[halgir]

I agree you shouldn't use LLMs to produce material wholesale, but I think it can be positively useful when used thoughtfully.

I recently taught a high school equivalent philosophy class, and wanted to design an exercise for my students to allocate a limited number of organs to recipients that were not directly comparable. I asked an LLM to generate recipient profiles for the students to choose between. First pass, the recipients all needed different organs, which kind of ruined the point of the dilemma! I told it so, and second pass was great.

Even with the extra handholding, the LLM made good materials faster than if I would have designed them manually. But if I had trusted it blindly, the materials would have been useless.

[tovej]

How can you ensure that the exercise actually teaches the students anything in this case? Shouldn't you be building the exercise around the kinds of issues that are likely to come up, or that are difficult/interesting?

If you're teaching ethics in high school (which it sounds like you are), how many minutes does it take to write three or four paragraphs, one per case, highlighting different aspects that the student would need to take into account when making ethical decisions? I would estimate five to ten. A random assortment of cases from an LLM is unlikely to support the ethical themes you've talked about in the rest of the class, and the students are therefore also unlikely to be able to apply anything they've learned in class before then.

This may sound harsh, but to me it sounds like you've created a non-didactic, busywork exercise.

[halgir]

> How can you ensure that the exercise actually teaches the students anything in this case?

By participating in the exercise during class. Introducing the cases, facilitating group discussions, and providing academic input when bringing the class back together for a review. I'm not just saying "hey take a look at this or whatever".

> If you're teaching ethics in high school (which it sounds like you are)

Briefly and temporarily. I have no formal pedagogic background. Input appreciated.

> This may sound harsh, but to me it sounds like you've created a non-didactic, busywork exercise.

I may not have elaborated well enough on the context. I'm not creating slop in order to avoid doing work. I'm using the tools available to do more work faster - and sometimes coming across examples or cases that I realized I wouldn't have thought of myself. And, crucially, strictly supervising any and all work that the LLM produces.

If I had infinite time, then I'd happily spend it on meticulously handcrafting materials. But as this thread makes clear, that's a rare luxury in education.