As artificial intelligence grows more embedded into industries and classrooms, educators worry its ability to provide fast answers may affect students’ capacity to think critically and sit with questions. For Michael Donihue, interim director of the Davis Institute for AI at Colby College in Maine, the liberal-arts model of encouraging critical thought has proven helpful for students increasingly exposed to tools that do the thinking for them, and it’s one the college turned to when making a tool called Mule Chat.
Piloted last year and named after the school mascot, Mule Chat is a portal that gives users access to large language models (LLMs) like Open AI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini and Meta’s LLaMa, allowing students and faculty to test and compare them.
“We have discussions that start with things like, ‘This prompt engineering has to be pretty good to get anything useful out of it.’ In other words, you have to ask it a good question,” he said. “Well, you know, at the liberal arts institution, that’s what we do. We teach kids how to ask good questions.”
Mule Chat reflects several key tenets of the university, Donihue said. For one, it promotes equal access to educational tools by including the most advanced versions of the models for free. For example, Colby has a license to share unlimited access to OpenAI’s GPT-4o, which would otherwise cost a user $200 per month.
It also reflects a cross-disciplinary focus, showing that AI can be useful for a variety of subjects. Maddie Puzon, a student at Colby studying philosophy and computer science (CS), said her classmates on the humanities side have a lot of fear about AI.
“With Mule Chat, its interface allows you to try out a couple of large language models, and because they all have different training data and different parameters, some respond better to, let’s say math and CS versus creative writing,” she said. “This way, students can see those differences and see which one they want to go use.”
Users can select multiple models to appear side by side within the Mule Chat portal to see how different LLMs respond to the same prompt in real time.
Puzon serves on a team of student tutors who guide other students and faculty through the Mule Chat interface. Tutors took a semester-long course where they learned about Mule Chat and effective prompt engineering for a variety of applications.
A tutoring program called Mule Chat at Colby College in Maine gives users access to several popular generative AI tools.
Photo credit: Ashley L. Conti/Colby College
The college also allows instructors to choose their own AI policies from class to class, and tutors can help students understand how to adhere to them. Puzon has seen policies ranging from “no generative AI whatsoever” to completely open use, with the instructor believing students are responsible for their own learning.
One instructor, Chaoran Wang, asks students in her writing courses to use generative AI for one assignment each semester. Wang consulted student tutors for help creating AI guidelines for her course, and she asked her students to submit records of and reflections on their use of AI.
“Some use it as a tool that they do traditional grammatical editing stuff. Some are using it more. They interact with AI a lot. They even see AI as something like a study partner,” she said. “I think this is why a multidisciplinary approach is important, because we have to teach students how it depends on the specific disciplinary conventions or the goals of learning.”
Donihue said Mule Chat and related efforts to educate the campus community about the portal — including the student tutors, communication with instructors and informational events — were an intentional push to establish a strong foundation in AI literacy. In the future, Colby College will have its own enterprise chatbot called Mule Bot, he said, and the student tutor role may adapt to further assist faculty with incorporating AI into their classrooms. The college is also looking forward to custom GPTs and AI agents.
“Thinking of these things as disruptive technologies in the classroom, absolutely, but it’s from that disruption that you get some creativity, and you get inspired to try new things, and you’re learning, and that’s what we want to instill in our students,” he said. “Try new things.”
Abby Sourwine is a staff writer for the Center for Digital Education. She has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Oregon and worked in local news before joining the e.Republic team. She is currently located in San Diego, California.
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