INVITE THE ELEPHANT INTO THE ROOM: AN ANALYSIS OF DESIGN STUDENTS’ CHATGPT USE IN A SCIENTIFIC ARTICLE WRITING COURSE
Year: 2024
Editor: Grierson, Hilary; Bohemia, Erik; Buck, Lyndon
Author: Boks, Casper
Series: E&PDE
Institution: Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
Page(s): 229 - 234
DOI number: 10.35199/EPDE.2024.39
ISBN: 978-1-912254-200
ISSN: 3005-4753
Abstract
Artificial Intelligence has the potential to substantially transform design education. Since ChatGPT was made available online only in November 2022, before course descriptions for the 2023/2024 academic year were finalised, there was no formal basis for regulating the use of this tool, or similar ones, in student assignments. This was particular an issue for a course that requires students to write a scientific review article, in the last year of master programs in Industrial Design Engineering, Industrial Design, and Interaction Design. In the autumn 2023 edition of this course, which has continuously run since 2001, 80+ students were tasked to write a 10-page review article on a topic of their personal interest, in conjunction with a design course where students are tasked to do a design project founded on state-of-the-art theoretical understanding in a relevant field. Since the autumn of 2022, the university has not managed to provide guidance for teachers or students on AI use, other than some very general university-wide guidelines which mostly address plagiarism, and a notion that ‘potential challenges and opportunities that would result from using chatbots vary from discipline to discipline and course to course’. Taking up the challenge of establishing what would be good practice in the context of this particular course, for the first time a workshop was organised at the beginning of the course, to address specifically the issue of using AI in the process of writing a review article, and to provide clear guidelines for students on how to approach this issue. The first part of this paper explains the organisation and content of the workshop, which challenged students to navigate the landscape of appropriate, undesirable, inappropriate and unacceptable use of AI tools like ChatGPT towards the preparation of their review article. The workshop resulted in establishing a contract between students and responsible teachers, which was intended to provide a clear set of rules and frame of reference for students to navigate in. The workshop also provided a stage to share fears, both from the side of the students and the teachers, for example about how to take up possible accusations or being unjustly accused of unacceptable AI use . All students were asked to include, in the Methodology section of their review article, to explain how and why they did (or did not) use AI-based tools in doing the research for their article and during the writing process. A preliminary analysis of drafts of the paper indicates that some students used chatbots extensively, whereas others explicitly state to have refrained from their use completely. The second part of this paper analyses and the discusses choices that students made, also informed by an post-course survey in which students were asked to reflect over the use of AI in the course, and draws learning from the results of this towards next editions of this and other courses.
Keywords: Design education, Artificial Intelligence, Chatbots, ChatGPT