I’ve been thinking about how to teach someone to use generative AI (typically chatbots like Claude or ChatGPT).
On one level, there’s nothing simpler. The basic instructions are:
- Go to the URL.
- Sign up for an account.
- Type a question or instruction in the text box.
But this is like teaching someone to draw by saying:
- Place the sharp bit of the pencil onto a piece of paper.
- Move it around.
The general-purpose nature of generative AI makes it hard to describe exactly how to use it. Often, the answer to the question: “How do I use generative AI?” is, “It depends on what you want to achieve.”
As such, there are few instructions you can give someone, which will help them learn how to use AI.
Lately, I’ve been asking people what problems they commonly experience, and then working through the problem with them and a language model. In these cases, I find that I’m not really teaching them how to use the technology; I’m teaching them how to think about the technology in the context of specific problems.
What I don’t do is give them a set of instructions they can follow. Instead, we identify something specific they’re working on and then explore how the capabilities of AI can help them with the problem.
And I think this will probably also result in more creative solutions to the kinds of problems that academics encounter every day.
Here are some examples from recent conversations:
- Use AI to create realistic patient case studies for students to analyse, covering various health conditions and social situations.
- Demonstrate how AI can summarise research papers, helping to keep course content up-to-date.
- Generate diverse multiple-choice questions or scenario-based problems for assessments, ensuring a wide range of topics are covered.
- Brainstorm interactive activities or discussion topics for classes on healthcare ethics and / or patient communication.
- Use AI to take on the role of patients with different conditions or backgrounds, helping students practice their communication and diagnostic skills.
- Show how AI can break down complex clinical guidelines into more digestible formats for student learning.
- Demonstrate how AI can help adapt teaching materials for students with different learning needs or disabilities.
In each of these examples, the lecturer had a specific problem that could be addressed by using generative AI. Each series of prompts were different because the specific use-cases for each lecturer was different.
If I was going to suggest a single principle for teaching people how to use generative AI, it would be: Focus on problem-solving with a partner, rather than telling people what to do.