M.S. AAI Capstone Chronicles 2024

EDUCATION ASSISTANCE THROUGH A.I.

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Virtual Teaching Assistant

Our project seeks to develop a tool analogous to ChatGPT (OpenAI, 2024) to be a virtual teacher assistant that would provide students educational support without directly offering answers to homework problems, thereby maintaining the integrity of the learning process . This tool will assist professors in grading assignments by providing suggestions and identifying potential errors, rather than providing direct answers. A critical aspect of our project involves evaluating the long-term effects of this tool on both students’ learning outcomes and professors’ grading methodologies. Additionally, we aim to address technical challenges such as optimizing memory usage, ensuring functionality, and implementing restrictions to prevent the generation of direct test or homework answers before the appropriate time. Through this initiative, we hope to explore the potential of generative A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) in educational settings while mitigating ethical concerns and enhancing the educational experience for all involved. This project is essential as it will demonstrate one method that Generative A.I. can be used to enhance education. It relies on direct access to course material with data poisoning on specific entries for the consideration of academic integrity. Moreover, it is becoming increasingly common for an international student’s work to be "written by A.I." due to limited understanding of the English language. Even if they are getting supplemental help from A.I., we believe a path should be opened to allow critical multi-lingual support and possible translation sources. Future extension of this project could open the door to a new chain of tool where a student can get grammatical and editing help they might truly need, but not in a way that would compromise the integrity of the learning process. Multi-lingual support is not a function we will consider directly in this paper but we truly believe it would be a worthwhile addition in the future. Our primary users are students, professors, and researchers interested in the ethical deployment of A.I. within educational frameworks. This project not only aims to serve as a direct aid to students and educators, but also to enrich the academic discourse surrounding

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