GenAI for Learners
What benefits, if any, does generative AI pose for student learning? What learning outcomes could its use support or enhance? This chapter assumes your familiarity with the risks and challenges of generative AI for post-secondary (e.g. academic integrity, assessment design, hallucinations) and imagines what benefits there might be and what opportunities there are for preparing students for a generative AI supported learning experience.
You can think of the possibilities in two domains:
- supporting personalized learning and
- generating academic content
With respect to generating academic content or performing academic skills, you want to think carefully about what the core learning outcomes are for the course, and whether and how students can demonstrate these outcomes. Those skills or knowledge that are not essential to the core learning outcomes might be appropriate for ‘cognitive offloading’ to a generative AI tool. Cognitive offloading refers to the use of external resources or tools to change the information processing requirements of a task so as to reduce cognitive demand.[1]
For instance, if your course learning outcomes require students to demonstrate abilities to generate multiple hypotheses to explain a phenomenon, using generative AI to generates these hypotheses would be inappropriate. However, if your course learning outcomes were focused on having students test a hypothesis it in a laboratory setting, having a generative AI tool generate the hypothesis which the student would then test would be an example of appropriate cognitive offloading.
Supporting Personalized Learning
Invite students to use a generative AI tool to:
Consider the following student uses of GenAI to assist them in their learning:
- Understanding: Students can ask the GenAI (like ChatGPT) to reword the description of a new concept (in a language of their choice), to draw up the concept or concept map or flowchart, provide examples, and keep doing this under they understand. The GenAI is infinitely patient and can adapt to a student’s preferred mode of understanding (e.g., by using analogies to help the student understand).
- Practice: The GenAI can create practice problem sets and adapt them to the learner’s understanding, adding more practice in areas where the student’s grasp appears to need more practice, and stepping up the difficulty as the student gains strength.
- Feedback: GenAI can be used to provide personalized feedback to learners on their work. Using a prompt that specifies what criteria to focus on, the GenAI can review each student’s work and make suggestions about where to continue working to improve the work. Students must be aware of privacy issues associated with the tools and should refrain from inputting any personal information into the GenAI tool.
- Open Mindsets: Ask students to consult a GenAI to present an alternative view to their position or to poke holes in their argument. Humans tend to become entrenched in a posit