UCLA announced it will offer a comparative literature course featuring AI-developed textbooks, class assignments, and teaching assistant resources.
comparative literature course The class is scheduled to begin in the winter of 2025 and will be “the first class in the humanities department to use materials developed by Kudu,” an AI system developed by UCLA, the university said. announced last week.
The course, led by Professor Zrinka Stafurjak, “studies selected texts from the Middle Ages to the 17th century, with an emphasis on literary analysis and expository writing.”
“This platform was developed by Alexander Kusenko, a professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA, and his former doctoral student Warren Essie,” UCLA said.
Although Stahuljak's course will be Kudu's UCLA Humanities debut, the system is already being used in an introductory history course in the School of Social Sciences this quarter, the university added.
Elizabeth Landers, a doctoral candidate in history at UCLA, said courses can take three to four months to develop, and Kudu's process requires professors to spend up to 20 hours developing the materials. added.
“The rest of the process will be managed by the Kudu team,” Landers said. “We have all the back-end support for instructors to understand where they want to go with the material.”
To create materials for Stahuljak's comparative literature course, the professor provided Kudu with notes from previous classes, PowerPoint presentations, and YouTube videos.
Stahuljak said she hopes this new AI approach will allow her and her teaching assistants to spend more time helping students with their writing assignments.
“Typically, I spend time during lectures contextualizing the material and using visuals to demonstrate the content,” Stahuljak says. “But now it's all in the textbooks we've created, and we're able to actually work with students to explain what it means to read, analyze and think critically about primary sources. It became.”
The professor added that students can ask Kudu for help when they have questions about course materials, and unlike ChatGPT and other similar AI tools, Kudu only pulls information from resources uploaded by Stahuljak. he claimed.
“We only respond based on the content of the course,” Stahuljak says. “So this is there to help students, but it also reduces the risk of students using ChatGPT to generate homework.”
Alana Mastrangelo is a reporter for Breitbart News. you can follow her facebook And with X @ARmastrangeloand further Instagram.
