AI Essentials for ECC Faculty
(Updated 2/17/2025) The AI Subcommittee’s resource collection for faculty encompasses five critical areas:
Understanding AI
Introduce Students to AI Tools
PowerPoint Presentation to be shown to students
External AI Resources
Links, articles, reports, and other resources that provide an overview of AI, its role in education, and the broader societal context
Inside Higher Ed: Why Professors are Polarized on AI
The Chronicles of Higher Education: AI Means Professors Need to Raise Their Grading Standards
Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Teaching and Learning
Practical Application of AI in Education
AI Citation, Ethics, Errors, and Plagiarism
AI Detection and Management
AI Resources to Try
- ChatGPT – (Updated 2/17/2025)
- ChatGPT is the industry standard. Has the most prominent “reasoning” models, which take time to “think” in order to return better answers.
- Free version available after account creation with email and password.
- ChatGPT Plus ($20/month) offers an enhanced model.
- Note: Don’t base assumptions about ChatGPT Plus on the free version.
- ChatGPT Pro ($200/month) offers most intelligent models and Deep Research report-writing tool.
- Has capability to upload and analyze various document types, including typed PDFs (not scans).
- Voice chat feature added to the platform. Can translate spoken language in nearly real-time.
- Phone app with excellent vocal transcription is available for Android and Apple.
- Has released an “agent” tool, Operator, which can take computer-based actions on the user’s behalf (only available in paid tiers currently).
- DALL-E is included, which allows for advanced image recognition and creation.
- Enhances visual content analysis and generation for academic and teaching purposes.
- Google Gemini – (Updated 2/17/2025)
- Nearly unlimited “token context” (memory for chat or document length).
- Can be plugged in to Google Docs tools.
- Features image recognition and creation tools.
- Claude 3.5 – (Updated 2/17/2025)
- Available for free to the general public. Pay for more usage.
- Key upgrades:
- Ability to upload up text documents. Can read scanned PDFs.
- Can test generated code in a “canvas” window within the chat.
- “Memory” of nearly 70,000-word context enables extended conversational threads and improved analysis of longer texts.
- Highly regarded for writing.
- More pleasant user interaction compared to ChatGPT.
- Note: Increased “agreeableness” may lead to more inaccuracies.
- Deepseek R1 – (Updated 2/17/2025)
- Top Chinese reasoning chatbot. Entirely free to use.
- Can upload text files.
- Considered at or near the top writing performance.
- Many privacy and security concerns surrounding phone app in particular, but model as a whole as well. Has “worst safety testing scores of any model ever” (Dario Amodei).
- NotebookLM – (Updated 2/17/2025)
- An AI-powered environment that allows you to upload digital texts and “converse” with them.
- Ask questions about a broad spectrum of specific sources you want to engage with.
- Generate a broad, engaging AI “podcast” where two AI “hosts” discuss the sources you’ve uploaded.
- A good way to quickly get up to speed on a variety of specific, dense sources before diving in more manually or deeply.
- Perplexity.AI – (Updated 2/17/2025) Designed to be a citation search engine, this AI will provide quick Wikipedia-like explanations of topics, as well as list links to reputable sources on that topic. It is fairly reliable (finds real sources), but not entirely useful (doesn’t provide access for all sources, not always relevant) for finding peer-reviewed sources on a particular topic. When ChatGPT’s Deep Research becomes more broadly available, its utility will be questionable.
- Gamma.app – A free AI tool to turn a lesson plan (or even just a small prompt) automatically into a nearly finished PowerPoint presentation. Here’s a video showing how it works.
- Guidde / Scribe – (Updated 2/17/2025) Paid tools to quickly create explanation videos, GIFs, or PDFs explaining a process. Helpful for creating documentation about how software or websites work for students.
- Midjourney – Midjourney is considered the best image generation tool available, but it has no free options.
- Suno – (Updated 2/17/2025)
Each resource provides insights into how we can harness AI to optimize our teaching methods and engage students, as well as how to manage potential pitfalls and maintain the integrity of our coursework.
We hope these resources will help you navigate this complex yet exciting terrain. Your questions, suggestions, or requests for additional assistance are welcome.