GenAI in higher education: Fall 2023 update Time for class study

In this report we provide the field an early look at longitudinal adoption of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and offer our perspective on how the evolving use cases of this technology will impact teaching and learning in higher education in the long run. Building on the foundation of the Time for class 2023 report [available in VOCEDplus at TD/TNC 155.585], Tyton conducted a pulse survey this fall, reaching over 1,000 higher education faculty and 1,600 current postsecondary students.

This research delves specifically into a pivotal emerging technology: GenAI writing tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Google Bard, Microsoft Bing Chat, or Meta Llama 2) and how it is being used by learners and instructors in a course setting. Students and instructors have gained a new powerful tool in generative AI models. While use of GenAI has expanded significantly across the last 6 months, we would characterize the current use by instructors and student as nascent. The ultimate impact on teaching and learning in higher education and workforce needs is still unknown. What we observe from March to September of 2023 is the following: (1) Use of GenAI continues to grow and will be sticky: Half of students are regular users of GenAI, putting higher education student adoption into the late majority on the adoption curve and yet, their use cases are relatively unsophisticated (apart from 12 per cent of students identifying as daily users); 75 per cent of students who already use GenAI indicate that they will continue to use it even if their professors or institutions ban the technology; Faculty in higher education have come up the adoption curve by over 20 percentage points from March to September but still are not consistently setting course-level policies and significantly lagging students in their use of GenAI; (2) GenAI is going to shape learning and the workforce: A near majority of students in the Spring (49 per cent) and Fall (47 per cent) believe that GenAI will have a positive impact on their learning. While in the Spring, 50 per cent of faculty believed that GenAI would have a negative impact on student learning, in the Fall, this figure declined to 39 per cent indicating faculty are more open to the potential of GenAI to support learning; Both faculty and students believe that GenAI tools will be needed to succeed in the workforce. An overwhelming 75 per cent of faculty using GenAI believe graduates will need to know how to effectively use GenAI tools to succeed in a professional setting; (3) Tensions exist between how students would like to use GenAI in their studies and what faculty will permit. These tensions are expected given students seek efficiency in learning and faculty want to ensure students are writing to convey learning without skipping critical pieces of the writing process: In written assignments, faculty cite concern about academic integrity if more than 30 per cent of a writing assignment's content is flagged as written by GenAI; Students are about 10 percentage points more likely to find it acceptable to use generative AI tools to write at least some parts of an assignment compared to faculty. Show less