The Last Show with David Cooper discusses AI in education with UC’s Joshua Lambert

Podcaster David Cooper hosts a weekday late-night talk radio show and podcast offering a mix of pop culture topics. The Last Show with David Cooper featured Joshua Lambert, PhD, a professor and biostatistician in UC College of Nursing to discuss his latest research on using artificial intelligence for student advising.

Lambert piloted a custom chatbot in a small group of Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) students who evaluated how a professor, a graduate assistant and a chatbot answered their statistical questions about their capstone projects. The results of the study have been published in the Journal of Nursing Education. 

The students rated the chatbot’s responses the highest in terms of overall satisfaction and helpfulness until they suspected the answers were from artificial intelligence. The small pilot project suggests a bias against AI and that more study is needed. It however offers hints about the future of possible AI use for student advising.

The use of chatbot has grown since its debut in 2022 with more than a third of American adults using them and 58% of adults under 30 trying them out. But their use in higher education has its own controversy.

“Like many other technologies, I knew chatbots and LLM’s were going to be integrated into our students’ lives quicker than we at the university could react,” explains Lambert.

Listen to Dr. Lambert on The Last Show with David Cooper online.

Read more about Dr. Lambert’s research on the UC website.