I have a longstanding interest in artificial intelligence. I liked science fiction books a lot when I was younger, and watched plenty of movies involving humanoid intelligent robots. I have given many of my hours to Star Wars and Star Trek shows and movies of wildly varied quality. When I was an undergraduate philosophy major at Rutgers University, there was a lot of interest in Jerry Fodor’s work (though Fodor did not teach any undergraduate courses while I was there, much to my dismay). Fodor was writing, with Zenon Pylyshyn and one of my professors, Brian McLaughlin, a series of papers criticizing the connectionist approach to artificial intelligence, and I was converted, fervently, to the connectionist cause by reading books by Paul Churchland on my own. I wanted to write a defense of connectionism against Fodor’s “systematicity” objections as a senior honors thesis, but real life got in the way, and I never finished my senior honors thesis.
I’ve kept up, a bit, with debates about artificial intelligence over the years, although the main focus of my research and much of my teaching has been on metaethics and the philosophy of language. I was afforded the opportunity to teach an AI class at my university, Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, when our fantastic Honors College was looking for someone to teach a course that fulfills a general education science requirement. While I am no scientist, I thought a course on artificial intelligence and cognitive science would be of interest to our Honors College students. Later, I worked to add the course to the philosophy course catalog, and I have taught, and will teach, an AI course online.
My list of readings is an attempt to cover the main debates over AI over the last seventy years. I use a classic collection, Mind Design II by John Haugeland, to show students the history of these issues. A more contemporary anthology, The Cambridge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence by Keith Frankish and William Ramsey, shows how some of the earlier ideas of AI researchers have flourished in industrial applications in recent years, especially the ideas derived from early connectionism.
Mostly I want to tell you about how I teach an online course. I have been teaching online at Oakland over a decade now, since well before the pandemic. My early online courses were primarily synchronous, meaning that I ran live sessions, typically over Cisco WebEx, lecturing over a PowerPoint and hoping for extensive discussion and participation. I was trying to recreate the live classroom environment over videoconferencing, and it never really worked. I had hardly any class participation at all, though I grant I did not force participation using incentives. Perhaps if I did it would have worked better, though with the complex lives and many commitments of my students, it would have been pretty harsh to require too much mandatory participation of all of them. Many of the students could not make it at the set time for the class, even though the time was on the course schedule, and most of these students watched the recording of the WebEx session later.
Given my negative experience with synchronous classes, I have shifted my focus in recent years to an asynchronous format. I make and post videos going over the main points from the reading assignments. For example, here is my video on Fodor and Pylyshyn on systematicity.
I post all of my videos on YouTube because YouTube videos can easily be accessed and watched on a variety of devices. I don’t publish all of my videos for public consumption. Instead, I set the video as “unlisted.” What this means is that anyone with the URL for the video can access it, but it is not searchable on YouTube or on any search engine. Only the students with the link can see these videos.
I also post videos by the authors of the various pieces I assign. These videos put a face on the person behind the reading. For instance, here is a great short interview with Margaret Boden on classic, logic-based AI. Also, here, more or less for fun, is a video of robots playing soccer. I use a picture of one of these cute NAO robots on the flyer for my course, and on the course management software. NAO robots provide a nicer face for AI than, say, the Terminator.
I think it’s vital, for asynchronous online courses, to keep in contact with the students on a regular basis. In addition to the dates for the assignments listed on the syllabus, I email the students weekly to remind them of what is due for a given week. These emails let the students know when they need to submit materials.
In a typical week in my class, much of the instructor to student, and student to student interaction is through the forums. This is a venerable method in online teaching, used for many years before Zoom. The forums get students talking to me and each other. I find forums much more useful for facilitating a discussion-based class than a live webconferencing session. To make the forums more manageable, I typically will divide the students into groups of five or so. In these groups, the students see each other’s forum posts, and are required to comment on at least one of each other’s posts. I don’t give credit to students unless they both post their own writing and comment on each other’s writing. I am lenient about this requirement early on, giving reminders until the students get the hang of it.
I also assign a short multiple choice quiz each week. These quizzes are there to make sure the students are reading the assignments and watching the videos. I aim to make the quizzes test vital skills just beyond regurgitation of class material, though some mastery of material is needed in my class, and the students are tested for this.
Much of the material on my syllabus is lifted directly from a course I took at Oakland University. The Oakland University E-Learning and Instructional Services department offers a course on online teaching. It is, itself, an online course. This online course models a good way to teach an online course. Because it is an online course on teaching online courses, I call it the online online course course. Nic Bongers, the instructional designer who taught my course, developed a great deal of useful material that I more or less took word-for-word from his syllabus and sample syllabus. I am deeply grateful to Nic and to Oakland University E-Learning for this.
This material is really worth reading carefully. It covers matters like what kind of technical knowledge and equipment a student should have in online courses. It sets some useful expectations, both for the students and myself, about how much they need to be logged in to do the course, and how often I will be checking in for the course. I need to make clear to the students that I will not be checking work email on weekends, that I will be on the course site and email regularly but not 24/7. These kinds of expectations are vital to set so that the online course does not swallow up my entire life.
The main thing I learned from the online online course course that I would like you to keep in mind is that a very regular schedule, with similar assignments and expectations from week to week, is vital in an online course.
In addition to the material I freely stole from our E-Learning department, there is a good deal of university boilerplate on my syllabus, some of it very valuable and important, like the university preferred name policy and the information for students with disabilities. This course runs regularly at the course cap (generously set by Oakland University and my department at 25 students) primarily because it fulfills a general education requirement called “Knowledge Applications.” This is a requirement for a student to take a course outside of his or her own major. As a result, I get a lot of students who are not philosophy majors. It is really nice to reach these students as well as our philosophy majors, and making the course fulfill this requirement as well as the writing intensive requirement at Oakland has the nice perk of avoiding my class being cancelled for low enrollment.
Teaching writing is a passion of mine. I have been focused on writing pedagogy for a long time, dating back to my time as a Writing Across the Curriculum Fellow at CUNY. (This is a program that provided extremely generous funding that helped me while writing my dissertation). I require quite a lot of written work in the class. Some of it is to show knowledge of the course material, but a great deal of it is for the students to develop their own ideas and support them. I think this is the most important aspect of any of my classes: getting the students to think philosophically. A lot of students go through college without getting enough training in thinking originally and setting it down in writing. These are skills that will serve students in all kinds of fields. To achieve this, my students are writing every week in the forums. Their midterms and final are all essay, with many questions requiring original opinions with argumentative support. There is also a required term paper in the class, with a rough draft and required revisions. This revision process is so vital, and too few of our classes involve it.
My students will hopefully learn a lot about debates over artificial intelligence and the history of AI. Even if they eventually forget about the details of these debates, I hope this online class offers them a chance to develop useful skills that they can apply throughout their lives.
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Fritz McDonald
Fritz McDonald is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, USA. He is currently the Associate Chair of the American Philosophical Association Committee on Teaching of Philosophy, and starting in July 2021 he will be Chair of the Committee on Teaching of Philosophy for a three-year term.
