Event description
I just missed the start of Generative AI (GAI) in education. When ChatGPT came out on November 30, 2022, there were only two weeks left of my course. Since then, however, I have worked to catch up - and in autumn 2025 I made a serious effort to systematically integrate and teach GAI as a learning tool in my course.
In this seminar, I will begin with a brief overview of my "voyage of discovery" into the emerging role of GAI in education. I will then dig deeper into the specifics of what I did last autumn to integrate GAI into my teaching, including students' answers to a GAI-focused questionnaire conducted after the course.
I will show some practical examples of GAI-based assignments that students had to carry out. I will also show you a set of general principles for the effective use of GAI tools, and a number of specific examples of both good and bad uses of GAI that I used to help students become more thoughtful and proficient users of GAI as a learning tool.
Students' self-reported experience with GAI before the course ranged from "heavy users for years" to "never used a GAI tool before". Overall, students were satisfied with the various GAI-activities and their self-reported experience after the course was significantly improved.
Although my specific context is Copilot (university-approved) and a university course in Software Configuration Management, the examples, principles and results are sufficiently general to be easily adapted to other educational settings.
I might also run a live demo or two, although I have bad experience with that since Copilot is not deterministic. As I am a control freak, I want to be in 120% control of what happens - so I will rely primarily on "chat dumps" (as I often did with the students) for most of the examples I present.