AI in northern Ontario's post-secondary education system: Tool or threat?
Algoma University is using AI to help students practice for job interviews
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping the post-secondary experience — both as a tool to help students and as a challenge for academic integrity.
At Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie, AI is being embraced to help students prepare for the job market. The university is using a program called InStage, which simulates job interviews to help students refine their communication skills.
"It's a great way to practice something that, let's face it, not everybody likes doing," said Jonathan Coulman, manager of career education and employability at Algoma University.
"I think students find that with InStage, they can practice in a completely risk free area. No one's going to see the interview, and they can do it as many times as they want, and practice does make perfect."
Coulman explained students can upload a specific job description into the program and customize their interview experience by selecting an avatar with a chosen personality.
"They'll be asked questions based on the job description and their resume, even myself going in and trying out this tool very quickly, it feels like you're in a real interview, just because of the way the conversation is directed," he said.
After the interview, students receive a comprehensive report analyzing their performance. The feedback covers communication skills, including filler word usage, speaking pace, and volume.
"We're getting more and more students using it, and it really does help us," Coulman said.
AI scepticism
But not everyone in the post-secondary sector sees AI as a positive force.
Aaron Langille, a professor of game design at Cambrian College in Sudbury, has seen the negative side of AI in the classroom. He has also been appointed as a special advisor to the vice-president academic on artificial intelligence policy at the college.
"Artificial intelligence has been painfully disruptive in terms of academic integrity issues. In particular, there's been a lot of use of ChatGPT," he said. "It's extremely hard to determine when students are using it, whether they're using ChatGPT or other tools."
Langille said because AI programs like ChatGPT can convincingly replicate human language, it has become challenging to distinguish between something students did themselves and something they made with AI.
This difficulty has fundamentally disrupted traditional plagiarism detection methods, according to Langille, forcing educators to completely reevaluate assessment strategies, including resorting to in-person testing.
In early March, Langille attended a national conference in Calgary on the transformative potential of AI in post-secondary education and said his biggest takeaway was the potential of AI-powered individualized learning tools.
"To ask a professor to go back and review all the material for only a small number of students that are struggling with certain concepts is a bit tricky at times, but having an AI assistant that can handle those cases can be very helpful," Langille said.
"We need to make sure that the baseline knowledge of what tools are available, how they're used, how they're used ethically and responsibly, is sort of universally available to both faculty and students."