Generative AI-chatbots in higher education: Challenges and opportunities in student motivation and authentic assessments

  • The rapid pace of development in generative artificial intelligence (AI) has resulted in the introduction of extremely advanced chatbots, such as ChatGPT, Google Bard and Copilot. These chatbots are capable of simulating human behavior quite successfully, because they have been trained on huge data sets with large language models (LLM). New avenues for application of generative AI-chatbots have arisen not only in industry, science and medicine, but also in education. The consideration of social and ethical consequences of this new technology has not kept pace with the speed of its development. This paper explores challenges and opportunities which have arisen in higher education with the emergence of generative AI-chatbots. For university students, the temptation to use chatbots to complete their assignments may seem like a good way to save time and effort. The disadvantage is that they may not learn anything by simply copying answers from a chatbot. Inexperienced students may trust the validity of answers which are incorrect,The rapid pace of development in generative artificial intelligence (AI) has resulted in the introduction of extremely advanced chatbots, such as ChatGPT, Google Bard and Copilot. These chatbots are capable of simulating human behavior quite successfully, because they have been trained on huge data sets with large language models (LLM). New avenues for application of generative AI-chatbots have arisen not only in industry, science and medicine, but also in education. The consideration of social and ethical consequences of this new technology has not kept pace with the speed of its development. This paper explores challenges and opportunities which have arisen in higher education with the emergence of generative AI-chatbots. For university students, the temptation to use chatbots to complete their assignments may seem like a good way to save time and effort. The disadvantage is that they may not learn anything by simply copying answers from a chatbot. Inexperienced students may trust the validity of answers which are incorrect, especially if they do not have prerequisite knowledge to evaluate the output of a chatbot. For educators, however, it can be extremely difficult to determine whether students have completed their assignments themselves, or whether they have submitted the output from a chatbot. Instructors have the responsibility to teach university students to avoid plagiarism by judiciously citing the sources used. Furthermore, competencies taught at the university level should go beyond mere reproduction of facts. The development of analytical capabilities and critical thinking often require hard work to learn from mistakes, so-called “productive failure”. Creative teaching methods, such as gamification, may help to motivate students to engage with learning materials. A number of questions which have arisen from these challenges will be addressed in this paper. (1) Can educators determine whether student submissions are original or were written by a chatbot?; (2) Should students be allowed to use generative AI-chatbots to work on assessments? If so, how?; (3) Can creative teaching methods, such as gamification, motivate students to engage in learning?; (4) What kinds of assessments can help to evaluate whether students have achieved learning goals? Challenges encountered in exploring these questions when teaching undergraduate university courses will be presented. Opportunities to increase student engagement and design of authentic assessments will be discussed.show moreshow less

Export metadata

Additional Services

Search Google Scholar
Metadaten
Author:Patricia BrockmannORCiD, Heidi Schuhbauer
DOI:https://doi.org/10.36315/2024v2end024
ISBN:978-989-35106-9-8
ISSN:2184-044X
Parent Title (English):Education and New Developments
Document Type:Article
Language:English
Release Date:2025/02/18
Tag:Artificial intelligence, chatbots, motivation, gamification, assessment.
Pagenumber:5
institutes:Fakultät Informatik
Research Themes:Digitalisierung & Künstliche Intelligenz
Verstanden ✔
Diese Webseite verwendet technisch erforderliche Session-Cookies. Durch die weitere Nutzung der Webseite stimmen Sie diesem zu. Unsere Datenschutzerklärung finden Sie hier.