University of Guelph-Humber student Ashnaa Narumathan says using AI has simplified her studies.Laura Proctor/The Globe and Mail
Ashnaa Narumathan, a fourth-year kinesiology student at the University of Guelph-Humber, uses artificial intelligence to help her study and organize her life.
She has used Microsoft’s Copilot chatbot to summarize academic articles and clarify certain concepts. Another tool has enabled her to turn course materials into podcasts narrated by AI voices. She has asked AI to create an hourly study plan that balances her time across several classes, then a nutrition and workout plan that fits her schedule. In writing her thesis, she used prompts to ask AI to translate the complex language of scientific papers into something more digestible.
“Sometimes I’ll take the abstract or the methods section, because they’re using all this big terminology, and ask, ‘Can you simplify this as if you’re explaining it to a middle schooler?’ And it saves me so much time,” Ms. Narumathan said.
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Universities have been cautious about adopting new AI tools, often because they are worried about what they will mean for academic integrity. In one prominent survey of more than 400 Canadian post-secondary administrators, researchers, technologists and others, 83 per cent of respondents said AI will be used to cheat.
But many students, like Ms. Narumathan, are discovering that AI can be used in ways that enhance learning rather than circumvent it.
The 2024 Pan-Canadian Report on Digital Learning found a rapid increase in the use of generative AI among postsecondary students.
From 2023 to 2024, the share of educators using it in learning activities, including by asking students to consult it for assignments, jumped from 12 per cent to 41 per cent. And instructors’ use of generative AI to support their teaching, such as by using it to produce course materials, jumped from 19 per cent to 49 per cent.
The report concludes there’s a strong consensus that the use of AI will soon become a normal part of postsecondary education.
Some universities are taking the view that if the technology is here to stay, students should be taught how to work with it.
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At Guelph-Humber, academic technology specialist Victoria Chen tries to persuade students to dive in and try the new applications for themselves. She has held regular sessions to demystify AI at different locations around the school.
She says her goal is simply to encourage students to experiment with new AI tools such as ChatGPT, which are based on large language models that train on huge sets of data to create new text, summaries or images.
Many students have told her they’re anxious about breaking academic integrity rules around the inappropriate use of AI. But Dr. Chen is concerned that if they leave school without having engaged with the technology, that won’t help them in the work world.
“We just want you to explore it, be curious about it,” Dr. Chen said. “These tools exist, and the big thing I didn’t want was people walking out of here having a fear of AI.”
Some professors are also diving into AI’s potential.
Joshua Gans, a professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, and his colleague Kevin Bryan, have created an AI teaching assistant that can answer student queries.
Prof. Gans said the student reaction has been “phenomenal.”
“I used to get probably a couple of e-mails a day from students, and then in the high period, five to 10 a day,” he said. “It dropped to zero.”
Students who used to e-mail him with questions shifted to using the AI tool. A class of 200 asked about 12,000 questions of the bot over a single term.
And there were interesting patterns in the data, he found. Students overwhelmingly asked more questions in the days leading up to tests and exams. And the bot, unlike a human, was available at all hours and didn’t tire, despite the volume of questions.
The students also didn’t feel inhibited about asking very basic things, Prof. Gans said, which can be an issue if students are shy or worried they’ll make a negative impression.
The bot is trained on inputs the professor provides, which can range from textbooks to lectures or the content of a syllabus. Prof. Gans says that contrasts with tools such as ChatGPT, where the origin of the information is not as clear.
As for his own work, Prof. Gans said he keeps an AI tool open on his computer all the time while he’s researching and writing. He compares it to an indefatigable research assistant. It makes mistakes, but it gets stuff done, he said, adding that with persistent checking and careful prompt writing, it’s very useful.
“It has transformed that aspect of my life considerably,” he said.
The Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario published a study on AI use last year that found students in universities and colleges see both promise and peril in the technology. About 80 per cent of the more than 500 Ontario postsecondary education students surveyed had used generative AI and about half were using it on a weekly basis.
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Slightly more than half were using it to brainstorm ideas, understand course materials and get feedback on their writing, the study found. A little more than a third were using it to summarize lectures or organize their notes.
Among those who didn’t use it, the biggest barrier, according to two-thirds of respondents, was “institutional prohibition” – the fear that they would be breaking the rules.
Jessica Tang, a student in engineering science at the University of Toronto, said she was uncertain at first about how and whether to use AI in her studies. But over the past two years instructors began including statements about the technology in syllabuses, and she grew more comfortable. Now she uses it anywhere from one to five times a day, she said, often for testing the feasibility of her ideas before she begins to code or debug something she has produced.
She has been working with AI extensively in a lab, seeing how it can be used to assist people in the teaching and correction of rehabilitation movements, and hopes to pursue a career in the field.
“There are limitations to what ChatGPT can do for us. This is what we can do now, and so we’re using it as best we can,” Ms. Tang said. “In 10 years, though, what might the development be? Honestly I don’t even know.”