Artificial Intelligence: A Case from an Educational Setting

Artificial Intelligence friend or foe? Many educational institutes worldwide are currently discussing the impact AI is having on administrative and academic performance. Higher educational institutions have had major positive impacts along with challenges in both administrative and academic performance due to the use of AI. The focus of this blog is on the challenges of ethical considerations with the reports students are writing using the aid of AI. 

Recently, there has been a rise with significant challenges worldwide in academic integrity of university student’s submissions of assessments. Ethical considerations are crucial when it comes to writing, particularly in academic contexts. To write ethically, it’s important to adhere to simple principles such as honesty, integrity, and respect for others’ work. Therefore, the overuse of AI to generate a student’s written report would raise ethical concerns. 

Being an English lecturer at Gulf University has given me firsthand experience dealing with the challenge of students showing increased interest and at times over relying on AI when writing reports. The current popularity of using AI as a content generating tool amongst students sparked an interest to research into this topic. 

This led to be sending out an email to several faculty members asking them to partake in an AI research task. 

Task:

Attached to the email were two documents with a short description of “working in universities”, one was a human written version and the other written by AI generating tool ChatGPT.  Staff were instructed to:

1. choose the text they believed was written with AI, without using a similarity generating tool.
2. Give a plausible reason for the decision. 
3. Asked staff if they have noticed any AI usage amongst students reports. 

Results: 

1. I was able to identify that my colleagues could all correctly recognize the AI generated text without using an AI similarity report generator. 
2. The reasons behind their choices varied from, the lack of human opinion, robotic structured sentences, lack of emotion and interruption in the AI text. To the detail of descriptions, uses of acronyms and grammar mistakes identified in the human text. 
3. Colleagues have noticed a rise of interest in students using AI tools when writing reports. 

Recommendations from colleagues to enhance the use of AI in an educational setting:

1. work on a university policy to introduce clear rules and regulations of student’s use of AI with report writing.  
2. Guide students on how to use AI tools in an ethical manner. E.g. develop student’s skills of paraphrasing information. Thus, diverting them from over-relying on the tool. 

To conclude, this task gave me a clear insight into what my colleagues were having similar challenges with students’ use of AI, and a positive outcome of a need to create a policy for AI use was successfully identified. It’s my strong belief that regarding the use of AI tools in writing, while they can be valuable aids in developing writing skills and achieving learning outcomes, it’s important to strike a balance. Students should not overly rely on AI to the extent that it hinders their own critical thinking and writing abilities. The goal should be to teach students how to use AI as a supplement to enhance learning, rather than as a substitute for developing essential skills.