{"id":70765,"date":"2023-11-20T00:18:17","date_gmt":"2023-11-20T05:18:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/world.edu\/?p=70765"},"modified":"2023-11-20T00:18:17","modified_gmt":"2023-11-20T05:18:17","slug":"south-african-university-students-use-ai-to-help-them-understand-not-to-avoid-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/south-african-university-students-use-ai-to-help-them-understand-not-to-avoid-work\/","title":{"rendered":"South African university students use AI to help them understand \u2013 not to avoid work"},"content":{"rendered":"

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When\u00a0ChatGPT<\/a>\u00a0was released in November 2022, it sparked many conversations and moral panics. These centre on the impact of generative artificial intelligence (AI) on the\u00a0information environment<\/a>. People worry that AI chatbots can negatively affect the integrity of creative and academic work, especially since they can produce human-like texts and images.<\/p>\n

ChatGPT is a generative AI model using machine learning. It creates human-like responses, having been trained to recognise patterns in data. While it appears the model is engaging in natural conversation, it references a vast amount of data and extracts features and patterns to generate coherent replies.<\/p>\n

Higher education is one sector in which the rise of AI like ChatGPT has\u00a0sparked concerns<\/a>. Some of these relate to ethics and integrity in teaching, learning and knowledge production.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re a group of academics in the field of media and communication, teaching in South African universities. We wanted to understand how university students were using generative AI and AI-powered tools in their academic practices. We administered an online survey to undergraduate students at five South African universities: the University of Cape Town, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Stellenbosch University, Rhodes University, and the University of the Witwatersrand.<\/p>\n

The results<\/a>\u00a0suggest that the moral panics around the use of generative AI are unwarranted. Students are not hyper-focused on ChatGPT. We found that students often use generative AI tools for engaged learning and that they have a critical and nuanced understanding of these tools.<\/p>\n

What could be of greater concern from a teaching and learning perspective is that, second to using AI-powered tools for clarifying concepts, students are using them to generate ideas for assignments or essays or when they feel stuck on a specific topic.<\/p>\n

Unpacking the data<\/strong><\/h4>\n

The survey was completed by 1,471 students. Most spoke English as their home language, followed by isiXhosa and isiZulu. The majority were first-year students. Most respondents were registered in Humanities, followed by Science, Education and Commerce. While the survey is thus skewed towards first-year Humanities students, it provides useful indicative findings as educators explore new terrain.<\/p>\n

We asked students whether they had used individual AI tools, listing some of the most popular tools across several categories. Our survey did not explore lecturers\u2019 attitudes or policies towards AI tools. This will be probed in the next phase of our study, which will comprise focus groups with students and interviews with lecturers. Our study was not on ChatGPT specifically, though we did ask students about their use of this specific tool. We explored broad uses of AI-powered technologies to get a sense of how students use these tools, which tools they use, and where ChatGPT fits into these practices.<\/p>\n

These were the key findings:<\/p>\n