Rab Paterson and Kaori Hakone. 2024. The artifice of teaching academic writing in an AI world: An e-portfolio approach for undergraduate students. PDF
AI’s arrival into the educational sector will have a powerful, foundation-shaking impact on education and teaching practices. Much like the Internet's emergence into the educational sphere in the 1990s and the development of online apps in the early 2000s, this will initially pose problems for educators until they adapt to AI. One of the major issues here is plagiarism. Therefore, this paper will help teachers incorporate AI-friendly teaching practices and guide students in appropriately using AI in writing classes to avoid plagiarism. Writing assignments usually have students start with research reading. In the approach covered in this paper, we show how they can ethically use a given set of AI research/reading apps to help complete their reading homework tasks. This paper will also give a brief overview of the pros and cons of these apps and a review of our personal experiences of using them in the classroom. Next, we will highlight ways teachers can create a classroom workflow of highly AI-proof experiential homework tasks (i.e., students cannot complete the task using AI as AI apps will not know what was done in the classroom or the students' classroom experiences). These tasks provide teachers with benchmark writing samples that can be checked using text analysis apps to check and compare against students' future work to determine if AI-driven plagiarism has occurred. The paper will conclude with the presenters' philosophical thoughts on AI in general and academic writing.
Keywords
AI tools, academic writing, e-portfolio, undergraduate education, Japanese higher education
AWCT 2024