A new Santa Monica College (SMC) course prepares educators from all disciplines to train their students in using artificial intelligence appropriately, effectively and ethically.
SMC’s “Education 50: Teaching in the Age of AI” (EDUC 50) course enables the college’s instructors to leverage the technology’s benefits for students while preserving academic integrity.
“It’s about understanding AI’s impact on teaching and learning, and learning how to use it ethically and effectively,” says Gary Huff, chair of SMC’s Education/Early Childhood Education Department, who co-teaches the course with author and media studies professor Lynn Dickinson.
Offered online, the three-unit course is open to all educators — who must enroll as students at SMC through the regular enrollment process — as well as anyone wanting to understand how AI can be used to enhance teaching. Huff based its curriculum on Dickinson’s book How to Use ChatGPT (and Other Large Language Models) as a Teaching Assistant. So, it was only natural that he asked her to help teach the course — and that her book be assigned as required reading.
“It’s kind of scary to have a class where all your students are professors,” Dickinson jokes.
But no concern was needed. The course filled to its initial capacity of 45 students within hours of opening for enrollment, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive.
Huff adds that, at the time they launched EDUC 50, a national survey showed that some 85% of higher education students were using ChatGPT but that only 15% of faculty had explored those tools.
“That was eye-opening,” he says.
Expanding horizons
The course covers topics such as how AI can be used to enhance lesson plans, improve teaching efficiency and personalize learning.
“We’re teaching educators to better prepare students for the workforce, where AI is already becoming a crucial skill,” Huff says. “We can’t teach in the same way that we always have. Traditional education doesn’t necessarily work in the age of AI, so there needs to be an evolution of pedagogy.”
He says that some of the educators in the course were concerned about AI diminishing students’ critical thinking and writing skills because of too much reliance on AI.
“In reality, AI can actually enhance those skills,” Huff explains. “You need to be a fairly solid writer to craft effective prompts, and you need to be a good critical thinker to evaluate output from AI. So those skills are still important. We just need to teach them in a different way.”
The course’s practical focus is one of its strengths, according to Dickinson.
“Once faculty realize how much time AI can save them and how it improves the quality of brainstorming and lesson planning, they don’t want to go back to the old way of doing things,” she says. “It’s like telling a math professor not to use a calculator — those days are gone. AI represents a huge sea change in education.”
Gerry Clark, a computer information systems professor at the California college, was in the course’s inaugural class.
“I’d been interested in AI since it came on the scene and had been experimenting with it myself,” he says.
Even with prior experience, Clark found that the course expanded his notions about AI’s uses and value.
“The course has encouraged me to use interactive chats to let AI refine itself in helping shape my ideas into whatever I want,” he says. “So now I use AI in a more comprehensive manner.”
Even so, the results of each task remain of the users’ design and making, because AI must always be applied with care, specificity and honesty, Clark notes.
Genesis and growth
The idea for the course developed after Huff noticed an almost-overnight improvement in students’ assignments. Having recently revised his curriculum, he attributed this to his own hard work — until a realization dawned.
“It was students who had caught on to ChatGPT and what it could do for them in terms of generating text and helping with homework,” he says.
Realizing he needed a crash course to cope with this technology, he bought his colleague Dickinson’s book.
“I read it without stopping,” he says. “What she wrote is so practical and hands-on that I could begin using it right away in my own classes.”
With her book in hand and the desire to craft a course in mind, Huff turned to his fellow SMC faculty for an interdisciplinary focus.
“I had partners in the distance education department and professional development and worked with academic affairs and career education,” he says.
Dickinson’s involvement completed the partnership, and EDUC 50 was born.
Used carefully, AI can bolster knowledge across a spectrum of subjects, Huff and Dickinson say. For example, Huff shares an example from one of his own hobbies.
“I have a ChatGPT bot set up as my Korean language partner. We have conversations back and forth in Korean, and it corrects my grammar and my pronunciation, and it introduces me to vocabulary, and then it summarizes it for me. And since ChatGPT learns as you use it — as do other AI platforms — it becomes more sophisticated about a topic with each prompt submitted.”
Writing the book on AI
Dickinson had been a sought-after expert on AI even before How to Use ChatGPT was first printed. In fact, that’s how the book came about. When organizers of a national AI conference asked her to be its keynote speaker, they also asked if she had published any books on AI in education so they could have something to promote.
Dickinson, being an experienced author and educator, said, “Give me a month.” But more important than that deadline, she says, “I wrote the book to answer the most frequent questions everyone was asking me.”
Powered by both professors’ combined skills — and cross-disciplinary input from fellow faculty — EDUC 50 is so popular that they doubled the offering to two sections for the spring 2025 semester, both of which are already full. And it may expand further as demand keeps growing. Huff and Dickinson are also considering sharing their curriculum with other institutions.
“The need is vast, and we can’t teach everybody throughout the state who needs this training,” Huff says, adding that faculty who are interested in signing up for the spring 2025 course can always reach out to him via SMC email.
Meeting that goal includes gearing the online, asynchronous course to account for teachers’ busy schedules — whether at the high school or college level.
“One of the many great things about Gary and Lynn and what they did in the course is they understand that every one of their students is an instructor, and we’re facing the same sort of time challenges,” Clark says.
Advantages and advances
Classmates also benefit from each other’s knowledge and teaching methods, Dickinson says.
“I’m actually learning a lot about pedagogy from Gary,” she notes.
Still, the course is only the first stop to preparing educators for the changes and challenges of leveraging AI. Fortunately, it is just one part of SMC’s commitment to fostering AI literacy, addressing ethical concerns about the technology and enhancing its uses for improving students’ futures. This includes potentially building on EDUC 50’s foundation to develop a certificate in the educational use of AI.
“Every day we learn about new tools and advances,” Huff says. “So, I think that what may follow are deeper dives into specific types of AI tools and how that can be integrated into different disciplines across higher education.”
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This article was produced by the Santa Monica College Public Information Office. It previously appeared in the February 18, 2025 edition of the college’s newsletter.