Ideas for activities using GAI tools

If you decide to use GenAI tools with students, then here are some ideas for activities. You don’t have to become a computer expert to start building GAI tools into student learning. The internet is full of ideas for using GenAI tools with students, and you will find many if you look around for what people are doing in your subject area. However, you can just start with some simple activities. On the main university website, you may already have seen these suggestions for using GenAI tools with students:

Alternatively, you could accept that they may choose to work with the GenAI tools. In the instructions, you could say “You may use a GAI tool to generate a response, but if you do, you must say that you have done this, and add a critique of its response. What was right? What was wrong? What was missing?”

In that situation, they must also have good data and information literacy, in other words, they need to be able to tell if the outputs from the tools are accurate, fair, and useful. They need to have highly developed source criticism skills (yest again, here is a link to the video by Fredrik Eriksson from LU library Links to an external site. for more on this).

You can also try to talk more about the development of students' examination work in class. For example, you could try some of these activities in class or as homework, with the students working in smaller groups and peer reviewing each other's notes, drafts, and ideas:

Information literacy: Ask students to use the tools to answer a question, and then to critique the outputs in small groups. Ask them to identify key points they are looking for to verify the outputs.
Idea generation: Ask students to use AI tools to brainstorm some ideas for thinking about a difficult question or topic, then discuss the appropriateness and feasibility of these ideas.
Structure: ‘Ask ChatGPT to give you a structure for the report. Then ask it to write this for a different audience. For a member of the public, or a student younger than you, or for a specialist. See what the differences are. What does that tell you about the level of language and structure you should be aiming for in your report?’
Structure: Ask students to use GAI tools to generate the outline of a written assignment such as an essay, then ask them to identify what further information they need to start writing. In class, get them to write some paragraphs while you are all together. This is a common approach in creative writing courses, with the last 15 minutes of class given to work on the examination piece – why shouldn’t it work with other subjects too? (see the ‘Shut up and write’ Links to an external site. technique).
Literature review: Ask students to use AI tools to generate the outline of a literature review, then ask them to find one reference for each paragraph in the introduction and justify its inclusion in their own words.

NOTE: Some students may prefer not to use GAI tools, in which case you can compare in class the outputs they create with those generated by tools, and discuss how they can tell the differences, and what elements are more likely to be successful in the examination.

Summary: Experimentation is important in all academic activities. You may feel that you don't have much time, but start with some of the small ideas in this course and build from there.

These are just a few ideas. You will probably come up with many better ones once you start thinking about how to use GAI tools as part of your courses. Please consider sharing them with colleagues through the University Teams area Links to an external site..

For many more ideas, try this site in English from University of North Texas Links to an external site.

OpenAI, the company which makes ChatGPT, has released this short blog post entitled "guide for educators Links to an external site." with some further ideas (watch out - the design of the page may hurt your eyes!)

Links to an external site.Ethan Mollick has a good English blog: Using AI to make teaching easier and more impactful – oneusefulthing.org Links to an external site.

And Peter Parnes has a good blog in Swedish Generativ AI för bättre lärande – parnes.com/blog Links to an external site.

It is also a good idea to check mailing lists and social media from colleagues in your subject area, as people are likely to be experimenting and sharing their findings.