Abstract:

Undergraduate studies demand excellent writing and thinking skills across the curriculum to succeed. Specialized courses, such as Academic Writing courses, have traditionally provided students with writing strategies and critical thinking skills that help them become credible academic writers. However, the advent of technology marks a turning point, putting traditional writing under pressure.

To clarify, writing was already a concern for Socrates within his oral society centuries ago: He feared that writing would create more forgetfulness and that students would no longer need to memorize knowledge. For Socrates, the most significant risk was a learning 'laziness' as students would simply look at what they had written down. Today, students can use external technological memory, as knowledge can be found at any time on the Internet, always at hand via extremely powerful pocket computers in the form of smartphones.

With that in mind, Higher Education Institution (HEI) stakeholders have begun to question the utility of the most basic skills, such as reading and writing. Over the past decade, the debate has been about whether notes taken by hand or on a computer are more effective. After all, the literature shows that writing down concepts enhances learning. Today, the question has evolved to include AI-generated options: Who is doing the writing? The student passively awaits a response with no need to write more than an initial prompt.

In some cases, students copy/paste the task or the article into an AI-generative tool and receive the output without any writing at all. Thus, if students can simply put a prompt into a tool and receive an automatic response, is there still a place for writing in HEIs? To the untrained eye, AI-generated text is hard to detect, as it can mimic human language styles quite naturally. With the technology improving at a fast pace, will students still need writing skills? Will HEI faculty still need to teach them?
In this paper, we focus on the role of writing in the 21st century. We surveyed faculty and students in HEIs in Switzerland.

Based on 366 responses, we address the following two research questions:
RQ1: What are motivational factors for writing?
RQ2: Which writing form (digital or on paper) is the most effective for learning in Higher Education?

When analyzing the results, we found that both students and faculty still enjoy writing, albeit on a keyboard for the students and on paper for the faculty. We have used the results to create a list of recommendations to motivate students and faculty to engage with more written tasks in the future. Writing need not become a task of the past; instead, it should be revamped, reworked, and reinvented for the next generation. We are convinced that writing tasks may differ from the past, but they will always have their place in HEIs.

Keywords:

Writing, Generative AI tools, Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), students and faculty, business schools.