Faced with a prolific rise in the use of artificial intelligence in the world of higher education, some instructors are taking the radical step of going back to pen and paper.
Shawna Dolansky, one of the many professors at Carleton University who’s removing technology from her lecture hall over use of generative AI, says she has had no choice but to completely overhaul the strategies she’s taken decades to refine.
“I’ve been teaching for 30 years. The take-home essay was always the go-to for developing students’ abilities, skills, thinking, deepening their thinking about things,” Dolansky said in an interview.
“When I had to get rid of the essay, it was with a lot of sadness, but also it was an opportunity to re-think: What are the goals in my classroom? What are the skills I want them to learn? It’s no longer to write a polished essay because any AI can do that.”
Dolansky, who teaches in Carleton’s College of the Humanities , said about two years ago she began noticing a disconnect between what students were able to explain in person and what their written works suggested they understood.
“The writing was great, but the thinking behind it was just missing,” she said.
She discussed the phenomenon with colleagues, all of whom shared similar observations, Dolansky said. It became clear that the status quo was no longer an option, and take-home assignments, a staple in many university departments, were now off the table.
“All of us have radically re-thought and overhauled the way we do what we do.”
If a machine can produce a competent argument in four seconds, she said, then the skill that’s going to be scarce is being able to tell whether the argument is any good, and you can’t judge that if you’ve never had to think deeply about something.
“I’m not trying to protect students from AI. I’m trying to make sure they’re able to enter the world after they graduate with the ability to supervise it, to work with it, to use it to its best ability,” she said.
In practice, this means all coursework and testing is now done in person with pens and paper. She gives weekly reading assignments, and students must make handwritten notes and discuss those notes with her every class.
Students pushed back at first — many of them have been trained since middle school that the end product of a polished essay was the point — but the process is what matters, she said.
“That’s disorienting at first, and maybe for a bit before it becomes liberating,” Dolansky said.
“With their laptops stowed, people were really in the room with each other. They looked at each other when they disagreed. The culture of the class changed, and I think it absolutely changed for the better.”
Carleton does not have a policy banning artificial intelligence. It has an AI “framework” that outlines what it calls opportunities and drawbacks of the new technology and leaves discretion on its use up to individual instructors.
Dolansky says AI may have its place in some academic disciplines, but it can’t exist in the humanities, a program she says is designed to enrich brain activity, to contemplate what it means to be human, to open minds to new ideas and to find meaning.
“I can’t imagine doing what I do and trying to inculcate in students what I’m trying to inculcate in students without having them do it the old-fashion way with pen and paper, given the abilities of (generative AI),” she said.
“I think for what I’m trying to teach, and what my goals are for my students, this is the only way forward.”
Timothy Pettipiece, another humanities professor at Carleton University, says it’s always been standard practice in higher education to embrace new technology as it emerges, but the rising prevalence of AI is “revealing the limits to that sort of thinking.”
Pettipiece, who teaches primarily in the Religion and Greek and Roman Studies programs, says he’s tried many different approaches in recent years to see what works. This has included going back to pen and paper, but there are drawbacks to this methodology.
“While the quality of work was quite good in this format, many students felt that this didn’t give them enough time to carefully craft the sort of essay they are used to,” Pettipiece said.
“It also involves a tradeoff since using class time in this way means that less content can be covered. I personally didn’t like this aspect.”
Moving into this year, Pettipiece’s approach will be to diversify the types of assignments and assessment tools for each course so no single element is too heavily weighted. He plans to lean into some of the traditional methods they’ve always employed, such as regular sit-down, in-person exams.
“Newer is not necessarily better in the education space and in some ways the solutions are hiding in plain sight,” he said.
Brett Popplewell, a Carleton journalism professor, said he personally bought notebooks and pens for his classes and would tell students not to bring their laptops after the first week.
While academic integrity and the use of generative AI have played roles in his decision to go back to the basics, it also has to do with how distracting technology can be.
“If anybody is sitting with their laptop and trying to actually take notes of something that’s happening in front of them, you turn off that part of your brain that’s listening for the important things,” Popplewell said.
“It’s for their benefit, and ultimately for a deeper learning experience, to actually take the time to learn how to do the skills we’re trying to impart to them so they can do the jobs we’re trying to train them to do.”
For Carleton students, reaction to the idea of going back to pen and paper has been mixed. Many highlighted technology’s role in cases of disability accommodation, while others said it was important to embrace technological advancements, especially in a university setting.
Stacy Kemp, a fourth-year psychology student, said the use of technology in the classroom and the overall portability it provided meant she could weave her schoolwork into an otherwise demanding schedule.
Kemp returned to school after starting a family and said the expansion of virtual classrooms in her earlier years made being a student and caring for her children significantly easier than it would have been with completely in-person learning.
“In retrospect, I doubt I would have been able to get the marks and the experiences that I have gotten without the freedom that that kind of integration afforded,” Kemp said.
“Being able to write exams from home with my children in the next room, while my spouse was at work, was more beneficial to me than words can really express.”
As the pendulum swings back to a more traditional way of learning, Kemp says she’s no longer able to take most of her classes virtually, which means her children need to be in extended daycare after school, something she hasn’t had to consider until now.
“I fully understand the educator perspective. Many students have clearly not been taking their education seriously,” she said. “I look forward to better tools to support educators in detecting academic violations and protecting the process, in the hopes that the tools that have benefited me will again be available to others.”
Other students say they’re embracing the change and believe going back to the basics is not only a necessary step to combat the threat to academic integrity posed by large language models, but also beneficial to their learning.
One fourth-year engineering student at Carleton, who didn’t want to be named, said a move away from tech in recent years had been beneficial for her academic experience.
Writing notes and assignments by hand had helped her academically, ensuring she was able to process and understand the subject matter better, she said.
“I find that this type of lecture is a lot more engaging, and I learn far more in these types of lectures rather than reading off of slides,” she said.
With opinions divided and post-secondary institutions grappling with how best to proceed in a world of technology that’s only moving forward, Dolansky hopes her students will walk away with a more enriched university experience, actually learning something instead of just racing to the finish line.
“I want them to be able to come out of this with the same mental development and mental maturity and cognitive abilities and skills that students did 10 years ago before there was genAI,” she said.
“That’s much harder to do now, but I still think it’s just as worth it as it ever was. In fact, I think it’s more worth it now.”
Related
Take control of your search results. Make the Ottawa Citizen a preferred source on Google and see verified local reporting first.
