Abstract:

In the last years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools, such as ChatGPT, have appeared across the university context and have significantly transformed the educational practices. They allow students to elaborate texts and answer specific questions in a short time without the need to apply critical thinking. Therefore, it is essential for the academics to know the utilisation of these by the students. Therefore, investigating the possible uses of AI at the university context is one of the objectives of a current teaching innovation project (2023PID-UB/011) developed by a teaching team involving 7 different subjects, at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

In order to gather the opinion and utilization of AI applications by the university students, we conducted a survey among the students of the subject Molecular Nutrition of the degree in “Human Nutrition and Dietetics” at the University of Barcelona in the 2023/2024 academic year. Molecular Nutrition is a last-year subject of the degree taught in the first semester.

Briefly, during a seminar from the last block of the subject, a specific question on probiotics was raised, and students were asked to explain how they would obtain a correct answer from online sources. In addition, information regarding their knowledge and use of AI tools and their opinion regarding the implementation of AI at university education was asked. A total of 32 students volunteered to fill in the questionnaire.

With regard to the answers to the research question, surprisingly, none of the students would consult ChatGPT as a first option and only 25% would use it as a second-fifth option. Moreover, 65% of the students said that they have used ChatGPT for academic purposes, and in 33.3% of the cases they used it even in the previous academic year. ChatGPT was practically the only tool they knew, and in fact, they had no knowledge of other existing ones like Humata, Tome or Bard. Most of the students were aware that they should make a critical use of AI resources (level of agreement of 4.6 out of 5 in a Likert scale). Finally, when they were asked whether the use of these strategies should be encouraged or penalized, a wide range of answers was obtained. As expected, the non-users of these tools opted for punishment, while regular users believed that their integration into the proposed activities is appropriate.

Overall, it can be concluded that AI tools are impacting the higher education and are being used by students and therefore, teachers must be aware of their use in order to design adapted activities that cannot be solved by an AI.

Keywords:

Artificial intelligence, ChatGPT, home activities.