Your Favorite Prof—Backed by a Bot?

A debit seems like a simple concept, right? You pay a bill or buy lunch and your bank account shrinks. But that’s not exactly how it works in the field of accounting, where a debit, oddly, can boost an account while a credit reduces assets.

“It can be non-intuitive, particularly for students just starting out,” said University of Maryland Professor Michael Kimbrough, area chair of accounting and information assurance in the Robert H. Smith School of Business. “Accounting is an area where people can get mental blocks, because it has a different kind of organizational hierarchy.”

While students normally flip back and forth through textbooks and glossaries and pepper professors and teaching assistants with basic questions until they get their bearings, Kimbrough tried something new in a class this summer—a chatbot.

He’s an early adopter of a recently introduced service offered by the Division of Information Technology (DIT) that creates class-specific artificial intelligence (AI)-based classroom assistants that students can ask about test schedules, reading assignments and, most importantly, how to find the information they’ll need to succeed. He tried out the chatbot in a 100-level accounting course for academically talented high school students in the Terps Young Scholars program.

“You can’t use this tool to get the answer to a problem, but you can use it to help you organize a problem,” Kimbrough said. “It is effective at helping you parse out the terms and ideas to find a solution yourself.”

The chatbot assistants were first piloted last spring, and are being rolled out this semester in 10 classes in computer science, engineering and cybersecurity, along with business. It’s all part of the university’s commitment to embracing the power of AI for education and research while ensuring it’s being used wisely, said Axel Persaud, assistant vice president of enterprise engineering in DIT.

“This technology is transformative, and whether we provide it to students or they go out and get access to it on their own, it’s here and it’s not going away,” he said. “So our thinking is, let’s do this the right way and make sure we’re giving them access to good information, rather than just whatever is floating around on the internet.”

The class chatbots are based on the latest version of ChatGPT but differ from the the commercially available service; UMD’s chatbots draws only on syllabi, schedules, readings, lecture outlines and other material chosen by instructor, rather than the mix of useful information and garbage that fills the public internet.

Persaud said instructors need only to upload the material to Google drives to allow the chatbot to work with it, he said, whether by telling students when an assignment is due, referring them to a specific chapter to find a key concept, or even creating quizzes based on relevant information to practice for upcoming exams.

In a handful of pilot classes, the chatbot didn’t always elicit as much response from students as hoped, Persaud said, so this semester, DIT is providing tips to help students understand the benefits and engage with the chatbot.

Kimbrough’s class didn’t have that problem; after he explained the chatbot assistant’s use, his students immediately began interacting with it. As a result, in-class discussions could focus on more advanced topics, and by the end, the high schoolers had mastered the material at a college level, he said.

“It was a good experience,” he said. “I think the students felt good about being able to effectively find answers themselves rather than having to schedule time with me or with a teaching assistant.”

As a bonus, his interaction with the system allowed him to see what questions students were asking in real time and adjust his teaching accordingly.

Ismail Taj, a sophomore at River Hill High School in Clarksville, Md., said using the chatbot reduced confusion about how to do calculations to balance books, among other problems. Taj said he’s glad to see that UMD is embracing AI.

“I see people in school pulling out their phones and using AI even when they’re not supposed to, so I definitely think schools need to find a way to integrate it that makes sense, because policies can’t stop it,” he said. “We’re going to be using AI everywhere in the future, so we should definitely be using it in education.”

Persaud said UMD plans to keep looking for new uses for AI as a human-centered tool for learning and exploration.

“We’re just at the beginning,” Persaud said. “In my mind this technology will keep getting better, and that means it’s going to be able to help students learn better and better.”