The Death of Discussion Boards in DE

Over a semester, yes and more!

 

Hope you are getting compensated properly.

 

I love to teach, so I teach. But I am very well compensated.

 

Unfortunately, those of us, both instructors and students, who have zero control over discussion board questions are likely reading a lot of content from Bing AI which now provides cites. https://www.bing.com/chat

 

I understand you don't like it! Fine, there is technology now to monitor AI use. I'll be continuing. I wish you well in whatever direction. We just don't agree here.

 

You trust TII? Going to expend your time putting in uncompensated plagiarism reports. I doubt it.

 

No insinuation here, my point is the Discussion Board is compromised as an online teaching tool at this point in time until something other than TII is deployed against AI written posts. I have taught exclusively online for 17 years, suddenly my General Education students are writing at Post Grad level. As an adjunct no way I am going to conduct dozens of uncompensated plagiarism investigations of AI generated nonsense. I would also argue that unless the student admits to using AI, TII is inconclusive since AI generates different versions of a question and is not static. A raw TII score with nothing but some funky algorithm backing it up does not seem like credible proof.

 

Musk's new search engine Perplexity.ai not only provides answers but cites, I rest my case.

 

It's called discussion! Just like in traditional classes. I could care less if it cites, it the interaction that counts. All in how you design the work!

 

Not sure I follow the logic. The courses I instruct have preloaded questions, this is fairly standard for online schools and has been the case at the six I have taught at. The students are taking the questions and dropping them into AI machine which generates differing versions of the same elegantly written and cited machine output. I know they are doing this at every level because just in the past year, students who grudgingly could only produce a few sentence in Gen Ed coursres are producing flawless 3 pargraph mini essays. You can't nail them because these AI machines produce endlessly different versions of the same answers. Is the "meat" instructor supposed to read the machine product and comment?

 

Oh, so you nail them! That's the answer. You don't instruct anything; you facilitate cookie cutter courses for some private for profit! I discuss with students the topic at hand. I assess the learning through various other means.
As to the "meat" instructor, there is now several software types to evaluate AI characteristics in discussion. If you ask questions in the right way, not necessarily seeking to catch student cheating, transfer of appropriate learning takes place. I've done it always, and when all I do is lead cookie cutter courses, I'm done. Have you done live lecture? We discuss topics. I don't care where they get their answers, they have to find them, and through the vetting of those topics they understand better the material. I sometimes use objective multiple-choice quizzes, but most often I use papers of various sizes, and open-ended questions that require them to write and explain a concept. But you probably don't agree with that either, it's no cookie cutter and done for you! Look enough of this! You do your way, I'll do mine. I wish you success.

 

I am not arguing with you at all; I am simply discussing an important subject - Discussion Board dependent LMS' that are used by online schools which despite being for profit or non profit are regionally accredited. Since there is no active learning besides the discussion board on the LMS, the instructor (almost always an adjunct) who is tasked with monitoring, faciliating, grading and student retention duties cannot devote hours to try to "catch" students using AI, especially if there are 20-40 students in the class and one or two weekly discussion questions. Their already meager compensation would be subminimum wage since integrity cases are time consuming. That is why I say the DB is dead in its current form in the LMS. The schools by the way are well aware of AI and essentially ignore it because machine tools like TII cannot really "prove" a student is using AI, the student can just deny it, it is not as if you can produce the plagiarized sources. No one however is learning anything here except "valuable" skills in machine aided deception, use of AI tools, and copying and pasting.