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OHIO faculty, staff invited to workshop on building custom chatbots

Ohio University faculty, researchers and academic support staff interested in building custom chatbots are invited to a half-day, encore workshop on Tuesday. Feb. 18.

The hands-on workshop(opens in a new window) has been designed by Professor Jared DeForest, Center for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment GenAI faculty fellow and chair of the Department of Environmental and Plant Biology.

During the workshop, participants will be introduced to custom chatbots and discuss how they differ from ChatGPT and other platforms, while they also focus on use cases for this type of chatbot. They will also receive a tutorial on how to frame knowledge to create a chatbot for use in teaching and research: for instance, developing and training a customized GPT model to function as a teaching assistant for a course. In addition, they will consider methods for evaluating and improving their chatbots.

At the end of this workshop, any participant with access to ChatGPT-4o will have a functional and tested custom GPT.

Following the workshop, participants will be able to:

  • Articulate strengths and limitations of custom GPTs and evaluate whether they can be applied to their teaching and/or research environment. 
  • Review ethical considerations and evaluate if custom GPTs align with their vision for a GPT. 
  • Create a custom GPT with Knowledge and understand how to train to a GPT with instructions that serve a specific purpose and set boundaries to protect academic and research integrity.
  • Evaluate their GPT performance for usefulness and integrity to make necessary changes to the Instructions.

The workshop will be held in the CTLA Collaboratory, 106 McGuffey Hall, from 3:30 to 6 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 18. Because the workshop is hands-on, it will be recorded for later viewing but not offered in hybrid format.

You can register here for the workshop.(opens in a new window)

Published
January 28, 2025
Author
Staff reports