Successful humanities courses can help students develop key, individually rich and widely applicable skills and immerse them in explorations that explore perspectives, ideas, and ways of thinking that can illuminate, challenge and inform their prospects.
Historically, extracurricular thesis assignments have been one of the best assessments for students to best practice and develop relevant critical thinking skills in humanities courses. Through the writing process, students can better understand a problem. It seems obvious or obviously wrong before spending days thinking and writing suddenly becomes obvious or obvious mistake. Students determine complex problems by writing and editing over a period of continuous periods to solve these problems in a rigorous way (i.e., not just writing a blue book in one course).
Unfortunately, due to Chatgpt already widely used, it becomes increasingly difficult to justify as a major assessment of introductory humanities courses in extracurricular writing. When students are largely outsourced to the generation and expression of thought and analysis, strong personal participation in the core of humanistic value is more or less bypassed. With Chatgpt’s ability to write compelling papers, the same is true for students to rely on it (and for professors who reliably detect AI).
After doing a very extensive experiment with Chatgpt, I found that at least in terms of introductory philosophy courses, Chatgpt can produce 10 minutes of material with 10 minutes of ignorance, prompting competitors to reasonably expect competitors to generate solely by students, especially considering that one can upload reading/course material and ask Chatgpt to upload chatgpt and chatgpt the Views the View its the Exturs the Real (you can try this).
Students rely heavily on it. According to my time-consuming and exaggerated detection techniques, one in six of my students relied on Chatgpt in an obvious way last fall. Given that the leeway for students on Chatgpt is no longer obvious, I have to conclude that the actual number of papers relying on Chatgpt must be at least about 30%.
It is not clear whether the AI detection software is reliable enough to justify its use (I didn’t use it), and that dependency on it is prohibited (regardless). Some lecturers believe that having students submit their work as Google Doc with a history of track change is an appropriate deterrent and detection tool for AI. It’s not. Students know their track changes history – they know they just need to type chatgpt content instead of copying and pasting. In fact, students don’t even have to type what AI generates: it’s easy to get a Google Chrome extension, text at actionable speeds (pause, etc.) and “type” it. Students can copy/paste a Chatgpt article and “type” it into Google Docs at a human-like speed.
In this context, I spent a lot of time familiarizing myself with locked browsers (a tool integrated with learning management software like Canvas that prevents access and copy/copy/copy/paste in programs other than LMS) and designed a new task model that I would love to use in the past semester.
This is a multi-date classroom writing assignment that students can access through a locked browser (and only apply): reads for pdfs, their previously uploaded personal quotes bank, overview documentation and essay descriptions (at least a week ago given to students so they have time to start thinking about topics).
On day 1 in class, students enter the Canvas paper question quiz through a locked browser, with links to the above resources (each opens in a new tab that students can access while writing). They spend the course of overview/writing and click “Submit” at the end of the meeting.
Between the writing courses from day 1 to day 2, students can read about the canvas (so that they can continue to think about the topic), but can prevent being able to edit it. If you are worried that students rely on Chatgpt to try to remember/reflux (I don’t know what we’re worried about the inevitable student trying this), consider introducing small wrinkles into the article description in the classroom lesson (e.g., “where your article has to go through this example somewhere”).
On Day 2, students attend class and can recover from where they leave.
Day 2 meeting looks like this:
A person may repeat the course of the third session. My course is 75 minutes and takes two days, while my 50 minute course took three days to complete an article of about 700 words.
This format gives students access to everything we want them to access when writing their papers, without any other. While a lot of troubleshooting is required to develop the setup (links behave very differently between operating systems!), this new task model provides an important direction worthy of serious exploration.
I found that this setting retains most of what we care about most in our extracurricular writing assignments: students can think carefully about the topic for a long time, they can make a decision on a topic through a process of continuous critical reflection, and they will experience the benefits and rewards of a project, thus standing out from the project and returning to it (with all topics in mind).
Indeed, I have spoken with several students who pointed out that they ended up changing the idea of the topic between Day 1 and Day 2, for example (for example), they set out to object to a certain point of view, and then they realize (after working on day 1 to oppose and reflect on this), what they want to do now is defend the original point of view they have developed. Perfect: This is exactly the kind of experience I always wanted students to have when I was writing my paper (a kind of experience that students get on the day-long Blue Book Paper Exam).
Thanks to the work of setting up files every day, it brings wonderful opportunities for students to reflect on their own writing process (they see themselves prioritizing each meeting, and how/why did they change their approach?). The opportunity to conduct peer reviews at different stages is also strong.
For those interested, I made a long (but timestamped) video that explains and explains step by step how to build a job in the canvas (it also discusses troubleshooting steps when the device is not in the locked browser). The video has a very minimal understanding of canvas and locked browsers, and it describes a very specific way to hyperlink everything so that students don’t stand out from the allocation or access external resources (in Canvas – I’m currently unable to speak to other LMS platforms). The basic technical settings for the job are:
- Create a canvas quiz for day 1, create a paper question, link to the resource in the question (the “Preview Inline” display option of the PDF upload must be uploaded to work across devices), need to lock the browser with a password to access it, and then post the quiz.
- Arbitrary, weightless grades after the first writing class so that students can read (but cannot edit) what they wrote before day 2 (students can read their submissions before you post some grades).
- Create a canvas quiz for day 1, but this time, in the paper question, link to the day 1 canvas quiz (select “External Link” instead of “Course Link” and copy/paste the Canvas Quiz leink link for day 1).
As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, successful humanities courses can help students develop critical, personal rich and widely applicable skills and immerse them in exploring perspectives, ideas and ways of thinking that can illuminate, challenge and inform their own perspectives. The research I’ve done over the past three years tells me that I can no longer be convinced that an introductory course that does not attempt to rely on extracurricular writing assignments can be a completely successful humanities course. However, the humanities course that completely abandons article assignments deprives students of the experience that best enables them to fully exercise and develop the most important skills of our subject. Some directions in the direction of locking browser paper allocation this multi-day is worthy of serious consideration.
