H’s reflection on meeting #3 (October 2023)

E: Our first two meetings were more administrative in nature, but things really took off recently with our third meeting. Here, H reflects on that meeting:

Our faculty learning community (FLC) focuses on teaching students how to use generative artificial intelligence (AI) effectively to improve their writing. We are a group of lecturers and professors from various schools at NTU and NIE: SoH, MAE, NSSE, CCEB, PPGI and supported by students from our schools. Our aim is to develop a short course for undergraduate students in year 3/4. After 3 months into the project, I would like to reflect on three (open) challenges we discussed during our investigation.

First challenge we had to discuss was the profile of the intended undergraduate students: from STEM or non-STEM? Initially we thought about focusing on STEM students only with the idea that narrowing the students’ profile will allow us to go more in depth and in details about how to use the AI tool. However, we realized that there a lot of diversity between the STEM students, and that the non-STEM may likely be the ones more prone to benefit from learning how to write with AI given the amount of writing they have to do. Therefore, we are now exploring the use of generative AI for STEM and non-STEM equally. This leads to other challenges since each community use different types of AI tools: some tools are better for coding, better for creative writing, better for literature review, etc. We set our mind on Chat-GPT4 as a ‘safe’ and widely use generative AI tool, with the hope that our outcomes will be adaptable to other tools.

Second challenge we faced is the difference in point of view between educator and students. We have different worries and different interpretations. For example, when asking students if they would mind be graded higher if they used the AI tool than students not using it, the students said that they thought it is ok. Some of us faculty initially thought they may perceive it as not fair instead. In addition, students may turn to the AI tools for gaining time, for getting better grades with lesser efforts, whereas as faculty we deeply worry about the skills the students will acquire to prepare them for their future jobs. What happens if our students write beautiful essays in school but cannot thrive in their work environment? We definitively will include this discussion about what should be the student’s intention when using the AI tool in our final workshop.

Finally, a third challenge we tackled is how we should assume the use of these AI tools will be in the future. Should we assume that AI will inevitably become part of our lives in similar way that we now all use Google, or should we not make such assumption? Assuming that AI will be used anyways sets a positive angle on the use of the tool, prompting us to think of how to use it more efficiently in addition to our own critical thinking. In turn, if we do not make such an assumption, we may be considering more on how to restrict and control the use of the AI tool, for example by limiting the number of prompts the students may use. From this discussion, we nevertheless all agreed that what is important are the skills and the thought process that are involved when using the AI tool. How to assess them is, however, the subject of our next discussions.