Future of Higher Education

A new paper entitled “Developing AI Literacy: Exploring Higher Education Students’ Perceptions and Practices” has been released by Márta Folmeg, Imre Fekete, and Rita Kóris (members of our research centre) in the recent special issue of the open access publication, Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice.

The study was designed to find out about university students’ perceptions of the effective and critical use of AI tools, and to further explore some elements of AI literacy. The study involved a written interview design with the participation of 69 students from the Hungarian higher educational context and the data were subjected to thematic content analysis.

The results show that the participants mainly used ChatGPT for their assignments, such as brainstorming, topic selection, information search and translation.

Although many found ChatGPT useful for creating and rewriting texts, some encountered challenges such as generality, communicating outdated information and the presence of alien structures in their Hungarian texts due to language translation. Students highlighted the effectiveness of the text generator in realising different assignments such as writing essays and preparing extracts.

Based on the participants’ views it can be observed that there are some instructors who already integrate AI in their classes, but this only makes up the minority of instructors. As the students’ technological (and thus AI) literacy is mainly self-developed concerning entertainment purposes, attention should definitely be paid in the future to the integration of subject/discipline-specific AI opportunities in the learning-teaching processes.

The study can be accessed here.