Christine’s gloating thought of the day that does not involve the LT department: I’ve always thought that the argument that yes, maybe, the current LLMs are bad but they will improve was not persuasive. The current models have already hoovered most data in existence. Well, now OpenAI has pretty much acknowledged the “hallucinations” will persist as a feature, not a bug. Because LLMs know nothing. Don’t take my word for it, take OpenAI’s.
Oh, and a recent study shows that using AI increases unethical behavior.
Checking Your Course Settings in Ultra
Whether you’re an Ultra pro or you just started using it, it’s worth going over your course settings. In Ultra, the course settings are located at the top right of your screen, next to your course status (open or closed).
Clicking on this will take you to your settings page where you can open or close your course.
In particular, I want to draw your attention to this part of your settings:
The first arrow determines whether your students can see the class roster under Details and Actions on the right sidebar. By default, it’s toggled on, which means students can see their classmates’ names.
In my case, you can see that I leave it toggled off. Note that leaving it on means that students can see each other’s names and COD ID (their login name before @dupage.edu). So that option is not on my students Details and Actions:
The message options is equally important. First, you can set whether students can message you inside Blackboard. In my case, it’s toggled on because I much prefer that students message me than email me. I get way too many emails as it is and students have a tendency to not specify which of my sections they’re in. With messages in Blackboard, I’m already in the course so I don’t have to wonder. But I know some of you prefer emails over messages. If you are in that category, toggle that off.
Then, if you toggled messages in, you have some options as to whom your students can message. In my case, only me. I don’t want them messaging each other.
The choices that I have made are based on safety considerations. I don’t want them to be able to message outside of what I can see (like in a discussion board), because I don’t want weird and unpleasant things to happen.
However you decide, make sure you check your course settings and make any changes you find appropriate.
