Professors are designing AI apps meant to help students think through problems

From the article:

Now, students still pull out their phones to prepare for his class — but they talk to an artificial intelligence app Wang designed. Before they are faced with tough questions from the professor and classmates, they argue at home with Caisey, as Wang nicknamed it.

“A lot of AI tools in education are designed to make things more efficient,” he said. “Caisey capitalizes on precisely the opposite: the capacity to slow students down, to actually make them focus and to also make them consider very different ways of thinking about questions.”

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Wang said the idea behind the app that helps students debate case studies is not actually new — it’s millennia old, rooted in the Oxbridge tutorship model that linked an instructor with one or two students for deep, thoughtful exchanges about what they were learning.

Before AI, Wang said, that focused, stimulating experience was tough to scale. Now he’s seeing faculty rethinking the way they teach.

Professors are using AI tools in many fields. At the Georgia Institute of Technology, a professor designed an app that helps electrical engineering students work through thorny problems. At Arizona State University, faculty-infused AI helps students in health sciences practice working with simulated patient experiences, chats with students mastering foreign languages, and guides biology students to help master the basics or extend themselves far beyond the course material.

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Wang piloted the app last spring. Now thousands of students at Columbia and 15 other institutions, including the business schools at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Virginia, use Caisey. Wang and a team of people adapt the tool for other instructors and classes, with faculty telling them what they want to teach, what they want their students to read and what they want them to discuss.

“It’s not a substitute for the really rich interaction that we have in class in the discussion,” said Rahul Bhandari, distinguished senior lecturer in AI and strategy at U-Va.’s Darden School of Business. But it’s helpful in preparing them to have more confidence in class, Bhandari said, and to present a more articulate, well-structured argument.

Jill Cohen, one of Caisey’s co-founders and a former Columbia Business School student, spoke on a panel in one of Wang’s classes last year. Multiple students came up afterward to tell her they love the app and have had so much fun with it, she said; that was mind-blowing.

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While some AI apps offer a “guided learning” or “educational” mode, faculty-designed AI taps directly into their expertise in the course curriculum to shape the guidance. Zhang designed the Smart Tutor at Georgia Tech using course materials for a notoriously difficult class. It provides feedback, allowing faculty to further pinpoint where students are having trouble, and adapt their teaching to those pain points.

In a pilot study last spring, students said they appreciated getting guidance and feedback in real time, found it helpful and hoped it would be added to more classes. Nidhi Krishna, a sophomore from Atlanta, said that it gave her the insight that she kept making the same mistakes, and then helped her understand why and how to avoid that.