UNL Open AI Impact Program: Psychology professor restructures course with ChatGPT – The Daily Nebraskan
Rin Nguyen in her Psychopathology and Mental Health class answering a student’s question during her lecture on Tuesday, Sept. 16 at Burnet Hall in Lincoln. (Photo by Paloma Sanchez-McGee/CoJMC,NNS)
Rin Nguyen in her Psychopathology and Mental Health class answering a student’s question during her lecture on Tuesday, Sept. 16 at Burnet Hall in Lincoln. (Photo by Paloma Sanchez-McGee/CoJMC,NNS)
This story originally ran in the Nebraska News Service
In her sixth year of teaching, psychology professor and doctoral candidate Rin Nguyen tasked herself with the challenge of restructuring her class with ChatGPT Edu to improve learning outcomes for students.
Nguyen’s ultimate goal was to make her upper-level psychology course, Psychopathology and Mental Health, more applicable to the industry. According to Nguyen, the process requires hours of devoted time–sometimes up to 20 hours to create an exam from scratch.
“Half of the students, if not more, are taking this because they want to be therapists one day and you can’t be a therapist if you just memorize words; you have to be able to apply it to real people,” Nguyen said.
The Open AI Impact Program provides 200 faculty/staff at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with ChatGPT Edu. The program accepts proposals focused on teaching & learning, creative research and operational improvements.
Last year, the University of Nebraska at Omaha launched the Open AI Challenge. The challenge received positive feedback with 81% of users saying it improved their overall academic and work experiences, according to a statement from UNO.
Interim Director of Academic Technology Amy Barry said the positive results at UNO helped launch the program at UNL. In spring 2025, the program invited professors and faculty to submit proposals to join the program.
Faculty and staff received their licenses in the summer and required them to attend a generative AI cybersecurity awareness training and provided them with resources from UNO’s challenge. Users can attend consultation meetings with Barry and UNL Academic Technology Support Specialist Brad Severa to answer any inquiries or discuss frustrations.
A review team monitors chats for security issues and unethical usage to maintain security and ethical standards.
“Instructors are very good with de-identifying any data they have,” Severa said. “We just do our due diligence to make sure that’s the case, and it’s been that way so far for everyone.”
Researchers or instructors working with high risk data, ensure that data will represent numbers rather than students and their personal information.
The program serves 200 users at UNL, including 177 academic users for instructors and researchers and 22 faculty users. The data shows usage splits almost evenly across the three categories of usage.
Barry said the majority of the usage focuses on teaching and learning. For example, instructors generate assignment prompts or adjust syllabus assignments. He also said, instructors in the program already use ChatGPT for free, but wanted higher messaging limits to continue their projects.
“It is mostly giving instructors some new ideas and new ways to look at things,” Severa said.
Severa said researchers get licenses for their team and use them to aid in filtering data and organizing projects.
Barry said users utilize operational improvements more broadly to improve the student or campus experience. For example, administrators use artificial intelligence as a filtering system for campus tickets, for web development on UNL sites or general paperwork.
“There is one for student engagement,” Severa said. “Looking to analyze how well students are engaging in a course.”
Barry said there were 75 applications, but all 200 licenses because they would request multiple individual licenses for their projects.
“We’ve also read people are wanting to do a chatbot for their courses,” she said. “Which I think is always such a fun application, too. Instead of emailing me your syllabus questions, just ask the chatbot.”
Students would use a chatbot as the first point of contact for any questions related to the syllabus and the course instead of emailing or Canvas messaging the instructor.
As of right now, Barry and Severa have yet to compile feedback and data about the users and their projects. However, Barry said she would like to analyze users’ activity and conduct a survey to receive qualitative data about how Edu is supporting their academic and work experience. According to Barry, they will begin conducting surveys to receive feedback in October and the project will continue at UNL as long as there is proper funding and interest.
Before joining the program, Nguyen avoided AI in both her professional and personal life. After the program started, she researched the ethical implications and how other psychology professionals use AI in the industry.
She quickly realized that AI is evolving and becoming intertwined in society, so she decided to start using it before it was too late.
“I never used AI, not even a little,” Nguyen said. “So many students are cheating within classes, using AI unethically, that I have to get ahead of the curve otherwise this is gonna become an issue long term.”
Coming from a research background, Nguyen said reading literature reviews about AI applications brought her comfort to begin using the technology in the classroom.
Nguyen’s experience with AI was nothing short of experimental. She said she spent most of the summer teaching AI to write a 5,000 question bank for quizzes and exams and to create fake client profiles for students to identify mental illnesses in patients.
“There is no one version or two versions of an exam, but hundreds of versions of the same exam,” she said. “It deters cheating and kind of using AI to fight AI.”
Once Nguyen wrote and edited the questions, she spent five hours moving the question bank from Edu to Canvas. According to Nguyen, the process to make the question bank and restructure the entire course this summer was faster using AI than creating it by hand.
“I always tell myself the time and energy that would take for me to come up with 5,000 separate questions would take so much longer than the five hours it took me to copy and paste it,” she said.
The question bank then allows students to take quizzes multiple times without repeating the same question to help students study and prepare for exams.
Each day presents new learning opportunities for Nguyen. She said she will notice a question has a peculiar wording style and will throw it out of the exam.
Nguyen also insists that she will not allow AI to grade papers because of the human nuisance aspect of written assignments. She said she wants to provide insight and feedback on the papers.
“In terms of exams, it’s either you are right or you are wrong, and AI is very much trained on facts–as long as you feed it the right facts, it will always spit out the correct answer,” Nguyen said. “If someone took over my account, they would be in great shape, but if they had to start from scratch, that would really suck for them.”
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