20 Scaffolding innovation
Maria Pavlopoulou, Postgraduate Student, Digital Education, United Kingdom/Greece
I used ChatGPT in an assistive role while preparing for an assignment, as part of the “Designing Digital Education” module in the MA in Digital Education at the University of Leeds (UK). In this assignment, GenAI constituted not only a learning subject, but also a supportive tool in the instructional design process.
Firstly, the objective of the assignment was the creation of a “Greek GenAI Academy for Educators”, which was a digital resource that would introduce educators of diverse backgrounds to GenAI’s role in teaching and learning. GenAI tools, like ChatGPT-4.0 and MojoAI (for photo generation), were leveraged in an assistive role, according to the university’s policy (University of Leeds, 2023), namely for generating abstract ideas for the content, exploring alternative phrasing of the resource’s slogans, and, generally, for supporting the early stage of structuring this platform’s components.
The subject matter of the resource was also GenAI and its application in educational contexts by teachers. Thus, I critically engaged with GenAI, its potential leverage, limitations, and ethical implications in education. Working on GenAI both as a tool and a topic enabled me to explore its meaningful and responsible adoption in education.
I personally used ChatGPT as a supportive thinking tool, while designing and refining my digital educational resource. My main goal was not to produce finished content, but to go through various alternatives of content organization, phrasing and activities’ structure. For example, I asked ChatGPT to generate some ideas for good and bad AI prompts to test learners’ understanding of prompt crafting through a Kahoot! quiz. Thus, GenAI helped me broaden my ideas on my instructional design project, amplify difficult tasks (e.g. organising the steps toward building the website) without relying on it to generate my final academic work. Instead, ChatGPT fostered a scaffolding discussion that enabled me to take ownership of the educational decisions I made on this project.
GenAI helped me revise my pedagogical ideas and reflect on my choices
ChatGPT, as a GenAI tool, supported my learning through this project, fostering the efficiency and depth of my decision-making. Rather than producing answers and ready-made solutions for this assignment, it helped me revise my pedagogical ideas and reflect on my choices. For example, it asked me to revise the activities for the participants in my Academy according to the learning objectives I had set. Moreover, it improved my engagement with academic literature by clarifying complex learning theories and frameworks, like Mayer’s multimedia principles (Mayer, 2017). Overall, the GenAI tool ChatGPT-4.0 did not replace learning and thinking – instead it constituted it more strategically and ultimately in a more meaningful way.
