Teaching Writing Across the Curriculum with AI
Writing Across the Curriculum Assignments, Classroom Activities, and Educational Resources for Higher Education
This series of activities works through strategies for prompt engineering, from basic choices to more sophisticated strategies. Use the activities one-by-one with students or point students to a specific strategy when they need to improve their prompt writing.
By requiring students to start a new chat for unrelated questions, the assignment demonstrates the value of resetting the chat history to obtain unbiased and “pure” responses, teaching them to manage context effectively in AI interactions.
The assignment teaches students to specify the desired length of ChatGPT responses, enabling them to receive information in various formats, from concise summaries to detailed essays, depending on their needs.
The assignment encourages students to specify the level of sophistication in their prompts, allowing them to receive responses that match their desired depth and complexity, whether for beginner or advanced understanding.
The assignment encourages students to engage creatively by asking ChatGPT to deliver explanations or summaries in the style of famous authors or artists, making learning more enjoyable and memorable.
The assignment allows students to explore and understand different tones by having them generate responses in various styles, such as playful, sarcastic, or authoritative, helping them recognize how tone impacts communication.
The assignment teaches students to use graduated prompts, starting with broad inquiries and progressively adding more details, helping them understand how specificity impacts the quality and accuracy of ChatGPT’s responses.
By rephrasing prompts, students learn how different wording can elicit varied responses, leading to a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the subject matter as they explore different angles and perspectives.
Students learn to generate and compare multiple responses from a single prompt, which helps them understand how different approaches and wordings can convey varying perspectives and nuances on the same topic.
The assignment introduces students to the technique of prompt chaining, teaching them how to build on previous prompts to extract more detailed and precise information, thereby enhancing their query formulation skills.
Students engage in prompt engineering by iteratively refining and tweaking the set of instructions given to a Large Language Model (LLM). Through a collaborative workshop format, students work in groups to analyze the AI’s output, discuss its strengths and weaknesses, and propose improvements.
Students engage in hands-on activities where they create prompts, analyze the outputs generated by LLMs, and reflect on the outcomes.
Students analyze how the AI processes and generates text, providing a practical understanding of natural language processing (NLP) concepts. They critically evaluate the AI-generated responses and reflect on the potential applications and limitations of using AI in technical communication.
Utilizing a threaded discussion platform, students experiment with AI image-making programs, focusing on the verbal prompts they create. Students are evaluated not only on the quality of their prompts but also on their support and encouragement of other writers.
Students generate prompts, collect consecutive responses from ChatGPT, and analyze these iteration. By summarizing, synthesizing, and editing AI responses, and conducting library research, students examine the ethical implications of AI in writing.