I put on a podcast where they tell me how to make a recipe. Listening to the description makes my mouth water, the way of telling it impresses me. I imagine the result on the table and I can’t wait. I buy everything that is required quickly and I’m on my way. Regarding that “a pinch of salt” thing, I’ll see what I do.

I don’t have the correct measurements of almost anything. The same audio already says it like this: “You will see it, the dish will ask you for it.” Nor have I searched what its final appearance will be like. I just got excited about the idea.

I finally cook and the result is a disaster. Cooking is horrible.

The importance of being prepared

Whether or not something is a nightmare depends largely on how it is explained to us, how we prepare ourselves to face it, how we use notions and concepts that we have already mastered, and how we retroanalyze it once we get the first results

In full explosion of popularity of artificial intelligence, when its use by students, as well as teachers, abounds in university educational environments. The feeling may be similar to what we feel when we listen to the preparation of that recipe without precise instructions.

But let’s think that since its hatching at the end of 2022 we have one more tool. Well introduced into our teaching strategy, it can give us more pleasures than dislikes.

However, given the range of possibilities that opens up, teachers ask ourselves many questions: what will happen if students use it in the classroom? They already use it: how do I act to detect if, among other things, they plagiarize or not? Will I be left behind as a teacher? Why do I feel lost? In short, how can I face the existence of AI and not die trying?

Continuous training

Teachers are continually adapting to the use of new educational methodologies and the way of learning of each generation. To this we must add the redesign of our functions as university educators in the face of a labor present that is no longer the future and to which we cannot turn our backs.

We must guide the group of students from a previous base that they bring from primary and secondary education; if they did not bring it, we promoted it. We do it from a strategy where continuous training is the axis, also for ourselves.

As teachers, we continue to learn through courses, workshops and seminars that provide us with transversal skills, including dissemination , communication and also conflict resolution, without forgetting updating our own fields of knowledge.

All this allows us to improve the results, from our kitchen or from the hidden curriculum .

This is how we can go beyond what is expected, using a whole series of strategic, analog and digital tools that facilitate the improvement of the learning curve of each student. That’s where artificial intelligence comes in.

New threats?

Artificial intelligence also has its dark side. Plagiarism is one of them, but it is not a new problem. The investigation of other specialists can help us to face this problem and give us support guidelines.

Faced with these and other threats, we must compare the information and investigate our doubts –necessary capacities not only to deal with AI, but with all university and work subjects–.

Active listening and previous experience in the use of other recent tools, such as that caused by the also recent emergence of the educational podcast , can also help us.

Turn threats into opportunities

We can promote strategies that serve to fill the gaps in reading comprehension and its impact on the learning methods of our students for several years.

Thus, for example, the development of the orders or questions that we ask the artificial intelligence itself –prompts in English– to obtain good results is a great opportunity: it offers us the perfect situation to structure the way of presenting a project together with the students from reading in a comprehensive, critical and organized way, something that will train them as better professionals.

At the Universitat de les Illes Balears we have put this strategy into practice, from the subject Fundamentals of Design of the degree in Building.

The key is to maintain a constant dialogue with the group of students. The effort is the same as in any other formative process.

When in teaching we make use of tools that work with artificial intelligence, we also try to know the elements that we will use or prepare to achieve it. If we don’t do it, we will kill learning and, incidentally, we may die trying.

Author Bio: Antonio Fernandez-Coca is PDI Training Director. University Professor at the University of the Balearic Islands