Activities for students to explore AI
Artificial Intelligence (AI) can support your needs in education and enhance your learning experience if used correctly. Using AI in a productive way can be a great way to engage with these new online tools actively. For example, AI such as ChatGPT can help you perform various tasks, including producing academic timetables, creating revision materials, and even facilitating group discussions. However, it is important to remember that AI should be used as a supplement to learning and not as a replacement.
Below, you will see a list of activities that will allow you to engage with AI tools, but in a way which will be personalised to you or your group’s academic needs. Try these activities with the assistance of AI, and see what it comes back with.
1. Create study plans or timetables
Planning your academic week schedule can be a great way to use AI technology and websites such as ChatGPT can help you to do this within minutes.
Ask the AI, such as ChatGPT to make you an academic timetable for a week. Then, tell it what you are doing each day, for example, your seminar times, society meet-ups, or that you would like to be able to do two hours of revision per night.
This will help you plan your week in an interactive and fun way, whilst also saving you time when planning your schedule. As well as this, you can interact with the model in real-time and receive personalized responses to the questions about your timetable.
Do this at the beginning of each academic week to make sure that you know where you are supposed to be and when for that upcoming week.
2. Facilitating group assessment discussions
AI technology such as ChatGPT can help with facilitating groupwork discussions by providing initial ideas for discussion.
To do this, open ChatGPT and tell it to give you initial ideas for a group discussion in a specific area (i.e., posthumanism in literature). You can either build on these ideas as a group or ask ChatGPT to generate more ideas to then discuss. Once you have discussed these, tell ChatGPT to act like a teacher to play a question and response game. Put into ChatGPT ‘question my group on these areas [input the discussion ideas], wait three minutes for a response and then give us an answer’. In the three minutes, work in your group to answer the question before ChatGPT gives your group the answers. Make sure to double check your answers and not to just take ChatGPT as having all of the correct answers.
You can divide workloads according to the capability of each member of the group and build on ideas the AI gives you. For example, you can have the chatbot generate more challenging problems for advanced students and easier problems for those who need more support. As well as this, ChatGPT can provide a more interactive and engaging learning experience, as students can interact with the model in real-time and receive personalized responses to their questions.
During group revision sessions.
3. Create revision materials
AI chatbots can be useful tools for students looking to create revision materials, such as sample questions, flashcards, quizzes, and outlines.
To do this, open your selected AI chatbot such as ChatGPT. You can start by inputting questions and answers related to the topic you want to revise. You can type of revision material you want the AI chatbot to create the materials in such as flashcards, quizzes or summaries. Once the material has been generated, you can review and edit to ensure accuracy. You can also input additional questions to the AI chatbot.
AI chatbots are built with a large database of information so therefore can help with revision and sample questions by allowing you to practice questions in a format like that of an exam, which can help you get confident when taking the real exam. It can help you identify areas you need to focus on when revising. This can help you plan your revision in a more structured and productive way.
AI chatbots can be used during revision sessions or after the course material has been covered to check for understanding of the topic area.
4. Summarise texts
AI tools such as ChatGPT and Summarizingtool.io can be used to summarize papers, articles, lecture notes or chapters of textbooks.
Input your typed up lecture notes, paper, or chapters of the book you are looking at into the AI tool. Depending on the tool, you will either have to ask it to summarise the text or click a summarise button. It would be useful for you to create your own summary and compare it to what the AI generated.
This can be useful for students to quickly understand the main points of a course materials, papers, textbooks, or lecture notes. Comparing your summary and the AI summary will make sure that you understand the content enough to condense it in this way.
Use this post lecture or pre-seminar to make sure that you have the knowledge you need to succeed in your session.
5. Translation
AI technology such as ChatGPT can be used as a reliable and accurate tool for translation. It allows students to easily translate texts from one language to another, providing them with a valuable tool for comprehension and communication. This could be reading an article or a text in another language or can be used by EAL learners to translate from their language to English or vice versa.
In your chat with your selected AI, specify you want to translate from and the language you want to translate to. For example, you can type “Translate from English to Italian”. Type or paste the text you want to translate into the chat. You can type sentences, phrases, or single words. The AI chatbot will then provide a translation based on the input. Make you review the translated texts using other translation tools to ensure accuracy.
AI tools can translate between many different languages and its advanced language model allows it to understand the context of the text, providing translations that are more natural. AI can save time compared to manual translation, making it a convenient tool for students who need quick and accurate responses for their studies.
- Reading texts: When you are reading text in a foreign language and finding it difficult to understand, you can use ChatGPT to quickly translate the text into your native language and improve your understanding.
- Research: When conducting research or writing papers on topics involving foreign-language sources, you can use ChatGPT to translate these sources into their native language, making the information easier to understand and incorporate into your work.
- Language learning: When learning a foreign language, you can use ChatGPT to quickly translate text into your native language, which can help you understand new words and phrases and speed up and improve the learning process.
6. Defining complex concepts
Most AI technologies are language models with vast databases; therefore, it can aid students in understanding complex terms and ideas in a course material. It can do this by providing clear and concise definitions and descriptions with examples. It can also provide definitions in a particular style. For example, you can ask the Chatbot to define Quantum physics in a storybook form or in the form of a nursey rhyme.
Identify the complex term/concept that you need help with. This could be term, theory, principle, or any other concept that you are struggling to understand. You can ask the Chatbot by saying “Can you help me define a complex concept”. You should be as specific as possible when asking your questions and provide any relevant information.
- For course materials: ChatGPT can be used to get a general and better understanding of key terms of a topic before and after it is covered in class.
- Revision period: ChatGPT can be used to study key concepts of a topic and practice answering questions like those that may appear in assessments
- Reading texts: When you are reading text in a foreign language and finding it difficult to understand, you can use ChatGPT to quickly translate the text into your native language and improve your understanding.
- Research: When conducting research or writing papers on topics involving foreign-language sources, you can use ChatGPT to translate these sources into their native language, making the information easier to understand and incorporate into your work.
- Language learning: When learning a foreign language, you can use ChatGPT to quickly translate text into your native language, which can help you understand new words and phrases and speed up and improve the learning process.
7. Content ideas
ChatGPT can be a valuable tool for students looking to generate ideas for written content. It can provide initial prompts and guidance to help organize and expand upon a student’s existing ideas. For example, it can be useful to a student who has a lot of ideas in their head but are struggling to organize and develop them fully.
Ask the AI chatbot a general question about a specific topic. For example, “What are the factors that affect economic growth” The AI chatbot will generate responses based on the knowledge in its database. You can use the information to build your own content. You can repeat this process as needed to generate more ideas or explore different aspects of your topic.
AI chatbots can provide a vast range of ideas on a topic, which can help you come up with unique content for your work which can be used during brainstorming sessions. It can save you time by providing quick suggestions on a topic. It can also provide a diverse range of perspectives that you might not have considered in your work.
You can use AI technologies when you are struggling to come up with ideas after you have done your initial research. You can use it when you want to explore a topic in more depth and expand your knowledge on a topic area.
Tips for writing prompts
When using AI technology to supplement your learning, such as ChatGPT, writing prompts are critical for generating coherent and relevant text. You can provide specific and well-crafted prompts that are clear, concise, and relevant to your academic needs as a student. This allows you to produce high-quality output that will help you with your studies.
It is important to remember that the output of AI tools such as ChatGPT is only as good as the input. As a result, if the prompt provided to the AI tool is unclear or incomplete, the resulting output may be illogical or irrelevant. You should experiment with several prompts to see which ones your AI tool responds to the best to avoid this. You may experiment with different keyword questions, grammatical structures, and degrees of information to see which ones work best.
Appropriate student use
Follow the guidance of your module leaders and academics about whether it is appropriate to use ChatGPT or other generative AI within any particular given assignment. If you are allowed to use generative AI within an assignment, ensure that you properly acknowledge the use of this technology within your writing, as per the guidance provided by your academics and found within your module handbook.
Any attempt to pass off work created by AI as your own constitutes academic misconduct within our current Academic Misconduct Policy.
3 things to remember if you are using AI
- It is important to fact-check the information you receive from the AI tool to ensure that it is not false.
- AI tools should only be used as a supplement to your research, not as a replacement.
- AI should be used ethically and in guidance with university policy. If this policy is not clear, then it is important that you follow instructions from your lecturers. By using AI in a way which might undermine your skills as a university student, you will not be achieving their learning outcomes, so it may stunt your academic development.