Students and AI to support learning

Can you use AI to support learning in academic studies? Why not.

It is about how you use it. AI is a dirty word at times when it comes to students using it, but there are so many ways in which AI can support learning. When we think of AI, most of us think of the generative AI that is abused for academic offences such as submitting work that is not your own for assessment. Even generative AI can be used for good if used appropriately; but there are so many AI tools now to support your learning.

I am going to review some AI tools in the future, but below I want to take a look at some ways in which you can use AI to support your learning and give some examples of ways in which I have used it.

Supporting understanding of a topic

I have areas within my own personal learning and development that I have to build understanding. I try to find different ways to encounter information to help with this, but some subjects just aren’t that accessible.

Generative AI, such as ChatGPT, offers an opportunity for me to have my own personal expert sat next to me (or, as I imagine, texting me back). The way in which the AI language model is designed, you can have a conversation about a topic and ask questions or ask for concepts to be explained in a different way. Something like…

What are the differences between pragmatism and critical realism in the approaches to qualitative research?

Why not ask for examples of sources for further reading too? I do find responses of supporting material a bit hit and miss, but if I find those papers or books, I can put these into another AI tool called LitMaps which then gives me related material to support my learning. If you ask for too much though, in ChatGPT at least, you will find that the response that the model does not work as a literature search tool but I find its normal response enough to get on with.

If you don’t understand the answer, you can then go to ask to explain other terms within the answer, or just to explain it in a different way. I personally find this works really well. Do not use the answers as your summative work, or even formative, quite honestly doing this makes your whole time at University worthless. You are there to learn, and if you don’t learn anything and prove that learning through assessment then it is just a waste of time and money.

Supporting reading academic papers

I think about what it means to be digitally literate a lot, and part of this ‘thinking’ follows down the route of what it means to be literate. Literacy comes in levels, just look at the Hemmingway Editor and you can see these levels are actually considered as reading ages. Ignore the reading ages, there are a little arbitrary, but it does show that there are different abilities in reading. And reading takes practice to be able to gain an understanding from what you are reading.

Academic papers are written in a very specific style. Third person, past tense, formal tone, and at times very repetitive in an attempt to maintain clarity of terms. If you have not been exposed to this style before then you will likely need a little practice. And I am not saying do not read papers, as this is still the way in which research is distributed. But there are some tools that can help, some will allow you to chat with a PDF, turn it into a Podcast, or listen to an AI generated discussion on the research paper (this is a trial tool, and in public Beta so you can only see created works at present).

Each University is Different

When thinking about the use of AI in your studies, take a look at the guidance from your University. With the amount of disruption happening with AI at the moment, I expect there is some fairly clear guidance about how you are expected to use AI what is not suitable use of AI, and whether you need to attribute AI in any of your work.

Every institution seems to be different with this, and it depends on their overall philosophy that guides their ideas of teaching and learning.