As part of his 2024-25 University of Minnesota Emerging Technologies Faculty Fellowship, Collier developed an AI tutor. Collier used the custom GPT technology that OpenAI had recently introduced. The tutor is trained on readings from his Ethics and AI course and given particular instructions about how to interact with students in a conversation. The goal of the fellowship is to foster a learning community that experiments with generative AI in their teaching and to promote the effective use and best practices of AI. Fellowship faculty are tasked with identifying an area of AI to explore and implement within a university course. “I felt that [creating this AI tutor] might be a good use case of generative AI tools.” Collier was cautious that his students use AI in a way that strengthens their independent and critical thinking skills. “The … tutor is Socratic in the sense that, like the philosopher Socrates, it only asks probing questions but never answers them.”
