Activity: creating case study examples A
One interesting use of GenAI tools is to generate a set of resources for students to use as case studies. Case studies are suitable for us in pretty much any subject, even if the exact term 'case study' is not traditionally used. It could be working through a documentary process in history or a complex situation in sociology, or organising an event in music production, or setting up a research project in science or engineering, as well as the kinds of uses we might traditionally expect like a business development or a clinical case in healthcare. Case studies lend themselves to active, problem- or inquiry-based learning approaches to teaching, and are really effective for teaching students about messy, authentic situations which don't have single correct answers. They can be used for individual students or for group work, and they can be used in-class or for examination.
One drawback with case studies is that it takes a long time to create plausible and complex examples for students to work through. As a result, groups are often given the same case study to work with. This is not bad in that they may come to different conclusions, but the preliminary work is likely to be very similar in all cases. It can be very boring to listen to ten similar presentations or grade 50 similar reports. Generating different case studies gives the opportunity to vary what students are doing and increase the interest for both you and the students. They are also more likely to learn from each others' work.
If you are new to case studies, I would suggest starting with a short one which can be tackled in a seminar/class session, say up to two hours, and then if that works well in your context, develop longer ones as you gain confidence. Whatever the length, GenAI tools are surprisingly good at doing this.
Activity aim: to try out the use of GenAI tools to prepare case studies in your subject area
A: Short classroom activity
- As usual, you need to start with choosing one of the GenAI tools. Any simple chat tool will be suitable.
- Start by writing a general prompt which asks for a set of case studies in your context. I am going to suggest a complex prompt here, but you could break it down. Obviously, replace the parts in italics with your own context:
You are a university tutor generating different case study examples for a two hour class for first year students on a Bachelors' programme. The students are learning about academic skills in history. I want to them to practice working in small groups to develop an approach to reviewing academic papers on The Late Medieval and the Early Modern Period, 1350-1850. The activity should take them around 4 hours to complete, including two hours in class and two hours after class to create a one-sided poster summarising their conclusions. 1) Write some instructions for the students about reviewing academic papers 2) Create 20 examples of standard historical events from the 1350-1850 from any part of the world. 3) Using the learning outcome and task descriptions below, generate task information for each of these 20 situations which includes the instructions you wrote.
Task description: The students will work in a team of 4-5 to produce an A4 poster or powerpoint slide which outlines an approach to reviewing academic papers, including the steps you need. Poster: use no more than one side of A4 or one powerpoint slide to present a simple approach to reviewing academic papers that you can use in the future
If you are interested in seeing the output I ended up with, I have pasted it into a single document here Download a single document here. I don't know if the selelction of events is good (it is Eurocentric even though I asked for events from any part of the world). I also would probably edit the prompt to focus more on the selection of papers, but it is a reasonable starting point for a teacher to edit and it could then lead to a further discussion about how they did the selection, and why those events are considered important, or not.
On the next page, you can try creating a more substantial set of case studies suitable for examination use.
Bonus: add to your teaching portfolio.
Have you used these kind of active learning scenarios in your classroom before? What are the benefits and disadvantages? How do you feel about using open-ended tasks which may have unpredictable outcomes, or outcomes that are wrong, or that you disagree with? How do you handle that? You could think about this and evaluate the actual use of a class activity like this compared with something you have done previously. Across the term, you could evaluate whether an exercise like this improves student performance in identifying and reviewing scientific literature.