What’s Working with AI in Higher Ed: Creating Instructional Strategies to Teach Empathy, Critical Thinking, and Curiosity

Diane Gayeski, Ph.D., Professor of Strategic Communication and former dean at the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College, outlines what she thinks is working with AI in higher ed.  This article originally appeared in Insight Jam, an enterprise IT community that enables human conversation on AI.

Think back to your memories of high school or college classes. The teacher takes roll, writes something on the board, reads off a set of slides, maybe asks a few questions. Then you cram, take a test on the readings and lecture, and forget the content in 48 hours.

Today’s young people don’t learn that way, nor is it an appropriate strategy to help them do more than memorize facts that will likely be outdated by the time they graduate. Additionally, almost a quarter of my students have some sort of accommodation for a learning disability—typical of all classrooms, even at the most elite universities. Coming up with multiple ways to provide information and to practice their learning is essential.

Especially in this age of AI, we don’t need employees who can spit back material or complete tasks in some sort of mechanical order. We keep hearing about critical thinking, empathy, and curiosity as the factors that employers want but can’t find. But how do we teach this?

AI in higher ed can do a lot more than help students write their essays. And while there are companies that are trying to sell AI grading tools for professors, the last thing we need is AI grading AI-created assignments! But AI does have a role in creating much more powerful learning opportunities.

Here’s How I Did It

I teach corporate communications and am trained as a media producer; I know that simulations and videos can create far more authentic learning situations that help students develop the rare skills employers are looking for. Plus, immersing them in authentic situations gives them the confidence that they can actually put what they are learning to work in their future jobs. Before AI, creating these kinds of videos and simulations would have taken weeks and thousands of dollars — or have been impossible for a professor who teaches 3 or 4 different courses each semester with rapidly changing content.

Here’s how I used AI to create an engaging simulation to teach a key lesson in my Communicating with Stakeholders class. You can see the results of that here.

1. I asked ChatGPT to come up with a fictitious company that would be understandable and appealing to 19-year-olds. The company would be undergoing some sort of change that would impact its stakeholders (employees, customers, neighbors, investors, etc.) in different ways.
2. Then, I used an AI video generator to create a “trailer,” a short movie that introduces the simulation and stimulates their interest. You can view it here.
3. The students were put into groups, and their first assignment was to develop a stakeholder map that indicates what specific message is needed for each stakeholder group, what their predicted reaction to the change might be (a big investor cash infusion and purchase of an old apartment building), how that message should be conveyed (e-mail, in-person meetings, etc.), and in what order the stakeholders should be told about this change.
4. Just as they were about to finalize their plans, I wanted to introduce another unexpected twist that mimics real life. AI helped me write a pretty convincing ransom note to the owners – all their laptops were hacked, and they were being asked to give the hackers $1 million to unlock all their data. Of course, this now had to be communicated to all the stakeholders!
5. While I didn’t use AI to grade the assignments, I first wrote my own assessment, then asked AI to provide its feedback. I gave students both—and they were actually much more open to this critique than when it only came from me!
6. The next step: I’m creating a series of simulated interviews with each of these stakeholder groups so that students can engage in conversations with stakeholders such as the city mayor, a long-term employee, an elderly customer, etc. AI can provide accurate data, such as what the city (in this simulation, Silver Spring, MD) was doing regarding legislation on short-term housing, whether the mayor was trying to pass tax breaks for the renovation of old properties, and so on.

The Take-Away, Even If You’re Not a Professor!

If you’re not a professor, how does this apply to you? All of these AI-created elements took under 2 hours to create—and that was more than 3 years ago, when AI was just coming onto the scene and I was a novice.

All of us are communicators.

• Instead of writing a memo, how about sending a short video?
• If you want your employees to practice a skill, why don’t you have them work with an AI simulation before they try it on the job?
• Don’t have a long meeting to introduce some new policy – have a tool like Google Notebook create a podcast that sounds like the ones they subscribe to, to learn what interests them.
• Ask AI to edit a long webinar down to the most important points and customize it for different audiences.