We invited faculty members in the 2024-2025 Purposeful AI Working Group to reflect on their experiences building custom chatbots that align with their teaching values and enhance student learning.
How has GenAI influenced your teaching practice?
Being in this “AI Class for Professors” has been just plain fun, especially alongside teaching students who engaged with the chatbots in class. The chatbots facilitated conversations with students, and my teaching engagement with the students built week to week on both the developing content of the AI agent and the process of rewriting the chatbots every week. The chatbots influenced my teaching practice by allowing me to experiment and learn alongside students.
I usually ask students to write an integrated reflection on the course readings each week. In Spring 2025, we experimented instead with GenAI to prompt student reflection. I used two purposeful chatbots:
- Being Whole begins by asking students a question that is central to our purpose at BC. For example, “Who does the world need for you to be?” To that end, we look at who we are as relational beings– how our relationships are the essence of who we are. We then examine the interconnection between our relational selves and one of the most fundamental experiences of life– health and illness.
- Betwixt begins with the idea that integration across content areas builds new knowledge. This chatbot draws from two main content areas– one that focuses on a positive health sciences orientation and the other that focuses on human flourishing.
How do you think that GenAI impacts your discipline?
GenAI allows me to actually build and create opportunities for engaging with the process of communication and relationship-building. I can connect the scientific tools we know about communication and relationships, and have users engage in conversations that facilitate better outcomes and human flourishing.
GenAI will be a highly useful tool for me as I move forward with a large-scale research plan to connect relationship science and human communication research with outcomes in health, illness, well-being, and human flourishing. The GenAI tools provide direct “practice” in conversation and feedback on conversation, thereby promoting learning.
I will use different forms of Generative AI, including the Cogniti chatbot I developed as part of this Working Group, alongside tools such as Google’s NotebookLM, to significantly advance the research agenda of researching, developing, and deploying creative solutions for restoring hope, meaning, and purpose to individuals and communities. This project focuses on understanding how AI can scaffold positive health ‘processes’ (i.e., self-discovery, hope building, optimism, resilience) that are meaningful and purposeful for their environment.
What do you plan to focus on moving forward?
From the tools I have learned this year, I have come to realize the enormous potential of GenAI, as well as traditional AI, in mapping out large literatures and making complex scientific concepts related to relationship science and human communication accessible, applicable, and engaging. Instead of me “just” talking about theory and the scientific basis of relationship science and human communication research, I will use GenAI to build tools with which users can engage. Whereas commercial uses of AI primarily focus on profit, my use of GenAI centers on human communication and interpersonal relationships. It will give integrated practice on how relationship science is integrated with positive health sciences to inform mechanisms and processes of how human communications form, function, and influence health and well-being.
