I am an instructor who helps deliver an apprenticeship. My new boss has been in our industry for about 20 years and is one of the most respected people in our company. They've just joined us to teach and are off doing a two week course. On the first day she was told to let AI write all of her lesson plans, and then feed the lesson plans to AI to make her slides...
Hopefully she rejects all this out of hand, but if she doesn't it'll mean that none of our trainees get the benefit of her experience, who she is as a person, and what she has to pass onto them.
We have 6 monthly reviews as instructors where we are told the same thing. "How could you use AI for your teaching?"
They don't even feel the need to justify why this would be desirable, or is needed at all. It's just pure bandwagonning. Unbelievably, most of my coworkers are extremely positive about AI, although none of them have told me they use it for anything besides preparing their lessons for them — they just use it instead of having to think, or spend time preparing...the only important thing they do at work.
It makes no sense to me.
I've been a teacher (most of the time a college professor) for...a long time. Nowadays, when preparing a new course, I definitely work with AI: "Here's what I want, and who my audience is - give me a course outline".
That gives me a starting point. Of course, I modify it. Maybe I bounce back and forth to the AI for further refinements and suggestions, but ultimately I have to be happy with the result.
When prepping the individual lessons, the biggest time saver is coming up with examples to illustrate particular points. I could do this alone, but sometimes that involves staring at a blank screen for a while. It is faster to ask the AI for suggestions, pick the one I like, and refine it further myself.
AI is a tool. Use it appropriately.
I’m teaching a class at a university in Japan (on AI-related issues, as it happens). I’ve been teaching for more than 40 years, but at 106 registered students this is by far the largest class I have ever taught. AI tools are very helpful for class management, such as keeping track of attendance and homework submissions.
I have to consciously avoid using AI for more cognitive tasks, though. It would be very tempting to have Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini summarize, classify, and grade the students’ assignments, write individual feedback, prepare my lesson plans, etc. However, I know that my engagement with the material and with the students would suffer. I also want to show the students that they are learning together with me and with each other, not with bots.
I am semiretired and have a light teaching load that gives me plenty of time to prepare for class. I can see that full-time teachers might find it hard to resist the lure of offloading their thinking to AI.