Designing Custom Chatbots for Teaching and Learning

There are a lot of ways (good and bad) that an off-the-shelf AI chatbot like ChatGPT or Gemini can be used in teaching and learning, but the default behaviors of these chatbots don't always align with our pedagogical goals. Fortunately, we have options for implementing custom AI chatbots to better support teaching and learning activities.

In this workshop, participants will explore a few pedagogical uses of custom chatbots: answering student questions, providing feedback on student work, assisting in lesson plan, and so on. Most of the workshop, however, will focus on writing the kinds of prompts that guide AI chatbots toward more meaningful, accurate, or pedagogically useful interactions.

Faculty AI Guides Jun Wang and Spyridon Simotas will lead the workshop, sharing their lessons learned designing custom AI chatbots for their courses. Bring a laptop, since part of the time will be spent designing and testing your own custom chatbot.