
A profitable humanities course helps college students domesticate crucial, personally enriching and extensively relevant abilities, and it immerses them within the exploration of views, concepts and modes of thought that may illuminate, problem and inform their very own outlooks.
Traditionally, the out-of-class essay task has been among the many greatest assessments for getting college students in humanities programs to most totally train and develop the related crucial pondering abilities. By the writing course of, college students can come to raised perceive an issue. Issues that appear apparent or clearly false earlier than spending a number of days pondering and writing instantly change into not apparent or clearly false. College students make up their minds on advanced issues by grappling with these issues in a rigorous manner via writing and enhancing over a sustained interval (i.e., not simply writing in a blue e-book in a single class session).
Sadly, since ChatGPT grew to become extensively accessible, out-of-class writing assignments hold changing into more durable to justify as main assessments in introductory-level humanities programs. The extraordinary private engagement with views and cultural artifacts central to the worth of the humanities is kind of bypassed when a pupil closely outsources to AI the era and expression of concepts and evaluation. As ChatGPT’s potential to write down convincing papers goes up, so does the coed temptation to depend on it (and so too does the issue for professors of reliably detecting AI).
Having experimented very extensively with ChatGPT, I’ve discovered that, at the very least in terms of introductory-level philosophy programs, the fabric that ChatGPT can produce with 10 minutes of uninformed prompting rivals a lot of what we will fairly count on college students to supply on their very own, particularly provided that one can add readings/course supplies and ask ChatGPT to regulate its voice (the reader ought to do that).
And college students are counting on it lots. Primarily based on my time-consuming-and-quickly-becoming-obsolete detection strategies, about one in six of my college students final fall have been counting on ChatGPT in ways in which have been apparent. On condition that it ought to take a pupil not more than 10 additional minutes on ChatGPT to make the case not apparent, I’ve to conclude that the true variety of essays counting on ChatGPT in ways in which battle with tutorial integrity have to be at the very least round 30 %.
It’s unclear whether or not AI-detection software program is sufficiently dependable to justify its use (I haven’t used it), and—at any price—many universities prohibit reliance on it. Some instructors consider that making college students submit their work as a Google Doc with track-changes historical past is an satisfactory deterrent and detection device for AI. It’s not. College students are conscious of their track-changes historical past—they know they merely should sort ChatGPT content material as an alternative of copying and pasting it. Really, college students don’t even should sort the AI-generated content material: There are available Google Chrome extensions that take textual content and “sort” it at manipulable speeds (with pauses, and many others.). College students can copy/paste a ChatGPT essay and have the extension “sort” it right into a Google Doc at a humanlike tempo.
Towards this backdrop, I spent a lot of time over the past winter break familiarizing myself with Lockdown Browser (a device built-in with studying administration software program like Canvas that stops entry to and copying/pasting from applications exterior of the LMS) and devising a brand new task mannequin that I fortunately used this previous semester.
It’s a multiday in-class writing task, the place college students have entry via Lockdown Browser to (and solely to): PDFs of the readings, a private citation financial institution they beforehand uploaded, an outlining doc and the essay directions (which college students got at the very least every week earlier than so that they had time to start pondering via their subject).
On Day 1 at school, college students enter a Canvas essay-question quiz via Lockdown Browser with hyperlinks to the sources talked about above (every of which opens in a brand new tab that college students can entry whereas writing). They spend the category interval outlining/writing and hit “submit” on the finish of the session.
Between the Day 1 and Day 2 writing classes, college students can learn their writing on Canvas (to allow them to proceed fascinated about the subject) however are prevented from having the ability to edit it. In case you’re anxious about college students counting on ChatGPT for concepts to attempt to memorize/regurgitate (I don’t know the way anxious we must be about college students inevitably attempting this), contemplate introducing small wrinkles to the essay directions in the course of the in-class classes (e.g. “your essay should someplace critically talk about this instance”).
On Day 2, college students come to class and may decide again up proper from the place they left off.
A Day 2 session seems like this:

One can doubtlessly repeat the method for a 3rd session. I had my 75-minute lessons take two days and my 50-minute lessons take three days for a roughly 700-word essay.
This format offers college students entry to all the things we wish them to have entry to whereas engaged on their essays and nothing else. Whereas it took a lot of troubleshooting to develop the setup (hyperlinks behave fairly in another way throughout working techniques!), this new task mannequin presents an essential route worthy of great exploration.
I’ve discovered that this setup preserves a lot of what we care about most with out-of-class writing assignments: College students can suppose laborious in regards to the subject over an prolonged time frame, they will make up their minds on some subject via the method of sustained crucial reflection and so they expertise the advantages and rewards of engaged on a challenge, stepping away from it and returning to it (whereas pondering laborious in regards to the subject within the background all of the whereas).
Certainly, I’ve talked with a number of college students who famous that they ended up altering their minds on their subject between Day 1 and Day 2—they (for example) got down to object to some view, after which they realized (after working laborious via the objection on Day 1 and reflecting on it) that what they now wished to do was defend the unique view in opposition to the objection that that they had developed. Good: That is precisely the form of expertise I have all the time wished college students to have when writing essays (and it’s an expertise that college students don’t get with a one-day blue-book essay examination).
As a result of the setup paperwork every day’s work, it invitations fantastic alternatives for college students to replicate on their writing course of (what are they seeing themselves prioritizing every session, and the way/why may they modify their method?). The alternatives for peer assessment at completely different phases are additionally sturdy.
For these , I’ve made a protracted (however time-stamped) video that illustrates and explains step-by-step how you can construct the task in Canvas (it additionally discusses troubleshooting steps for when a tool isn’t entering into Lockdown Browser). The video assumes very minimal data of Canvas and Lockdown Browser, and it describes the very particular methods to hyperlink all the things in order that college students aren’t bumped out of the task or given entry to exterior sources (in Canvas—I can not at present communicate to different LMS platforms). The essential technical setup for the task is that this:
- Create a Canvas quiz for Day 1, create an essay query, hyperlink to sources within the query (PDFs have to be uploaded with the “Preview Inline” show choice to work throughout units), require a Lockdown Browser with a password to entry it, then publish the quiz.
- Submit arbitrary, weightless grades for Day 1 after the primary writing session in order that college students can learn (however not edit) what they wrote earlier than Day 2 (college students can not learn their submitted work till you publish some grade for it).
- Create a Canvas quiz for Day 2 similar to Day 1, however this time, within the essay query, hyperlink to the Day 1 Canvas quiz (choose “exterior hyperlink” quite than “course hyperlink,” and duplicate/paste the Day 1 Canvas quiz hyperlink).
As I discussed in the beginning of this piece, a profitable humanities course helps college students domesticate crucial, personally enriching and extensively relevant abilities, and it immerses them within the exploration of views, concepts and modes of thought that may illuminate, problem and inform their very own outlooks. The analysis I’ve executed over the previous three years tells me I can not be assured that an intro-level course that nontrivially depends on out-of-class writing assignments could be a totally profitable humanities course so understood. But a humanities course that totally abandons sustained essay assignments deprives college students of the expertise that greatest positions them to completely train and develop the abilities most central to our disciplines. One thing within the route of this multiday in-class Lockdown Browser essay task is worthy of great consideration.