Teaching students how to evaluate AI platforms for academic research

The AMICAL Information Literacy Initiatives Committee (ILIC) is happy to announce our upcoming hands-on workshop, “Teaching students how to evaluate AI platforms for academic research”.

In this 90-minute workshop, participants will learn how to teach students to critically evaluate AI platforms on a variety of criteria. The goal is to decide if a platform is appropriate for a targeted task and how much content from that platform should be used in a student’s final project. One way this goal can be accomplished is by presenting students with a rubric to evaluate AI platforms for multiple academic criteria, as well as providing a curated list of AI platforms that have potentially strong scholarly value.

Participants will be asked to take on the role of a student during the webinar and evaluate one AI platform they are not yet familiar with. They will be divided into breakout rooms according to their choice, and each group will be responsible for trying out and reviewing their chosen platform.

Participants will leave with:

• A reusable evaluation rubric
• Experience assessing AI platforms
• Strategies for teaching critical AI evaluation

Who should attend? Librarians, faculty, and instructional designers.

Before the webinar:

• Choose a platform you are not yet familiar with and sign up for the free version:
• Perplexity
• Elicit
• SciSpace
• Consensus
• Britannica Chatbot
• (If you’re familiar with all of the above, choose the one you’re least familiar with.)
• Review the “Student Guide: Choosing AI Platforms for Academic Work” rubric that the organizers have created.
• You may use this or a different rubric to assess your chosen platform during the workshop.
• You are welcome to develop your own criteria or adapt the rubric to this exercise

The webinar will be led by:

• Katherine Ruprecht, Information Literacy Librarian at the American University in Bulgaria
• Stavros P. Hadjisolomou, Associate Professor of Psychology at the American University of Kuwait
• Fadia M Alakhras, Reference and Instruction Librarian at the American University of Kuwait
• Michael Stoepel, User Services Librarian at the American University of Paris

The event will be held on Zoom (see our online event guidelines) and recorded. If you register for the event, you will be emailed a link to the recording.

AI use notice: We used ChatGPT for editing clarity. Perplexity Pro was used to format the rubric for evaluating the AI platforms.