Lessons from my students – Autumn 2024

Until this semester I had not taught a class on campus since Spring 2022. Back then, and in the preceding decade, my classes consisted of about 30 postgraduate students, and I included a mix of slide presentation work along with class discussions, group work and so on to achieve the module learning outcomes. Resources included a variety of case studies and an annually-updated reading list with recent relevant journal articles to guide students in their learning. And then the world changed later that year when a company called OpenAI launched ChatGPT…

As I prepared to teach my module that would begin in September 2024 (with a class of almost 50 students) I digested my university’s policies on Academic Integrity generally, and more specifically on the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools. I was satisfied in the knowledge that I could decide on a level of GenAI that students would use for my module assessment work, they would adhere to that level and all would be well. In theory yes, in practice, not quite.
I settled on level 2 of a five-level framework whereby level 1 states that GenAI must not be used at any point during the assessment to level 5 stating that You will use GenAI to complete specified tasks in your assessment. At level 2, GenAI can be used for brainstorming, creating structures, and generating ideas for improving work, however,  No Gen AI content is allowed in the final submission. Further, I was able to specify appendices that students must include with their assessment. Armed with this information I created a module outline with all the guidance students would need to complete their assessment work, including the content to be included in appendices:

• The prompts that were inputted by the students during the brainstorming activity.
• The output generated by the GenAI from the prompt.
• A 500-word statement critiquing the brainstorming outputs from GenAI in comparison to the outputs from their structured search strategy and a rationale for the topics that they included in their essay (assignment).
• A statement acknowledging the use of GenAI in the assignment and the level of GenAI involvement.
• A checklist to ensure that they have included all elements required as part of the assignment and considered their approach to the use of GenAI.

While most students attempted items 1, 4 and 5 on this list, there was little evidence of items 2 and 3 in the submissions. Feedback on individual assessments offered content relating to their design of prompts GenAI tools, as someone recently said ‘rubbish in, polished rubbish out’! (I cannot recall where I heard it, otherwise I would have credited the source, naturally). Lots learned by both parties to build on for our next modules, lesson number 1.

Lesson number 2
As is my practice, I created a reading list for the module with carefully created resources to scaffold the students’ learning. At the module halfway point (week 3) I checked the data available to me regarding students’ engagement with the module in the virtual learning environment (VLE) and also the module reading list. While everyone had engaged with the VLE, the same could not be said of the reading list. I was surprised since at that point about one quarter of the class had not yet accessed the reading list. I asked the librarian responsible for the management of the reading lists software to check my interpretation of the numbers, and this was confirmed. I raised the matter in class, advising the benefits of using resources from the reading list for both formative and summative work. The number improved in the couple of weeks that followed but after the end of the module there remained a small number who did not access the reading list. Now, as the librarian pointed out: There are a number of students who have looked at the list but not any readings through [the tool]. In saying that, those students may be searching for the readings in the library catalogue, or online, or in study groups. Of course this may well be the case, and the lesson for me going forward is for more specific direction to resources in the reading list or the library catalogue for further research. My thinking is that if I have done the curation work in the reading list for the students, it should save them some time and give them ideas to pursue further searches for content of interest in the library catalogue or other suitable tools. After all, higher education involves learning how to research suitable sources for assessment work – the process of which may be considered as important as the product.

Until next time, Sandra

Featured image courtesy of WOKANDAPIX from Pixabay