Julie is the MA Magazine Journalism course leader.

In this practice spotlight, Julie outlined how integrating Generative AI (GenAI) into learning activities with students could serve a dual purpose. She talks about how, as well as cultivating better understanding of how to effectively use this technology, many of the skills developed through the activities overlap with those being furthered as part of their degree course.

How did Julie decide to use GenAI in her practice?

Julie integrated exploration of GenAI tools into an MA Social Media module in a variety of ways:

• She explored a variety of possible journalistic uses for GenAI with her students, including brainstorming ideas for news stories, e.g. “Give me 10 ideas for Christmas related new stories in Nottingham.”
• She used GenAI to produce text on a set of journalistic topics relevant to the module for students to analyse with an appropriate critical thinking framework, considering areas such as accuracy, bias, depth, and relevance.
• She asked students to use a GenAI tool as part of developing their essay assignment but show their working through the prompts they used, including those that displayed their use of the critical thinking framework.

What made Julie decide to use GenAI within this module?

Firstly, Julie had found that students on her Social Media module were sometimes struggling to write critically instead of descriptively in their essays. She saw an opportunity to use GenAI tools as part of an effort to build critical thinking skills within one of her sessions. She first introduced critical thinking explicitly as a concept, and then the Paul-Elder framework of critical thinking, which Julie has found lends itself to journalism as a subject area.

Secondly, Julie self-describes as an “early adopter” who sees “a set of opportunities” in the newly available GenAI tools. She thinks it’s important to keep up with how the technology is changing and is part of an AI teaching group in her department that shares practice.

“Once it emerged it was immediately clear what a difference it was going to make – it was so easy to use.”

For the critical thinking activity, Julie used a GenAI tool to instantly produce text on any specific news topic needed, which students could then evaluate critically. She has been observing the pace and extent of change in journalism as an industry in response to AI tools and feels that this should be reflected in how students are being taught.

What was the impact of using GenAI for this activity on the students? How does she know?

Julie spoke with her students and found that some said they’d never used it before, and some were surprised that Julie was advocating its use, given that it had been forbidden to them for use in developing assessment submissions during their undergraduate degree. So an immediate impact was that some students experimented with using GenAI tools for the first time in a supported and structured way that also set the groundwork for developing their essays.

The range of responses from students was varied: some were fascinated, some sceptical, some a bit scared. Some students said it helped them to see how it might be useful in other contexts as well.

Were there other impacts on Julie’s understanding or practice?

Because of the student reactions and questions she received when running her session, Julie believes it is vital to decide and clearly communicate policy around use of GenAI in assignments with students to avoid confusion, especially since policies will need to allow for variation by module/course because of different needs and focuses.

How did conversations go between Julie and her students about how GenAI might impact their learning?

As part of her session Julie discussed with students the need to “question everything” and verify information from all sources, as well as evaluating the sources they use – which is good journalistic practice as well as an important part of developing GenAI literacies. Julie explained the problems with using these tools as a search engine – they produce text output probabilistically, rather than presenting quality information and sources.

She also talked about how AI is changing industry practice, for example, “reinventing the role of the subeditor,” and how that will affect the work of students after they graduate.

Has Julie made changes to her activity, or does she plan to?

More recently, her assessment changed from easy writing to the creation of a video, so she has adapted the activity accordingly, but spent less time on the GenAI critical thinking activity. Although the submissions are not easily comparable because they are such different formats, Julie has the impression that critical thinking was better demonstrated in previous assessments overall, so plans to develop something closer to her original activity for the next iteration.