"Stoplight" approach to AI use in writing assignments

Like you, my Inbox is bombarded with messages about AI. I try to keep up, to stay especially focused on the writing instruction-centric ones, but it seems that only an AI-based triage tool can help me with the deluge...

Teachers do keep productively discussing the challenges of student use of AI, especially in writing instruction. This term, I am team-teaching an Honors seminar Contrasts in AI: Now & Future, part of Drexel's overall Honors College theme this year: Black & White. The class has been a great experience, particularly working with my colleague, a computer and electrical engineering professor.

Our course is about AI, and in addition to many informal assignments such as reading notes and quizzes, we also have three short papers/projects. We talked about this a lot in the summer, and we eventually developed a "stoplight" approach that we thought not only fit well with our course subject matter but also helped us address the challenges of requiring short papers in this current AI educational environment. Lightly edited from the syllabus, here is what we asked of students:

You will write three short, 500- to 1,000-word papers/projects in the course, due Weeks 4, 8, and 11. We’ll discuss each in class when it is assigned, but in general you’ll follow these guidelines:

1. For the theme/thesis of each paper/project, you will develop a contrasting perspective/view of some aspect(s) of AI, building on the course materials and conversations.
2. Each paper/project will be different in its use of AI, based on a “stoplight approach”:
• Project one is RED: You cannot use any AI, including grammar checkers like Grammarly. It may be impossible to avoid some built-in tools in Word and Google Docs.
• Project two is YELLOW: You can use some components of AI to help you develop your ideas and deliver them. You might think of writing on a kind of scale of complexity or a continuum, starting with the word, working through the sentence, then paragraph, then overall concept/purpose. (We missed a few steps in between for sure.) For “Yellow,” please do use AI bots/apps in your project, but only do so up to the paragraph “level.” We ask that you still not use AI for invention, conceptual, or organizational matters, but you should feel free to “partner” with ChatGPT, Copilot, etc. to help you at the sentence- or word-level, perhaps in particular with grammar and mechanics.
• Project three is GREEN: You can freely use AI as a partner to help you write your paper. Note that you cannot just submit the raw text generated by an AI app/tool, but you can certainly go through an evolution of prompts in presenting your final paper.
3. For each paper, you will include at the end a one-page metacommentary about how the use of or the constraints on the use of AI affected your development of your ideas. There are alternative ways you could present this metacommentary that we’ll discuss in class. Note this is different from the AI statement described in the Course Policies below.

So far, we've received the red and yellow papers/projects. This class of bright students have written strong, thought-provoking projects, but, boy, has the hidden gold been in the metacommentaries. 

In these end reflections, students have commented in considerable depth about the constraints of the red and yellow categories, how they navigated what those categories have meant to their writing process, and in some cases how they hadn't realized how much they had become reliant on AI tools in their writing. (Note the metacommentaries are part of the grade, a deliberate move we made so as to reward their thoughtful work.)

I want to reiterate that our class is about AI: Issues surrounding AI are part of the course subject matter. That certainly helped lead us to developing a "medium is the message"-type approach to the assignments.

However, including these detailed metacommentary components has helped us with our writing pedagogy. While plagiarism and authenticity weren't primary targets, the metacommentaries have encouraged authenticity while also providing them with a platform to discuss their own writing and thinking processes, in line with decades of composition work about the value of such writing.

As instructors, we are eager to receive paper/project three next week, not only to see their final thoughts about AI contrasts but to read how the open green category differed for them in their use of AI in their writing.

GSOLE Principles and Tenets revision presentation at CCCC 25 in Baltimore

Since its founding in 2016, the Global Society of Online Literacy Educators (GSOLE) has continued to grow and evolve, expanding its membership, initiatives, and offerings.

A key example of this evolution has been a recent effort by the GSOLE leadership (you can see current leadership here) to revise GSOLE's Online Literacy Instruction (OLI) Principles and Tenets, which were approved and published by the GSOLE Executive Board on June 13, 2019. Somehow, over five years have passed since our group developed these initial guidelines for OLI.

In education generally and literacy/writing specifically, much has changed since June 2019, and many of those changes, especially pandemic-related online learning and now the impact of AI, need to be examined in terms of the way we approach OLI. 

I'm part of this revision effort, and a hardworking group mainly broke up the work into subcommittees to evaluate how the Principles and Tenets might change. My subcommittee focused on AI.

We just learned of the acceptance of our proposal for CCCC 25 in Baltimore to present both the results of this work as well as the process we took to get there. We'll be eager to share the way that what we believe were fundamentally sound--they really are!--initial Principles and Tenets have adapted in the face of major changes in the landscape of OLI.

Faced with disruption, my students were flexible, adaptable, nimble

[I adapted this from my post on the site When Falls the Coliseum.]

Drexel was one of the universities to experience a protest this past academic year, as toward the end of our fast-paced spring '24 term and overall academic year, protesters camped in the center of campus for nearly a week.

The university went on lockdown when the encampment started on a Saturday night, gradually resuming normal operations during a five-day period. For two days, many classes were online, including mine.

In my class, studenting-wise, the kids did alright.

I know this pandemic "generation" has been through a lot, but collective worries that they have fallen to pieces and will not be able to cope or function in the "real world" (whatever that is) were certainly challenged by my students' quick and in most ways expert transition to a Zoom-based classroom.

The university was functioning hour-by-hour, so the entire Drexel community would only receive information about the next day's operations in the evening. We all had to be ready to shift gears.

I don't know if they were happy about it, but every student showed up for our synchronous online class on Tuesday, and they were on time and ready to go. All but one had cameras on, and they worked well both in the whole group class and the breakout rooms, interacting with me and their classmates.

We shared a few winky in-jokes about online learning, but in terms of the outcomes for that day's lessons, we stayed on track--I did my best, but it was largely thanks to their attention and efforts.

Few would likely choose to resume learning in a solely digital modality, but if need be, they showed they could pull it off.

These students are not withering little snowflakes, fluttering about, buffeted helplessly by forces they cannot/will not resist, melting when the temperature of their environment clicks up a notch. I think, as I did during much of the pandemic, that they're warriors. I keep finding that they adjust and adapt when called upon, and they showed that again last month.

Drexel acted with relative speed in opening its campus and beginning onsite instruction again. We finished the quarter. Graduations for both colleges and the university as a whole came and went.

I watched students walk in front of me across the stage at the College of Arts and Sciences graduation, and, you know, I felt not only proud that I had a chance to work with many of them but confident that they'll be the ones in charge some day.

Messy final drafts and metacomments

Like many teachers, I've been thinking about how writing studies faculty can help ourselves and our colleagues by drawing on our expertise to keep up with some of the challenges AI poses in writing instructional environments.

One teaching strategy I have been using is discussion-board dialogue about final student projects , as I described in "AI apps and student writing worries?: An old, reliable OWT practice can help"and "Generative AI and integrity concerns: More discussion board support."

That was a mixed bag. I used this teaching strategy in two very different courses. In one class it worked great. In another class, not so much.

In the latter class, I think the lukewarm success was partly because the course assignments didn't lend themselves to conversation. This course, The Literature of Business, has assignments that, while students can make them their own, does create somewhat similar results.

So I lived and learned. In recognition of those problems, I added another layer. I started also using metacomments: simply put, I ask students to write about their own writing as part of the assignment. This is an old composition practice, and in fact Julianne Ross-Kleinmann and Wess Trabelsi recently described a version of it in a smart T.H.E Journal piece "Teaching and Learning, Cheating, and Assessment in the Age of AI":

Another way to change teachers' method of assessing papers is to ask students to defend their work. This means having a conversation with them about their paper, either in person or when they upload it to the learning management system. Why did they make this argument or include that fact? What is the crux of their position? If they can't answer these kinds of questions, maybe they shouldn't receive a good grade on the paper — even if it is an excellent piece of work on its own. (emphasis mine)

Metacomments push students to talk about their practice and to defend their choices. In asking for these comments at the paragraph level, I am seeking granular analysis about their rhetorical choices.

My primary goal is constructive pedagogy, but if we're worried about authenticity and plagiarism, these comments head off a lot of clear, wholesale "borrowing": even if generative AI (or their roommate!) wrote a paper for them, they would still in many cases have to think through what each paragraph means in the context of the assignment.

If they tried to get AI, they still have to cut-and-paste individual paragraphs and generate the purpose--note, not the summary--of that paragraph in the context of the entire assignment. They're going to have to do some work in most cases.

My students have produced strong metacomment work. At times the comments are good. Sometimes they are fantastic. And occasionally they are better than the writing project itself.

However, I had to shake myself out of normalcy and embrace a new mindset when reading student writing. While in writing studies we often talk about embracing process, we traditionally still want something clean handed to us. Indeed, I think most teacher-readers are enamored of the "clean draft": neat, tidy, finished. I get why, but if we use metacomments the way I'm suggesting, we're asking for a "messy final draft," one in which students accompany each paragraph with comments about what they want to achieve; such writing will be intrusive. 

I don't require students to be fancy in formatting their metacomments. Footnotes or endnotes are ideal, but I'm fine with inserted bracketed or boldfaced comments after each paragraph: Messy, but functional for this purpose!

Ultimately, I'm moving away from the cleanly "typed" paper toward a product that vividly shows the often messy excellence of student thinking.

AI and the Philadelphia Eagles' greatest center ever

Occasionally I get to cross my two little corners of the web. Here is a version of a piece I wrote on my blog on the site When Falls the Coliseum about the farewell speech of Philadelphia Eagle center Jason Kelce. It was a powerful, emotional speech, and a strong piece of writing and rhetoric.

The delivery was not just quintessential Kelce, but it was very much something of the writers of his time and generation: Dressed in a sleeveless workout shirt and sandals, he read the speech from his phone; he had perhaps even composed it on that phone--writers regularly compose on phones now.

For a book club at Drexel, I happen to be reading The Meaningful Writing Project by Michele Eodice, Anne Ellen Geller, and Neal Lerner, in which they describe their research project to discover how students report the qualities of meaningful writing experiences, how those experiences are connected to learning, and how what faculty offering such projects conclude about meaningful writing, finding this:

meaningful writing projects offer students opportunities for agency; for engagement with instructors, peers, and materials; and for learning that connects to previous experiences and passions and to future aspirations and identities. (4)

Watching Kelce, I thought and felt a lot of things from many perspectives. In my role as a teacher, I thought: "No way AI wrote that speech."

Why? Because I was struck by how authentic Kelce's speech was. It was him in content, style, and voice.

I thought how proud I am when I receive authentic writing from my students. And it made me think again of the big challenge--a challenge now renewed because of generative AI (GAI)--facing us writing teachers to create writing assignments that are not plagiarism proof so much as plagiarism discouraging because they bring out authentic, meaningful writing from our students.

I know it's not simple for us as teachers to create such writing assignments. After all, we're not going to be able to reproduce easily contexts like Kelce's, where someone emotionally bids goodbye to an activity of passion after nearly a decade and a half.

But I believe GAI productively pressures teachers to create more meaningful writing environments for our students. Assignments with authentic roots will have a greater likelihood of inspiring such responses.

There's considerable and rightful concern in composition about GAI. Will GAI engines grow in sophistication to the point that we won't need people for that very human task, writing? Maybe, but as I watched Kelce, I thought, "I don't think so"--or at least, "We've got a ways to go before that happens."

I won't start boasting that I can create plagiarism-proof assignments: Students will take up the challenge and prove me wrong. But listening to Jason Kelce's farewell from football, I realized that if I keep striving to develop assignments that mean something to them, students will return something meaningful for me and, more importantly, for themselves.

Kairos publication: "OWI—A Future of Challenge and Possibility"

I was fortunate to work with ten talented colleagues as part of the recently published multimedia interview project "OWI—A Future of Challenge and Possibility" in Kairos (1).

This innovative publication placed experienced online writing instruction (OWI) teacher-researchers in dialogue with each other about key questions in the field.

Initially, project leaders Jason Snart and Jessie Borgman asked each "author" to post a question in a brief 20-second or so audio and/or video. Snart and Borgman helped matched each question with another participant, who responded with a lengthier audio, video, or text.

Adding another layer, a different contributor then had the option to provide a short reply to each question's response.

Snart and Borgman encouraged free play among the ideas from the beginning, communicating via email that even if the questions the 11 of us initially drafted were not used as written, they "bet the ideas will re-emerge as our question-answer conversation builds, not to mention the very late stage of everybody having another chance to come in and do new replies or comment on comments, etc."

The result is an overlay of thinking and commentary, a web-like representation of knowledge creation that well suits OWI.

It is also the kind of unconventional publication that is characteristic of the OWI mind, and I was glad to have been a part of it. Check it out.

Note

1) Issue 28.2. In addition to Snart and Borgman Jennifer Cunningham, Natalie Stillman-Webb, Joanna Whetstone, Heidi Skurat Harris, Casey McArdle, Cat Mahaffey, Lyra Hilliard, and Mary Stewart.

Generative AI and integrity concerns: More discussion board support

As I wrote a few months ago, the hand-wringing about generative AI and academic integrity that has been taking place in academia caused teacher me to return to a fundamental educational technology that has served me well: Message boards.

The writing assignment submission approach I'll briefly describe has lots of pedagogical upside, but I'm talking about it here in the context of AI-driven concerns about academic integrity.

For my current course, students submit four short writing projects in addition to many low-stakes assignments. I call these writing projects Exploration dialogues; you'll see why in a moment.

They submit these projects in two ways.

One, they submit to a Turnitin dropbox in our Blackboard (Bb) Learn course, a method I use not for plagiarism policing so much but because Turnitin has an effective audio commenting function that is great for response and is seamlessly integrated in Bb Learn. Although I don't require submitted rough drafts of every project, they also must submit rough draft material, even photos of notes from class. (The photos, by the way, are great and super fascinating.)

But they also post their final drafts to a Bb Learn Discussion, and I provide them there with these instructions:

Please cut-and-paste only your final draft of your Exploration dialogue Project 2. Do not use an attachment.

On this thread, read two of your classmates’ projects and respond to them. From the Syllabus:

On a Discussion board for each project, you will read two of your classmates’ projects and write short (at least 50 words) but meaningful Reactions. There is no fixed framework for your Reactions, but asking questions and seeking points of clarification are ideal. These Reactions may also allow you to connect the project with your own work in the course or perhaps your own experiences. The project author then will reply to these Reactions, either individually or collectively. 

Feel free to ask me questions!

Philosophically, this approach is nothing whiz bang new. Teachers do things like this. These straightforward threads have yielded interesting results in terms of student dialogue and learning for this course. I could talk more about that, as I mentioned.

But I believe this approach provides a constructive approach to academic integrity in a time when teachers are not sure what to do. Can students still misrepresent their writing, generative AI or otherwise? Of course! But there are implications if they submit a paper that is not theirs.

For one, they may reveal weak mastery of the content, which could become apparent as these message board conversations unfold.

More importantly, they are doubling down on integrity issues by writing about something that isn't theirs! I mean, they have to really have ice water in their veins to engage in a conversation about writing that is not theirs, fooling not just the professor but their own classmates. Could it happen? Does it happen? Of course it could! But shoring up against such behavior through an open course writing environment like this seems less like cheating vigilance and more like using good pedagogy for a collectively good end.