ADVENTURES WITH BOTS - DESCRIBING THE EXTENT OF STUDENT USE OF GENERATIVE AI IN ASYNCHRONOUS ONLINE GEOL 101 CLASSES AT ANTELOPE VALLEY COLLEGE

Arguably, the hottest new technology of 2024 is generative AI, such as ChatGPT. Multiple articles have described student use of generative AI in college coursework, but few focus on the student use of generative AI within the geosciences.

During Spring 2024, I became aware of multiple student submissions that seemed oddly duplicative, strangely wrong, with unusual word choices (enlightening, intriguing, etc.), and featuring a trite, 5-paragraph essay format. I realized I needed to understand the scope of student use of generative AI so that I could undertake a possible re-design of this course.

This poster showcases several typical assignments and AI-generated student responses from my Spring 2024 asynchronous online GEOL 101 classes at Antelope Valley College (a California Community College), which are also listed on the CVC exchange (although >93% of students list AVC as their home institution), as well as some of the modifications I have made to the course and its assignments to try to reduce student use of generative AI.

Most of the student use of generative AI occurred either in “graded discussions,” which are used in many asynchronous online courses to fulfill the requirement for “regular and effective student-student contact.”

Tools used to confirm use of generative AI included AI detectors such as GPTZero and Scribbr’s Free AI Content Detector, as well as pre-emptively entering my prompts into ChatGPT. The former was extremely time-consuming. The latter allowed me to be aware of which student responses were likely AI-generated by noting all responses similar to the ChatGPT output (because when students put the same prompt into the same AI site, they usually get very similar responses) and also to seek prompts for which ChatGPT might provide incorrect or misleading information (e.g. that earthquakes can be predicted or that “earthquakes tend to have more predictable patterns and less immediate devastation compared to volcanic eruptions”).