Teaching Entrepreneurship Students to Self-Teach With AI

A business professor at Miami University in Ohio encourages learners to use generative artificial intelligence tools to complete coursework, which he says prepares them for their future careers.

Increasingly, employers are indicating that there’s a need for students to be trained in generative artificial intelligence tools as more businesses integrate the tech’s capabilities into the workplace.

Some instructors have implemented AI into their classes to demonstrate prompt engineering and showcase AI’s research and writing abilities. Entrepreneurship professor Mark Lacker at Miami University in Ohio encourages students to use generative AI tools to complete projects, inspiring creative and critical thinking skills that can prepare them for careers.

How it works: Whether it was talking with employers or with students as they engaged in internships or reading recent research, the theme of generative AI in the workplace was made exceedingly apparent to Lacker this past summer.

So, on the first day of classes, Lacker told his students what he’d learned: That a majority of graduates wished they’d been taught AI, that businesses were aggressively investing in AI tools and that if they didn’t board the AI train, it would leave the station without them. The students bought in immediately, he says.

The rapid evolution of AI has shown Lacker that it’s not enough to teach students how to use tools, but to teach them to use these tools while learning. “It’s gotta be in the workflow,” he explains.

The course, which covers start-up marketing and finance, is a 200-level course predominately taken by first-semester sophomores who represent a variety of majors and disciplines.

Lacker considers his course similar to an internship, where he fulfills the role of supervisor and his students act as interns, receiving project requests and submitting them.[…]