Cana Fuest, PhD Candidate

I recently downloaded Ollama on my Macbook Pro (my computer has a M3 chip and 8GB of memory). I’m very new to LLMs but determined to learn, so I have been experimenting with Llama3 to see how it compares to LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini. So far I like it.

[If you want to better understand what Ollama is, you can read this article.]

I already wrote about my goal in my AI studies, which is to turn a LLM into my own personal teaching assistant and course designer. I want to leverage the power of AI to generate text and images to develop quality learning materials, and to do the repetitive tasks for me. As an educator, I have the knowledge and expertise but not always the time to make my courses as engaging as I would like. As any teacher knows, the first time you teach a class, you spend a significant amount of time outlining, creating assignments, notes, slides, etc. It’s time consuming.

So here is the little experiment I conducted: I asked Llama3, first of all, if it was capable of helping me grade a document, without my having to copy and paste text into the terminal. Llama3 gave me a few ways that it could access documents, one of which is if I were to share a Google drive or Google doc link. I used one of my own papers for my PhD program and gave Llama3 the Google doc link. Then I asked Llama3 to grade the assignment based on academic writing quality and grammar. For this test, I did not provide a rubric. Llama3 gave me some good feedback and pointed out areas where the grammar was imperfect, or the writing could have been smoother. All of this took place in under 5 minutes.

My conclusion is that I believe it might be worthwhile to continue to explore how I can leverage this LLM to assist me with teaching tasks. I think that some teachers might be opposed to using AI with grading because they feel that they should read every little bit of student writing. But honestly, I think the LLM might help me to grade more objectively. Sometimes we get tired when we grade, or make other careless mistakes. My intent is to use the technology to become more efficient and provide better feedback to students.

I know that other applications for teachers exist, such as Gradescope, but I personally wasn’t a fan of the interface. I think that Gradescope also requires payment in order to access its advanced features. I get it – these edtech companies need to make money too! For my part, however, I want to know how to customize my technology enough so that it does precisely what I am looking for as a teacher.

If you have done your own grading or course design experiments with AI, I would love to hear about it!