About This Book: The Oklahoma Education Commission

The author of this book, Christala Smith, is a member of the Oklahoma Education Commission. This Commission is led by Representative Danny Williams of the Oklahoma State House of Representatives. Members on the commission represent higher education, K12 Department of Education, virtual charter schools, workforce development, the library system, the department of corrections, and juvenile affairs. They meet approximately one time per month, usually at the Oklahoma State Capitol, to discuss trends and needs in the various sectors of education.

Artificial Intelligence presented itself as an area all sectors were experimenting with and led to multiple conversations within the commission’s meetings. One such discussion considered what a general education course with intentional use of AI would look like. Christala was invited to explore this concept for her own course. She began immediately to develop the underlying theory upon which she would base the design of her AI activities in the course, which is that the incorporation of AI should focus on interaction rather than delegation of work to AI.

Six initial assignments were developed for and tested within the course, all of which received excellent feedback from students. The purpose of this re-development of assignments was to demonstrate to other instructors how AI might be incorporated into teaching, and the course was not in an easy to share format. Therefore, an OER grant from the Online Consortium of Oklahoma was obtained, which facilitated the use of the Pressbooks platform and enabled the creation of this book in an OER format, which can be shared with other instructors.

For the development of this book, the original activities were refined and many additional activities were created based on the same foundational principles of collaboration versus delegation. An AI enhanced activity accompanies each instructional chapter of this text, providing a wide variety of examples for how AI might be used as a teaching assistant to enhance the academic experience while preserving the pursuit of critical thinking skills in students.