Abstract:

Forward College's AI Hub represents a comprehensive approach to managing student-AI interactions in higher education, developed through two years of empirical action research. The initiative began in April 2023 when the college provided ChatGPT+ licenses to students preparing for final examinations, requesting anonymized logs to understand authentic usage patterns. This exploratory approach revealed strong student appetite for AI assistance, prompting development of formal literacy programs through interactive workshops covering fundamentals and prompt engineering.

Critically, students co-created their own AI usage manuals tailored to specific subjects through participatory design. This approach helped students understand AI engagement at different cognitive levels, from basic recall to complex creative tasks, emphasizing metacognition over shortcuts.

Since 2025, the AI Hub platform has evolved into a sophisticated system addressing research findings. Following unsuccessful attempts at restrictive "Socratic chatbot" approaches that frustrated students, the team pivoted toward supporting reflective, intentional engagement while preserving student autonomy. The platform now offers three core features: access to diverse language models from Grok to Claude, privacy-first individual accounts, and a reflective dashboard enabling students to monitor their cognitive offloading patterns.

The dashboard's centerpiece provides detailed insights into AI engagement patterns, allowing students to observe prompt quality evolution and track cognitive offloading categorized according to research-derived taxonomy. Using automated GPT-5-mini classification, the system analyzes each exchange for prompting quality, learning task types, and offloading levels. Crucially, data is presented transparently without judgment, recognizing different learning contexts may warrant different strategies.

Current research focuses on longitudinal studies examining whether reflective dashboards promote more responsible AI use and sophisticated prompting strategies, while investigating correlations between usage patterns and learning outcomes across student populations.

Keywords:

AI Literacy, Reflective Practice, Action Research, Self-Directed Learning.