The Implementation of Generative AI T&L Activities for Media Writing and Media Design Course

The advent of Generative AI (Gen AI) tools in education has prompted instructors to implement these tools into their Teaching & Learning (T&L) activities. In the "Writing for Professional Communication" and "Media Design for Corporate Communication" courses I teach, I worked with students on generating AI output that follows the principles set up by our home university:

Empowering students to use AI.

Being critical when it comes to the role of AI in our society.

Using AI tools in ethical ways and building and maintaining the unicity of human beings in the process.

Therefore, students worked with Gen AI to create text and images for these two courses during the T&L activities. Although, at first, students believed the use of Gen AI would make their work much easier, they soon understood that there was much work to be done. Therefore, students were encouraged to compare the output among themselves, to look for patterns that indicate Gen AI creates the output, to refine their prompts, and to compare the results with those of their colleagues. In the media design course, students used Gen AI software like Midjourney to create visual content for their newsletters. The students described the experience as "eye-opening" as it allowed them to go beyond the classic photos they would normally find online and include them in their projects. One takeaway from this experience of integrating Gen AI into the T&L activities is that students need to work more than before to have their creativity stimulated. They expect Gen AI to provide an output without knowing how that output looks. This disadvantage can be tackled by better explaining how the Gen AI tools work and highlighting how prompt engineering will lead to particular outputs.