From prompts to learning and insight: Unlocking new possibilities with Generative AI

From prompts to learning and insight: Unlocking new possibilities with Generative AI

NUS educators are harnessing AI to deepen learning across a diverse range of topics, from fake news to music generation

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is inherently complex - offering both immense potential and notable risks. While AI's advancements can help students learn more and in deeper ways, it also poses pitfalls such as providing inaccurate information. But what if its multi-faceted abilities, including this pitfall, can be harnessed for good? Educators from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music have incorporated AI meaningfully into their courses, using the tool to augment their teaching and students' learning.

Debunking fake news using AI

An article in The Straits Times on singer Katy Perry's fake AI photos of herself at the Met Gala was one of the impetuses for Mr Tan Kai En, Instructor at the Department of Communications and New Media, to generate a fake news article for the course NM1101X Communications, New Media and Society, which explores how technologies shape human communication.

Generated with Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (ChatGPT), Mr Tan's fake article was manipulated visually and in code to mimic a legitimate news site for the discussion topic on "Misinformation and Fake News". Students analysed the AI-generated fake article in both print and web formats, identifying visual and textual cues that pointed to its inauthenticity. This helped them to critically examine the influence of AI on message credibility and meaning-making in media environments.

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In addition to this exercise, Mr Tan designed a qualitative interview activity, revealing both the capabilities and limitations of AI in simulating human communication. Students engaged in small-group discussions to evaluate a list of interview questions generated using ChatGPT. Besides examining the assumptions behind each AI-generated question, they also reflected on what worked, what felt formulaic, and what could be improved. In the second part of this activity, students used ChatGPT to simulate a qualitative response for a selected AI-generated question.

These tasks enabled Mr Tan's students to understand how GenAI can be used as a supportive but fallible tool in qualitative research, as well as how the proliferation of AI intensifies the ease, speed, and believability of misinformation. "Students demonstrated noticeably deeper engagement and sharper analytical skills. They became more inquisitive about how media and algorithms interact… Their reflections revealed greater awareness of both the continuity and the transformation of misinformation in the AI age, as well as stronger critical thinking about ethics, credibility, and human responsibility in the communication process," he said. "GenAI brought immediacy and relevance to both exercises, transforming abstract concepts into lived classroom experiences."

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AI as Socrates

In the course PL1101E Introduction to Psychology, Associate Professor Nina Powell from the Department of Psychology uses GenAI for an exercise on Socratic dialogue, which refers to a form of dialogue rooted in questioning to stimulate critical thinking, uncover beliefs, and reach a refined understanding of a topic.

This allows students to engage in an open-ended, dialogic exploration of ideas. In the exercise, students select a starting question based on the course material, with topics ranging from conditioning to human cognition, and begin a dialogue with a GenAI tool of their choice. Students begin by asking a question, before prompting the GenAI tool in any manner they wish, with the aim of gaining further clarity and understanding. Once students are satisfied with the dialogue, or feel that they have reached a sufficient level of clarity, they proceed to write a reflection on how their earlier assumptions or beliefs about the question may have been challenged, in addition to any limitations identified while engaging in dialogue with the tool.

Assoc Prof Powell, whose scholarly work over the past five years has focused on AI-human interactions and the ethics of AI, shared that this exercise is designed to cultivate students' sense of agency and mirror the core process of psychological inquiry. "At its heart, the discipline of psychology is not about the memorisation of facts, but the reasoned exploration of uncertainty, the asking of meaningful questions and the testing of assumptions. Rather than treating AI as an authority or 'answer machine', students learn to prompt it critically, evaluate its responses, and recognise its limitations," she noted.

Echoing this, Dong Ming Hao, a second-year student majoring in Engineering and Psychology, shared a lasting impact from this exercise. "The Socratic dialogue with AI not only helped me review the topics covered in lectures but also encouraged me to think more proactively and find links between lecture content and real life. Having been enlightened by the ideas given by AI, I challenged my own cognitive distortion, which has helped me make more logical and rational decisions."

While AI can synthesise information, it cannot reason, reflect, or care. Assoc Prof Powell said, "Integrating GenAI into PL1101E has deepened my ability to teach psychology as a discipline of inquiry rather than of answers. It helped to create a shared object of analysis that students and I can interrogate together." She noted that GenAI has expanded her role as an instructor. "Instead of being the primary source of content, I now act as a facilitator of reflection and critical engagement," she said.

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The AI musician

For Mr Benedict Ng, Teaching Assistant at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music, GenAI helps to provoke more in-depth and thoughtful discourse among his students. One of the assignments for GEC1014 Social and Cultural Studies through Music includes a segment where students respond to a short question and engage in intellectual discourse. This is meant to diagnose students' understanding of why different groups of people make music, and to encourage reflection on concepts taught during lectures.

As the responses from students could benefit from greater depth, Mr Ng sought to augment this segment. He set them a task to use free AI tools to generate a short piece of music accompanied by a short reflection. The students' submissions would comprise the link to the generated piece of music, the prompts used to generate the music, and a short write-up with the context in which this piece of music is to be played, in addition to the value or purpose of the music within its given context, the elements of music incorporated into the prompt to achieve the intended outcome, and their assessment as to whether the generated song meets their initial intentions and expectations.

As the course is taken by students hailing from different faculties, many with limited prior musical background, Mr Ng hoped that the use of prompt-based AI music generation tools would help to bridge the gap, while fulfilling learning objectives.

"GenAI has helped to give students a dynamic platform to apply their own conceptual understanding to create and analyse music, and as an iterative reflective process. Apart from GenAI, I have also used AI for music analysis and relevant critique. Looking ahead, I am considering including the use of Large Language Models for ideation in future courses," he said.