22 Examining Ways of Using AI to Better Support Teaching Faculty, Mitigate Burnout, and Increase Teaching Creativity

Recently, the discussion of AI and introduction of Chat GPT and the like has caused some widespread concern for those within academia. Many have discussed how our curriculum, teaching, and the entire academic process needs to be reassessed considering these developments. Faculty may feel additional exhaustion that could continue to contribute to burnout from what may seem like a heavy task ahead of redefining education given the introduction of this technology. A lot of discussion has been given to the topic of academic honesty, and how to handle that issue moving forward. One issue that is beginning to gain momentum is the discussion surrounding how instructors might utilize AI with their students and classes with the goals of easing their teaching load along with increasing student engagement and creating opportunities for creativity within the teaching process (Mollick & Mollick, 2023; Celik et al., 2022; Srinivasa et al., 2022). Certainly, the topic of faculty burnout is not one that is easily solved. Using tools such as AI technology could be one way to start to mitigate the burnout, but recognizing and acknowledging that it is a long, uphill challenge with system-wide changes needed to fully address how to alleviate this burnout. The current chapter will be focusing on specific uses of and opportunities with AI for faculty within their classes with these previously stated goals in mind. The discussion will draw from my psychological background as a psychologist and social scientist, and thus focus on the impact on the individual. All the AI uses suggested should always be edited and proofread by the teaching faculty prior to implementation in a course to catch any inaccuracies or omissions of information and to change the tone to match the instructor’s tone.

Increasing Student Interest

An instructor’s level of engagement is highly related to students’ engagement in a class (Harbour et al., 2015). This relationship is not new and has been examined over the years. In fact, one early study found that students that have high levels of teacher support are twice as likely to be successful academically than other students (Klem & Connell, 2004). With the rise of online education, both instructor engagement and their presence become very important to student engagement (Dumford & Miller, 2018). One component of an instructor’s engagement can be how they interact with the students in discussions or announcements. At times, it seems a daunting task, trying to find ways to connect with students in the classroom, particularly as the students seem younger and younger to faculty each year. Many of the generational differences can become quite apparent in communicating with students and within various other interactions. One use of AI can be with drafting discussion posts and announcements to students. Announcements and discussion prompts that engage students or catch their interest requires creativity of thought and perspective-taking. Burnout has a direct impact on an individual’s ability to engage in creative thinking successfully. Creativity has been found to require a similar amount of mental effort or cognitive load as other complex thinking tasks (Redifer et al., 2019). The amount of cognitive load or mental effort required to engage in creative thought can be another load added onto the mental effort already being required of burned-out instructors. The prompt to the AI can be tailored to request something that appeals to the age range of students within one’s class, and to increase the entertainment and fun surrounding the topic of the discussion or announcement. AI can make an announcement with a catchy title and other hooks to pull the student into reading the content. For example, using an AI prompt such as “create an announcement for the end of the first week of an online class. The announcement should discuss that the students should be introducing themselves in the discussion, begin to read chapters 1 and 2, and start working on the chapter assignments. Make it geared towards higher education students and have it be engaging” will create an interesting and eye-catching post that can be edited and used for the course. All the instructor needs to do is include the details of what the assignment should include and provide as much or as little contextual information as they want. If they do want to make it more contextually relevant, an instructor can continue to provide AI with direction including asking the AI to “add more enthusiasm, take a more professional tone, provide more encouraging words” or even including details specific to the student population in one’s course such as “focus this message towards students in their first year of college”, “make this appeal more to students studying in the physical sciences”, or “try again but focus on online students”. An AI prompt that begins with “create an online post…” will provide text that includes emoji’s, which may catch the interest of more students and is not something that is necessarily an area that instructors feel competent within. Instructors can now save the time and mental effort it would have taken to create this sort of engaging post for other tasks.

Opportunities for Creativity

Often faculty will have taught the same course for many semesters, if not many years. Sometimes we can lose the drive, particularly when also dealing with burnout, to continue to evolve the materials, change the structure, or reexamine ways to increase student learning within one’s course. Research indicates that there does seem to be a relationship between creative activity and aspects of well-being (Acar et al., 2021). Even if an instructor has the desire to change things and increase the creativity of certain elements and it could have a positive impact on their well-being, it can be labor-intensive and time consuming to come up with these new ideas, which might involve diving into different educational resources within one’s area or more generally, reading up on current books, reading articles, or looking at websites. As has already been mentioned, it also requires more mental efforts and adds to cognitive load. It is also less common to find an idea that can be directly implemented within one’s course without having to tweak it a bit to meet the needs of students within the course, the size of the class, the format of the class (online versus face-to-face) or the content of the course being taught.

One way to use AI is to engage with it in the creative process of examining new examples/case studies, re-writing existing materials or assignments that can work within the format of the class, size of class, and connect more easily with students. AI, itself, is a great source for providing ideas on how to adjust assignments for use with AI. A request can be made to Chat GPT/Bing/Bard to provide ways to integrate AI into assignments. It provides a list of different ways that it is possible to add and are easily adaptable for classes. You can have AI provide you with additional, more generalized ideas on examples or case studies you could use. These will likely still need to be adjusted to fit the needs of the course. For example, after entering the following into Chat GPT “provide me with some examples of operant conditioning that will connect with 18- to 26-year-old first year college students.” Chat GPT provided a list of examples that do seem to really connect with a college student population including ones that applied to study habits, fitness and exercise, social media use, part-time jobs, and healthy eating habits but the answer lacked the detail that was needed to teach the students how to apply the example to the terminology and content being discussed. It was helpful in providing the additional examples that could be now used, which reduces cognitive load of an instructor, but required an instructor to add to the example the content knowledge and terminology to be usable within the class and more helpful to the students. As of this writing, AI does seem to struggle with providing real life examples that relate to recent events. For example, when asked to “provide a real life, recent example of groupthink” the AI responded with a generic example and stated “as of my last knowledge update in January 2022, I don’t have real-time information or the ability to provide examples that have occurred after that date. However, I can offer a generic scenario that might resemble instances of groupthink. Keep in mind that real-world examples would require up-to-date information.” After providing the generic example, AI suggested that recent news, research studies, and case analyses may be a good way to find the examples needed. After the prompt to find a recent example was removed and merely an example was requested, the text-based AI did generate several historically significant examples of groupthink but were not ones that students may understand or connect well with since many of them happened twenty-plus years prior to these students being born. In this particular instance, AI did not alleviate workload with the result being to either utilize the generic example or try to find one within news sources that is more relevant and recent. It is entirely possible that AI might be able to fulfill these types of requests for recent events at some point in the future.

Decreasing Workloads

Much of this chapter has focused on ideas related to increasing student, as well as faculty engagement in higher education, while attempting to utilize techniques that address some of the larger issues of overload and burnout. Often one of the more tedious tasks for instructors is creating materials for assessment purposes. The very process of creating assessments is very time-consuming for instructors. They can at times have access to their textbooks suggested assessment questions, but it is very common that an instructor still must edit these to work for their class. Writing good exam questions takes knowledge and experience that may not be in the skill set of an instructor, particularly those early in their careers. The process of writing questions also often involves mapping assessment questions to course level objectives. In the age of technology, it becomes important for instructors to revise and redevelop assessment questions or practices more regularly. These tasks are a large amount of work and can feel like the less rewarding components of teaching, which adds to burnout. Although a necessary component of higher education, it often can take time away from the act of engaging with students.

AI can be very helpful in both coming up with ideas for assessment within the class as well as the actual exam questions themselves. Providing the AI some details about the actual class, can result in a plethora of ideas on how to assess learning within that environment. Also, it is quite easy to ask AI to create new individual exam questions, convert an exam question to a different format, or refresh exam questions based on older exam questions on a specific course topic. Although these questions should always be first reviewed by the instructor for errors, it can be a time saving strategy overall.

Sometimes email communication can be time-consuming for instructors. Drafting an email that comes across to the student in the tone intended can take a few different attempts and requires some thoughtful consideration. AI can help draft those emails within seconds and can be directed to include the tone that an instructor is trying to communicate. For example, an instructor can ask AI to create an email response to a student that is requesting to be added to a course late in the term, with the prompt including details like “kindly decline their request with an encouraging tone to have them sign up in the future”. This sort of prompt will result in an initial draft of that email that could be utilized, or could be further edited for length, clarity, adding additional language, and other specific details. These emails can also be saved and organized in a way so that they can be recycled and used with the more common requests/questions that come up from students.

Often teaching-focused faculty tend to be individuals that have a strong desire to help students succeed, increase student engagement, and improve learning in their classes. But this desire to help and the associated workload can often come with consequences to the faculty themselves, including stress, feelings of emotional fatigue, and other undesirable attributes that can lead to burnout and job dissatisfaction. Providing more ways for these student-centered, teaching faculty to leverage AI technology within their classes to lighten loads, is a worthy topic of discussion. Further research and thought and attention should be given to these topics within higher education to help retain faculty that are highly valuable to the institution due to the care and attention they give to student success and learning.

The use of AI in the ways that I have outlined in this chapter has led to a reduction in my own professional burnout in a few different ways. For one, AI has helped me harness a level of creativity in my communications with students in writing that is more like the way I believe I communicate to them in person, which is something I have not been able to achieve in the past. My enthusiasm for teaching that my students can feel with the energy that I put into my face-to-face interactions has now been more fully integrated into my text-based communications with them. Along with the increases in text-based creativity, enthusiasm, and energy, this use of AI has required little effort on my part beyond some scaffolding directed to the AI, which reduces my mental load. Secondly, AI has done much of the workload on tasks that I have traditionally found tedious and time-consuming such as assessment revisions and components of assignment redesigns. The lifting of tasks that I do not enjoy as much from my workload has both allowed me additional time to engage in the tasks of teaching that I enjoy (i.e., interactions with students, revamping curriculum, and content for courses) as well as the mental relief of not having to fully engage in what I find to be the tedious, less enjoyable work of teaching. As with previous technology advances, if harnessed correctly, the addition of AI in teaching may help shift these overburdened and burned out, student-centered teachers into people that can also care for their own well-being in the process.

References

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About the author

name: Jenn Grewe

institution: Utah State University

Dr. Jennifer Grewe (she/her) is an Associate Professor with the Department of Psychology at Utah State University. Dr. Grewe has taught thousands of undergraduate students in face to face and online courses. Currently, she is the Director of Connections, which is USU’s first year experience program and co-directs the undergraduate psychology program. In addition to the mentorship and teaching of undergraduate students, she also teaches a graduate level course on the topic of the teaching of psychology. She is the advisor for the local chapter of Psi Chi (International Psychology Honors Society) and is a consulting editor for the journal of the Teaching of Psychology. Dr. Grewe enjoys working with students in all levels of their career and loves being an Aggie!