AI Learning Assistants with Sravanti Kantheti

We know that having students go to the free version of ChatGPT and ask it questions about course content can lead to some… inaccurate answers. But what if we could send students to an AI chatbot that was actually trained on our course content? Might that be a useful tool for learning?

These are no longer hypothetical questions. Top Hat has rolled out a new AI tool called Ace, an AI chatbot that reads your own course materials and answers student questions using those materials. How well does Top Hat Ace work? I reached out to Top Hat super-user Sravanti Kantheti to find out.

Sravanti is the program director for anatomy and physiology at Lanier Technical College in Georgia, as well as an adjunct biology professor at Georgia State University. She recently introduced Ace to her students. In our conversation, Sravanti shares how her students have been using Ace and what they think of it and we talk about how a tool like Ace can help students succeed in a challenging course like anatomy and physiology.

Episode Resources

Sravanti Kantheti on LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/sravanti-kantheti-9874a261/

Top Hat Ace, https://tophat.com/features/ace-ai/

"The ChatGPT Effect and Transforming Nursing Education with Generative AI," Gosak, Pruinelli, Topaz, & Stiglic (2024), https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1471595324000179
 

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Chapters

• 2:06 Meet the Educator
• 5:58 Edtech in A&P
• 12:24 Clickable Image Polls
• 13:52 Ace, the AI learning assistant
• 21:07 Learning by Outlining
• 26:33 What the Robot Can Do
• 29:24 Future Uses of Generative AI
• 33:21 Student Study Skills
• 36:38 Outro

Transcript

Derek Bruff 0:05
Welcome to Intentional Teaching, a podcast aimed at educators to help them develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas and teaching. I'm your host, Derek Bruff. I hope this podcast helps you be more intentional in how you teach and how you develop as a teacher over time. It's been six months since ChatGPT was released and all of higher education had to start figuring out what to do with generative artificial intelligence. One thread in that very lively conversation has focused on the potential for A.I. to serve as a kind of learning assistant for students. We know that having students go to the free version of ChatGPT and ask it questions about course content can lead to some inaccurate answers. But what if we could send students to an A.I. chat bot that was actually trained on our course materials? Might that be a useful tool for learning? These are no longer hypothetical questions. Top Hat has rolled out a new A.I. tool called Ace that students can use to ask questions about course materials.You may know Top Hat as a classroom response system with the variety of live polling tools. That's certainly how I encountered it. But Top Hat is also a robust, asynchronous learning platform where instructors can share text and video and other learning resources with students. Ace is an AI chat bot that responds to student queries using those resources so that students who want help with course materials get answers based on those very same materials. How well does Top hat ace work? I reached out to a top hat super user to find out. Sravanti Kantheti is the program director for anatomy and physiology at Lanier Technical College in Georgia. As well as an adjunct biology professor at Georgia State University. She started using top hat during the COVID 19 pandemic and recently introduced A.I. tool ace to her students. Our conversation Sravanti shares how her students have been using ACE and what they think of it. And we talk about how a tool like ACE can help students succeed in a challenging course like anatomy and physiology. 

Sravanti, Thanks for being on the International Today podcast. I'm very excited to talk with you today. Thanks for being here. 

Sravanti Kantheti 2:13
Thank you, Derek. Thanks for having me. 

Derek Bruff 2:15
Can you tell us about a time when you realized you wanted to be an educator? 

Sravanti Kantheti 2:21
Yes, I actually had that aha moment at my very first job teaching, which I took by accident just to supplement my income back in 2008. And it was at a local career college that was teaching medical assisting students. And I said, okay, the class was 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. and luckily I was still in my twenties, so that didn't seem too bad. And I walked in, prepped for my first class before I got there. And I walked out realizing, okay, this is my calling. 

Derek Bruff 3:02
Oh wow. 

Sravanti Kantheti 3:02
So I left the healthcare field and seeing patients. From that day forward. So I knew I wanted to teach full time. And one of the reasons I felt so invigorated after that first class is because the light bulbs going off. And I was like, Oh my gosh. And just teaching them stuff that I thought was just basic knowledge. And even that was just so mind blowing to some of them. And that's when I was like, okay, this is my call. So that's when I realized I wanted to be an educator. 

Derek Bruff 3:39
That is a great story. Wow. Yeah, I don't I haven't talked to many people who had such a transformative moment like that. That's really great. 

Sravanti Kantheti 3:47
Yes. 

Derek Bruff 3:47
Well, what about the courses that you teach now? What what are some of the courses that you teach and who are the students? 

Sravanti Kantheti 3:54
Sure. So my role is a program director now at a local community college slash technical college here in Georgia. And I teach anatomy and physiology courses, as well as being in control of the curriculum and all of the material that we utilize and overseeing faculty and all that stuff for just the A&P courses. A majority of my students are the students that enter these courses and this department here, our future nurses and our RN program is huge here now, and even more so in the last five years. We also do other two year health degrees, such as radiology, technology, physical therapy, assisting, 

and those are our biggest ones. And we also have dental hygiene. 

Derek Bruff 4:45
Okay. 

Sravanti Kantheti 4:46
So that's what we put out. And then we have a short a number of students or a small number of students that want to use this as a stepping stone for taking their pre recs to a four year college. 

Derek Bruff 4:59
Gotcha. Okay. Well, and I have I think this is will be pretty relevant. I have a pretty good sense of what A&P entails. But how do you describe anatomy and physiology as a course? 

Sravanti Kantheti 5:10
It's hard because the human the human body is is so complex. And one thing that I tell my students is I wish we were taking this in the 1700s when we knew so little. And to be honest, we still don't know so much about the human body, but we do know a lot. And therefore, it is 

rigorous in that realm because we are such complex machines and beings. But there is so much information about every single part and function of the body, and that's what makes it so rigorous. But I hope they take into that 

understanding of how amazing our design is of the human body. So that's one thing that I hope they appreciate. From my course. 

Derek Bruff 5:58
Yeah. Yeah. So let's talk about teaching this challenging course before the advent of ChatGPT and this this recent wave of AI tools. How did you use technology in your course? What were some of the tools and some of the purposes of technology at that point? 

Sravanti Kantheti 6:16
Okay. So just a little background about me personally and technology. I minored in computer science in undergrad, so I am a little bit of a tech nerd. I love learning and being exposed to new software and anything that's out there that can make my job easier, my students job easier. I'm on those that side of Reddit. So I'm always looking at new technology and I'm like, What's out there for teachers? What can we use? What's out there for students? And I've always been the one that is eager to find solutions through technology, like I said, to stay on top of it. 

Derek Bruff 7:00
Yeah. And what were what were some of the go to technologies that that you've liked in the past few years? 

Sravanti Kantheti 7:06
Okay. So I was one of the first or pioneer faculty members to use Remind, which was an app on our phone. Bef schools got on it, I said, We can talk to each other and you don't even have to know my phone number. And so that was a good way of communicating with my students on a platform, which is their phone, which they have on them. And we use Blackboard at our our institution. And instead of me going up and opening Blackboard and creating an announcement, this was a feature that I was just like, I can send them a meme after class about what we talked about in class and to the whole class, and they could be driving home or wherever and they could respond back to it. And now they can even react with emojis. 

Derek Bruff 7:53
And that's all through text messaging, right? 

Sravanti Kantheti 7:56
Correct. Yes. Through an app. So no one has their phone numbers given to anyone because I didn't want to do that. And I that was one of the first really collaborative pieces of technology that stuck and stayed with us. And now we have it on a schoolwide level to where a lot of faculty still don't use it. But I love that connection and engaging piece that just comes so naturally to them because they're on their phone. 

Derek Bruff 8:29
So were you using top hat before they rolled out their new A.I. tool? 

Sravanti Kantheti 8:33
Yes, I was. 

Derek Bruff 8:35
Okay. W did your top hat use look like in A&P. 

Sravanti Kantheti 8:39
O, so just a background. I started using top hat in 2020 when we had to abruptly change our courses to go online. Prior to that, I did not. We had a very traditional lecture take notes. I put up some handouts and PowerPoints on Blackboard and you go home and it was a done deal. I was able to digitize and create interactive pages with Top Hat, which was a total game changer for us and me in particular, because I could customize it to my course. And because it's such a an engaging student platform, it makes it really easy for the instructor to kind of deliver their personalized lectures and the way they would teach by still kind of keeping everything on an online 

platform, you know. So I just used it as a here's what we're going to do, watch these videos. Lecture material is here. I would have embedded YouTube in their interactive quizzes and then like summaries and tests, because back then we were still testing online. And so it was a way that I could utilize it for that as well. When we got back into the classroom and it was not until a whole year and a half later, I think 2021 fall semester and we came out of our shell and said, okay, I think we can do this now. 

I ended up realizing that it was more so the engagement live engagement piece that I truly embraced from top Hat. So going back to how I love connecting with my students on the phone, I would I still do it I preface every class, even now with an interactive poll, and it's five questions based on what they should have learned from the previous class and they plug in the code. It takes that fear factor out of, Oh gosh, it's 8 a.m. and she's asking me this. And traditionally, when I would ask my students those same five questions, I would have that either the same person or two answer 

or crickets, you know, and there was really no incentive for me to continue to do that because I would be like, I'm not sure you guys awake or you need to let me know if you truly don't understand this, because I don't want you to get to the exam and then be like, Oh, I don't understand. So this takes that whole conversation out of the picture because they're doing that by the questions they see. I see instant immediate feedback and they love those percentages. And sometimes we joke about it. I'm like, okay, the one person that's, Oh, okay, well, I'm assuming you messed up a little and then we'll laugh about it and they understand, okay, the whole class got this, so maybe I should know this too, and hopefully that will prompt them to approach me during office hours or after class or something. And that's that's what I've seen happen with those polls. And that's something that I have adopted for every single class 

Derek Bruff 12:25
Do your polls tend to be multiple choice or free response or one of the other formats? 

Sravanti Kantheti 12:29
So I do a combination of 

so because anatomy and physiology, I'll have like a picture of the body or the heart we just did last week. You know, they're supposed to click on it where they would find deoxygenated blood in all the areas. So then you'd have the clicks show up. And then if somebody is all the way here and I'm like, Oh, what happened here? 

So it's a quick educational feedback tool. 

Derek Bruff 13:00
This and this is this is in the weeds. But I really find polling questions fascinating. So that's a clickable image. Question So you've uploaded an image to the system. The students can then tap and each student can can tap multiple times because there's like more than one answer. 

Sravanti Kantheti 13:17
Yes. Yes. 

Derek Bruff 13:19
And then you see kind of a kind of a heat map of where. 

Sravanti Kantheti 13:22
Yes, that's exactly what it looks like. 

Derek Bruff 13:24
Okay. 

Sravanti Kantheti 13:25
But I do the click on questions, multiple choice and true and false. I love the true and false because they're usually main concepts that I've talked about in the lecture before or something that was in their reading. It's 5050, but it's funny, how that 5050 trips them up because they tend to second guess themselves and that kind of gives us an opportunity for review real quick. 

Derek Bruff 13:52
Okay. Well, let's talk about the main event. So Top Hat has rolled out this new tool called Ace, and it is an AI learning assistant. 

Sravanti Kantheti 14:01
So, yes. 

Derek Bruff 14:02
Tell us about this tool. What is it and how are you using it? 

Sravanti Kantheti 14:07
Okay. So I stumbled upon it. One fine day I saw a little button on the side and I said, Hey, what's this? And I was actually playing around and I said, Oh my gosh, this is an actual AI tool, kind of a bot that you can ask questions directly into this box that comes up and it will spit out the answer. So I used it in class and, you know, technology of any kind that I want to have my students learn about instead of just telling them about it. I was like, Let's play around with the robot, shall we? So for a couple weeks I after my clicking questions, I was like, okay, what are we going to ask the robot today? And we would ask Ace something and, and, you know, relevant to our chapter of our content, and we would see what it would be able to spit out. And because of that, my students have been giving me feedback that they have really started utilizing Ace as they were doing their readings, as they were doing their homework, and especially for the final exam study. So I said, Okay, how are y'all using that? Becau yes, if you're stuck, you can ask it questions. And the ease of not going to Google and using Ace instead is because one is right there. Number two, Google is pulling from multiple sources. And one of the disclaimers that I gave in my classes, anatomy is one of those courses that could be taught on a third grade level or med school level. We're in between, you know, we're we're almost med school, but we're not. We're at a two year. You guys are going to be nurses. So I don't want us to study and just lack of competence because we're just studying that at fifth grade level or getting that type of answer. 

Derek Bruff 16:11
Sure. 

Sravanti Kantheti 16:12
So Ace is able to pull directly from my lecture notes, my material that is on Top Hat already, and then it also uses Google and other sources if it needs to go from there. 

Derek Bruff 16:30
Okay, 

Sravanti Kantheti 16:30
So my students were intentionally using it to make an outline of the material. So for example, I would have like this is specifically what they told me, the Brain chapter when we did Neuroanatomy in paragraph form, I will have bold face words with the name of the lobe and then this function. Now you could tell they said they could tell Ace create an outline of all the lobes of the brain along with their short descriptions and bam, they have it all there. So it was great for them to use as a studies tool because it's when I looked at the answers that I was giving, most of it is pulling directly from the material that they were told to read. 

Derek Bruff 17:21
Gotcha. And just for clarity, so you had mentioned during the pandemic you started putting a lot of material in top Hat. 

Sravanti Kantheti 17:28
Yeah. 

Derek Bruff 17:29
Lecture notes, videos to watch paragraphs of text. Right. And so Ace is not my understanding. Ace is not like ChatGPT where it's been just trained on, you know, some huge corpus of text. Ace leveraged some of the functions of a ChatGPT, but it also has been trained on your material in your top hat course. 

Sravanti Kantheti 17:50
Correct. Which I thought was the biggest game changer. And the ease of not having our students open up all those tabs and windows and and everything else. 

Derek Bruff 18:02
So the students are on the top hat platform. 

Sravanti Kantheti 18:04
Yes. 

Derek Bruff 18:05
Reading your course materials. watching the videos you've asked them to watch, you know. That. You've put in there. And Ace is right there in the sidebar and they can access it right there. 

Sravanti Kantheti 18:17
Correct. And I thought that was great. So that so yeah, that's pretty cool. I was like, Oh my gosh, this is amazing. 

Derek Bruff 18:25
Well, one of the things that I found with even ChatGPT is I mean, the, you know, the chat, the GPT-4 the paid version of chat GPT is much less likely to hallucinate some false information. It has access to the Internet and it can look stuff up. But but even then, if you give it some text to read and synthesize or analyze or summarize, it's going to do a much better job if you give it something to work with. 

Sravanti Kantheti 18:55
Correct. 

Derek Bruff 18:55
And so my understanding is top hat ace works the same way. It's it's not as you say, it's not pulling stuff from all over the Internet as it first go. It's pulling stuff from the materials that you've given your students. 

Sravanti Kantheti 19:06
Absolu. And I feel like as the instructor or the educator, I feel more confident and allowing them to utilize that as a tool because it's I know it's accurate and I know it's the information that I want them to know with the rigor that they are using to study. 

And that was really good, 

really good on their part. 

Derek Bruff 19:36
Yeah. So so yeah. What is your student's reaction to this? How? 

Sravanti Kantheti 19:41
Oh, they love it. They absolutely love it. So they say they use it for homework all the time. So explain to me. So they come up with my homework parameters for A&P is I give them three chances for their multiple choice, so they have three chances to get it right. I usually say basically, I'm giving you these points and I want you to utilize your time wisely. Use ACE to give you more of an understanding of why that answer is correct. And they say it has really helped with the homework on that because those are open book questions and they're able to utilize ACE for those. So as a study tool to not only get the outlines but the summaries, that is key. And I'm not sure what has happened to students just overall in the last 15 years since I've been teaching. But I've seen such a drastic decline in desire to read paragraphs. Okay, 

So I thought I was doing them a little bit of help by highlighting the words, you know, you know, bold or a different font. But I think Ace take takes it a step further and does the outline and they love the outline but then it can spit out. 

Derek Bruff 21:08
Y. So let me ask about that because I'm imagining some voices from the audience saying, but what about the act of outlining? Isn't that. Yeah, a valuable learning experience for students taking this, you know, blocks of text and identifying the key information and organizing it? What do you worry that they're missing out on a kind of learning experience by just having the robot do the outline for them? 

Sravanti Kantheti 21:34
I'm going to kind of relate that to those digitized flashcards that are out there. I know Quizlet is a huge one that my students use, and initially when that came out, I think I did that exact speech to my students. I said, But you guys making the flashcards is the studying. So if you are not doing that part and you're just looking at flashcards that are already made for you based on your content, how is that helping? And they're like, No, that's okay and helps because we can pull up, pull it up on our phone, we can carry them everywhere. And so I think it's just a difference School of thought. On 

using that technology as a tool to not necessarily take away from the studying component, but to skip on maybe the tedious part of some of that. And like you said, yes, as educators, we can argue that that is a vital part of the connection. 

But I'm telling you, they are using it just like they're using those flashcards. And I think you can even tell Ace, if I were to create flashcards or create these lobes, list these lobes and give me the definitions and they know what to put on those flashcards. 

Derek Bruff 22:54
Yeah. 

Sravanti Kantheti 22:55
So yes and no. I completely agree with you. 

Derek Bruff 23:01
Well, and I also wonder, you know, it's it's I don't know. So I'm old enough. We used to we had Cliff notes. Yes, I think. Oh yeah. 

Sravanti Kantheti 23:10
I definitely remember to save my life. So. 

Derek Bruff 23:16
You know, one could use Cliff Notes as a substitute for reading the book that your English teacher assigned you to read. 

Sravanti Kantheti 23:24
Yes. 

Derek Bruff 23:24
Or one could use Cliff notes in, I think their intended form purpose, which is to read the book and use the notes to help you make sense of the book. 

Sravanti Kantheti 23:34
Exactly right. 

Derek Bruff 23:35
And. And okay. So I'll make a connection to what I'm doing this year. I have perhaps foolishly signed up for a year long, slow read of the novel War and Peace. 

Sravanti Kantheti 23:47
I love it. 

Derek Bruff 23:48
I'm reading one chapter a day. It's going to take me all year to finish the novel. But what's cool about it is that there is a whole community of folks on Substack who are doing this. There's a guy named Simon who's organizing it, and War and Peace is kind of a hard novel to read. I don't I don't know, you know, early 19th century Russian history that Well, yeah, So I'll read the chapter and then I can go to the community and see what people are saying about that chapter, what questions are asking. And there are people there who know Russian history pretty well who can answer some of those questions. And so I think if a student is really intending to do well in a course and wants to learn the material, having that outline function is a study aid, not a study substitute. Right. They're still going to be studying from that outline. 

Sravanti Kantheti 24:36
Yeah. And I always have to kind of related back to my own children because the way that they are exposed to technology and the way that they are taught to study even from elementary school, it just varied so much from from my time, you know, from early nineties to now. So like I said, I don't think my nine year old who's in third grade currently has ever done a traditional worksheet for homework. Everything is on that computer. And so they get that Chromebook and she has digital math problems in reading. And then there's a tool because she's struggling with reading I account it to having her in kindergarten doing COVID by the way. 

Derek Bruff 25:25
That I can I can do it Yeah. 

Sravanti Kantheti 25:28
She has a tool on there which is very similar to a Google extension where it's talks to her it reads to her and she's so self aware of her limitations in reading. So now she does. She has that button on anything she has to read because it reads it to her. So I said, You know what? This is awesome. You know that you're struggling with that. I'm hoping that one day she is good at it. As you know, the computer's reading it to her. But for now, she's she's getting her homework done. Yeah, she's able to answer the questions and she's not asking for help because she has been given the tools to fill that deficit that she knows she's struggling with. 

Derek Bruff 26:18
Yeah. Ye. Well, and how many adults do I know who listen to audiobooks instead of reading the paper version right now? 

Sravanti Kantheti 26:27
Because I can do my dishes and cook my way and have my airpods in. 

Derek Bruff 26:34
So you mentioned. Okay, so using ACE to outline materials, using a ace for kind of homework help, what are what are some other things that you and your students have figured out that the robot can do? 

Sravanti Kantheti 26:47
Sometimes it will give you a opportunity, especially going back to how overwhelming anatomy can be and some of the systems that we talk about. Cardiovascular just happens to be one of them. It can give them the key objectives of that unit. So not only is it just an outline of a particular area, but it can be what are the objectives that are relevant for this entire unit and how does that relate to whole body homeostasis or something, which is the whole body balance? How does it regulate that? So in all honesty, I've seen it very similarly used to ChatGPT as far as like or Google where you just plug in and questions and sometimes it can do it and sometimes it'll say, I don't have enough information to answer that specific question. Can you ask me in another way? And we're like, okay, so and that will prompt the student to say, maybe I didn't ask this right? Maybe I'm missing bits and pieces to where I'm not understanding how to ask this question. 

Derek Bruff 28:06
Yeah, well, and Google won't tell you that it doesn't know anything. It'll just give you some results. They may be terrible results. 

Sravanti Kantheti 28:14
I know I have used Ace as an ice breaker exercise on the first day because I wanted this semester. I wanted my new students to know it existed in their courses. And then I also was like, okay, everyone's going to be in a group and I want you guys to come up with a prompt that we can ask. And this is first day anatomy. They don't know anything. So it was like, I think one group asks, how many bones are there in the human body? So it was asked. It was telling us that. So it can get that specific to detailed from that relevant chapter or unit that you're working on. 

Derek Bruff 28:58
Yeah. Does it, does it get things wrong? 

Sravanti Kantheti 29:02
I have not come across that now. I will say I have come across the I don't understand how you're asking this or don't have enough information. I' not sure the exact wording that was 

outputted, but something along those lines where we had to reword things. But in terms of inaccuracy, I have not seen that. 

Derek Bruff 29:24
Well, what we're talking about kind of what ifs. But you know, what are some other uses of generative AI, either ace or other tools that you can imagine you or your students using in the future? 

Sravanti Kantheti 29:38
Because all of most of mine are going into the health care field. I think having that quick 

interactive tool to give out not only descriptions but like maybe even a recap map of why are we taking this blood pressure? Like what if I had a a brain fart and I'm like, I know I'm doing this, and I think it would be one of those go tos, 

you know, not just ace. I'm referring to just anything. Instead of arbitrarily looking through and scroll through all of the information that you Google spills out, it's more of a hopefully more structured material that can come out of that. 

Derek Bruff 30:31
Yeah, And I'm expecting we'll see more of that, especially this year because not unlike Ace is kind of trained on your course materials, right? To have a chat tool that is trained on a particular knowledge base and really good at answering questions from that knowledge base. I think a lot of a lot of businesses are moving into this direction, right? I don't I don't. Want this. I don't want to give all my proprietary information to I want a chat bot to read it. Yeah. 

Sravanti Kantheti 30:59
Yeah. And what I would really love to see in the future with health care in general and then kind of leading towards nursing as well, is the simulation of fake patients and using A.I. to come up with a scenario of this is the lab work of this patient, This is what that patient would present with, What are we going to do about it? What do you think they have? And I think eventually that would come in handy. So. Well, because there's no human sitting there generating all these multiple scenarios. And I think that's where we could really utilize technology. 

Derek Bruff 31:42
Yeah, Well, and I've seen a couple of examples of giving ChatGPT a detailed patient description and asking it to do a diagnosis. I couldn't judge whether or not its diagnosis was accurate, but it did the task right. And so I can imagine having nursing students evaluate the output of ChatGPT. 

Sravanti Kantheti 32:07
I love that.

Derek Bruff 32:08
For its accuracy. 

Sravanti Kantheti 32:09
Right? Yes. 

Derek Bruff 32:10
And that we can do right now. Actually. 

Sravanti Kantheti 32:13
Yeah. I was going to say we could use the use ChatGPT for that now because like you said, there's some sort of algorithm that it's following that has, you know, it's, there's this patient in this paragraph, Does this patient present with this well then, yes or no? And it's doing that. And that's what I teach my students to do in order to diagnose or figure out what somebody has, you have to go through that algorithm in your head. So I think that would be good for a homework assignment. Yeah. 

Derek Bruff 32:44
And what I would like to see is, like you said, a scenario like a case study where either ChatGPT or the A.I. tool generates the scenario for students or can even kind of role play the patient in an interchange. Right? I know that seems like we're close to that level of like if you tell you tell the AI, here's you know, here's who you are as a patient, please respond accordingly. I feel like it could come close to that. 

Sravanti Kantheti 33:13
Yeah, Please present with all those symptoms. Right, right, right. 

Derek Bruff 33:18
Right. 

Sravanti Kantheti 33:18
That would be amazing. Amazing. 

Derek Bruff 33:22
Anything else about Ace we haven't talked about? 

Sravanti Kantheti 33:25
Yes. 

Just like we present our students with tools and materials, some tend to get overwhelmed with additional. Oh, gosh. Now there's this other thing that I guess I have to use or, you know, and so I've seen that hesitancy amongst most of my students. I'd say the majority, even at their young age of having the accessibility to technology, they still feel overwhelmed with the amount of resources and they don't know which ones to focus in on and actually use. So some students will run with it and say, Oh my gosh, I've been using Ace the whole time, and then I'll have some students that are just like, I don't know, this is way too much information. I don't know how to study. 

Derek Bruff 34:21
Yeah. 

Sravanti Kantheti 34:22
So I think that goes back to our conversation about knowing how to study and which tools to utilize, because not everyone's a flashcard person not everyone's an outline person. So with these tools and technology that are out there that I've even provided and showed you, you still have to pick and choose what works for you. Yeah. So I think there's a little bit of that study skill component knowing how they study is missing. And I wish there was a little more work in the K-12 system to establish that. 

Derek Bruff 35:02
Sure, yeah. But I would also say that I think that the types of study skills that students need in college are sometimes different than what they needed in high school, obvious. And for a course like A and P, I suspect there are even kind of course specific or or kind of domain specific study strategies that are more or less effective because how do you study in your course is going to be different than how a student might study in my math course. 

Sravanti Kantheti 35:26
Correct? Absolutely. 

Derek Bruff 35:28
And, you know, maybe there's a kind of pandemic effect here, but I'm hearing this from a lot of faculty as well, that the the the students are not coming in with the same kind of study skills that I might have expected five years ago. And so we're having to kind of regroup a little bit and think about how do we how do help teach those study skills. We don't have a lot of time for that because there's a lot of to do. I'm curious if if a tool like Ace could be tuned to do some of that prompting of students to kind of point them in useful study directions. 

Sravanti Kantheti 35:58
I would love to see that too. I would absolutely love to see that, especially because it's doing the outline and the summary. That's great. But then prompting them now, what have you learned about this summary right. Or maybe having it prompted a quiz question was related to that summary. 

Derek Bruff 36:17
Oh, sure. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Do a little testing effect right there. 

Sravanti Kantheti 36:22
Yeah. Yeah. 

Derek Bruff 36:24
Well, Sravanti, this has been great. Thank you so much for talking with me and sharing some of your experiences and it's exciting to hear about your experiments and and what you're learning. So thanks. Thanks so much. 

Sravanti Kantheti 36:35
Thank you for having me. It's wonderful. 

Derek Bruff 36:40
That was Sravanti Kantheti program director for Anatomy and Physiology at Lanier Technical College, an adjunct biology professor at Georgia State University. I love Sravanti's enthusiasm for teaching and for trying out new technologies, and I appreciate her taking the time to share about her experiences using Top Hat Ace. I suspect we're just getting started with these AI learning assistants and Sravanti's experiences provide a little insight into what's around the corner for all of us. Teaching in higher ed. Intentional teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the Online and Professional Education Association. On the show notes you'll find a link to the UPCEA website where you can find out about their research, networking opportunities and professional development offerings. This episode of Intentional Teaching was produced and edited by me, Derek Bruff. See the show notes for links to my website, the intentional teaching newsletter, and my Patreon where you can help support the show for just a few bucks a month. If you found this or any episode of intentional teaching useful, would you consider sharing it with a colleague? That would mean a lot. As always, th for listening.