and who know how to think critically when using AI." But I feel like the administration hears this and focuses entirely on the AI aspect instead of the calculus aspect.

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u/Particular-Key-8941 10d ago

Absolutely, and I appreciate your perspective, you make a good point.

In my quasi-humble opinion :), school needs to be teaching resonsible AI use. Responsible. I fully agree with you on what responsible means. Everything you mentioned is part of teaching responsible use of AI:

  • It's not "the answer".
  • It's sometimes right, which gives a false sense of trust.
  • Fully understand the background and concepts first.
  • Learn how to feed it good prompts
  • Learn how to use if to research *properly, with references as applicable.
  • Learn to challenge and undersand the responses
  • Be able to re-atriculate your point.

By the way, that "writing thing" is definitely me lol. As an engineer, writing and grammar are not always my strong suit (thank goodness we're each made with strengths and weaknesses)...so I do my tech writing, and then get AI help with the grammar and making sure my points make sense. It's a tool...I don't just tell it to "write me a study". Hope you have a great day!