This week we will hear from Assistant Professor Sylvain Masclin from the Life and Environmental Science (LES) Department. He has incorporated AI into several aspects of teaching, some of which he discusses in his weekly newsletter Tuesday Teaching Tip. To learn about his vast array of AI tools (NotebookLm, Pedagog, Perplexity, and Claude, to name a few) that make teaching enjoyable and effective, read on…
Making assignments learning tools rather than chores.
Sylvain has joined UC Merced as a teaching faculty just a year-and-a-half ago, but he is no newcomer! He has been a lecturer at UC Merced for a decade, after completing his Ph.D. here. First, he mentions how posting course assignments on Catcourses has received an upgrade. “Instead of just saying the assignment is due by this date,” he says, with AI, “I have a specific format where there is an introduction, a learning outcome, a procedure, a task to do, some resources, and a time estimate.”
Another supplement – a rubric. “When you have your assignment ready, ask AI to create rubrics,” he suggests. “This rubric has the purpose of guiding your students,” he adds, which has proven most helpful for them.
Interactive tools for in-class engagement: chatbots and podcasts
While many of us are familiar with using AI to sharpen our written documents, Sylvain takes AI utilization to a different level for in-class engagement. He has created chatbots the students in his class can interact with.
“I asked students in my class to interview a famous environmentalist. So, some people interviewed, maybe Rachel Carson.” Rachel Carson (1907-1964) was an American marine biologist, author, and conservationist whose work is credited with advancing the global environmental movement, as well as the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
“Though, unfortunately, she's passed away, based on the information this chatbot can have, you can simulate talking to her."
Sylvain has even turned the painful COVID zoom teaching into something amazing. “I had recorded myself lecturing during the COVID period. So, I transcribed the audio into text and uploaded this material to NotebookLM (https://notebooklm.google/) to create podcast audios of my chapters.” This tool has the potential to offer an additional innovative and adaptative learning support to our students. Little did he know that it would provide an instructional delivery solution to a visually-impaired student.
There is an assessment plan as well. This semester, Sylvain split one of his classes into two sections. “In one, I will run it normally as I've been doing it, and for the other one I will use all of this audio in a flipped classroom approach.” And to ensure the flipped audio lectures are getting the students’ attention, this class will have quizzes designed on the audio content.
SG: Sylvain likes Free Podcast Transcription (https://freepodcasttranscription.com/) for transcribing audio. Otter.ai (https://otter.ai/) is another good one. And if you have not tried NotebookLM yet, give it a go. Listening to your own proposal or publication as a podcast is an unforgettable experience.
What are Sylvain’s favs?
“I think two main platforms I've been using was aiforeducation.io and Pedagog.ai that provided me with a lot of basics and some tools, especially chat bots, and I've been using this in the classes, which can be anywhere from 48 to as large as 286.”
SG: Creating a chatbot is simpler than you think. If you are a chatbot novice like me, just go to ChatGPT and ask. You can even deploy your bot to a website or add voice responses.
What about for other applications?
By his own admission, “at this point, it's just a daily tool, mostly just to refine my writing for a lot of my emails. I'm not a native English speaker, and it's just nice when you can polish your writing." I’m sending a weekly newsletter,” Sylvain mentions (Teaching Tuesday Tip), “and I'm asking AI to refine it.”
For these purposes “I prefer to use Claude (https://claude.ai/) and not ChatGPT...and another tool I could mention is Perplexity (https://www.perplexity.ai/)...it's more like Google search on steroids.” Who would not want that?
Sharing beyond the classroom
The quote from a pedagogy podcast he listened to "Today's teachers are teaching with the best technology they have ever had and today's student learns with the worst technology they'll ever use" strongly resonates with his approach. This perspective has motivated him to not only implement AI in his own classroom but also help other faculty adapt to these tools. Working with Professor Brian Utter, he led last year CETL Course Design Institute cohort on AI, which drew significant interest from faculty eager to understand and implement AI tools in their teaching.
Building on this momentum, his next mission as member of the 2024-25 CETL Faculty Fellowship and a UC systemwide CTL AI workgroup focuses on organizing the symposium "Demystifying AI in Academia" on March 14 – part of Research Week – where faculty and grad students will learn from peers how AI tools can be used for different academic tasks.
Philosophical considerations
Of course, Sylvain shares the concerns of all educators about the impact of these fast-developing tools. His approach: “We have to make our change in assessment, but it should be based on each instructor to define how we allow the use of AI...as part of my assignment, I have begun placing a scale of how much AI they could use, a kind of a five criteria scale, no AI at all, brainstorming, refining, writing, maybe more...”
However, he is not worried about the AI takeover. “After you spent many hours using AI, you realize that AI is not creative. It's just using the same database and maybe showing you the results in different ways. But in terms of creativity, you're still the creative mind behind your work.” He ends with a most honest assessment. “Teaching can be boring just like learning can be boring. I have found using AI tools help you to be more engaged with the students.”
And that, as we can all agree, is what makes teaching rewarding. And AI tools worth a look. The UC Merced Teaching Commons provides an evolving set of resources to help instructors discuss and integrate GenAI tools into their classes (or TA sessions, maybe?) responsibly and ethically.
Interested in contributing? Email sghosh@ucmerced.edu
