As I wrote in my previous newsletter, faculty members across the country who were also uncertain about this transformational technology have nonetheless jumped in, and many of them are sharing their stories with me.
This week I’m focusing on Meghan McInnis-Domínguez, an associate professor of Spanish at the University of Delaware. What interests me about her story is that she viewed AI as a way to both mitigate cheating and bolster declining enrollments in language courses.
That might sound counterintuitive, she said in an interview. How can you fight cheating by working with AI? But she has found that being explicit with students about her awareness and use of these tools, and carefully incorporating them in her teaching, made students less likely to cheat. That’s partly because they knew they couldn’t fool her, she says, and partly because they found the tools intriguing enough to challenge themselves in new ways.
McInnis-Domínguez’s work with generative AI has been evolving since the spring of 2023, when she began introducing it into her courses. She encouraged students to try different AI tools to generate summaries of works they studied and then critique them. She used it to create discussion questions and debate topics. She asked students to produce essays and bibliographies with AI and compare them to their own work. She also had them use AI to generate poems in the style of certain authors and critique them. And she has encouraged students to use AI to brainstorm paper topics.
Working with AI helped students think at a higher level, she says. For example, in one assignment she asks students to analyze an author’s work. Before she introduced AI, students would sometimes drift toward writing a biography of the author, which is not what she asked for. But by plugging her directions into AI and then working with its suggested topics, students were better able to stay on target and were often inspired by the responses they got to think more creatively.
McInnis-Domínguez never felt that they turned in papers simply generated by AI, she says. “Going through the process of working with AI they see that their own critical voice is better than some of the ideas the bots come up with. … They learn to be critical of AI and also to see how it can potentially help them.”
She surveyed her students on the usefulness of large language models and found a mostly upward trend as she refined her approach over the semesters. Their confidence in the originality of their written work improved, she says, as did their engagement. They were less inclined to say that it encouraged plagiarism (she got some initial pushback from students — in the spring of 2023 some thought of it as a cheating machine). They also gave AI relatively high marks for helping to improve their critical thinking and — increasingly — providing accurate information.
McInnis-Domínguez hopes to see her course enrollments grow because students are interested in understanding and working with AI. That hasn’t happened yet, but she attributes that to a lack of awareness of how she has adapted her courses. In the spring of 2025 she’s teaching a course specifically about AI literacy and its use in the study of literature.
She’s also expanding her outreach. In the fall McInnis-Domínguez will be working with 10 students who, for course credit, will investigate potential uses of generative AI in the humanities and create videos from that. Her department has also applied for a grant to create a four-course certificate called AI for humans. And she has produced a series of videos to help other instructors get up to speed on AI tools and how they work, which you can find on her YouTube channel.
Have you been inspired to incorporate AI in your teaching? Tell me your story and it may appear in a future newsletter. Write to me at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com
Back to school
Every fall we like to remind readers that The Chronicle offers a host of free advice guides written by teaching experts to help you fine-tune your teaching and course design. Here are a few we have on offer. If there’s a topic you’d like to see us tackle in guidebook form, let us know.
How to Create a Syllabus, by Kevin Gannon
How to Teach a Good First Day of Class, by James M. Lang
How to Make Your Teaching More Engaging, by Sarah Rose Cavanagh
How to Hold a Better Class Discussion, by Jay Howard
How to Make Your Teaching More Inclusive, by Viji Sathy and Kelly A. Hogan
How to Be a Better Online Teacher, by Flower Darby
Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com or beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.
— Beth
As always, nonsubscribers who register for a free Chronicle account can read two articles a month. Your readership supports our journalism.
Learn more about our Teaching newsletter, including how to contact us, at the Teaching newsletter archive page.