Pedagogy without Borders: New Frontiers of Teaching and Technology

Since the advent of the digital-interactive era of communication, new educational technologies have transformed higher education, increasing both the possibilities and the challenges related to learning. While the internet and hypertext are the core elements that underpin remarkable educational resources, such as Wikipedia, the copy&paste function noticeably facilitates plagiarism. And with the advent of generative artificial intelligence (AI), higher education has been transformed yet again; because generative AI allows for assignment prompts to generate texts from a bank of texts (ie. new data from training data) thus by-passing a student’s learning curve altogether. While some courses and instructors permit the use of generative AI tools on an ad-hoc basis or for specific tasks and activities, others strictly prohibit it pursuant to Trent University’s Academic Integrity Policy 1.5 that explicitly includes “the presentation of work from an AI generator” (2024:p.640) its definition of Plagiarism.  

For teaching and learning, the core issue derives from the technological asymmetry between infraction and detection, because the same AI technology that facilitates plagiarism does not correspondingly facilitate the detection of plagiarism. It is a fact that popular plagiarism detectors, such as Turnitin or SafeAssign, have at best limited success in detecting plagiarism accurately let alone demonstrating plagiarism conclusively. This difficulty is in no small part compounded by the availability of free paraphrasing software that can transform machine-generated text into text that “appears” to be written by humans.

Thus, from a pedagogical perspective, the main challenge is neither the detection of plagiarism nor the application of appropriate penalties, but about prevention. As the “Pedagogy without Borders: New Frontiers of Teaching and Technology” conference asks how faculty are “navigating challenges in teaching and learning”, it is an ideal forum to present the preliminary findings of my research project on analog learning methods in the digital age. Ever since a sudden and dramatic use of ChatGPT was detected in a first-year course in the fall of 2023, I have carried out an experiment in my courses, substituting digital assignments with analog assignments in the following three terms (winter 2024, spring 2024, fall 2024). I have collected data on student performance, adherence to instructions, and feedback. And I have analyzed the data. And therefore, I would be happy to present the preliminary findings on the role of analog assignments in the digital age at the KTT conference in the “contemporary issues related to educational technologies” conference track. And I look forward to the feedback and comments fellow faculty members can provide.