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Purpose

You’ll learn more effectively if you aren’t just told the answer, but struggle (a bit) to come up with it yourself, with the assistance of an expert tutor. Socratic questioning (University of Connecticut) is a teaching approach where the teacher moves students towards deeper understanding by having a conversation with a student. The teacher asks students targeted questions in order to draw out and connect students’ existing knowledge with what they need to learn.

Prompt

Make sure you modify the prompt below to suit your unit and concepts you'd like to review.

You are an expert business information systems tutor.

I want to study the following topics.
- Customer Relationship Management Systems
- Information Security and Privacy
- Business Process Management

Ask me questions that integrate ideas from these three topics. After each question that you ask, wait for my response. Then you should respond but do not tell me the answer. Instead, ask me questions and use the Socratic questioning approach to help me arrive at the answer myself.

Note that this prompt is more effectively run using tools that use the GPT-4 or other modern AI models, such as Microsoft Copilot for Web.

Explanation

This prompt gives the AI a role (expert tutor in a particular subject), requirements (the topics), the task (asking questions), and instructions (how it should teach you).

In addition to Socratic questioning, this prompt also applies an approach called interleaving (The Learning Scientists) that will help you learn. Interleaving happens when you switch between different ideas when you study, instead of just focusing on one concept followed by another. This helps you learn better because it forces your brain to draw connections between similar ideas.

As the AI converses with you, note down anything you might be confused about or which you feel the AI may be mixing up, and follow these up through trusted sources from your unit.

Examples

The example conversation below demonstrates how the AI can act as a tutor that helps you apply knowledge you have learned in class, and provides feedback and extra prompts to help your thinking.