Test your knowledge on a topic. Have a discussion on new concepts to improve your understanding. Explore other perspectives of a current issue. Develop your ideas by build from other ideas. With learning prompts, genAI can take the role of a study buddy for you.
When used appropriately, genAI tools can perform similar tasks to a human “study buddy”. This means if you know how to prompt genAI to get what you need, these tools can help you on your learning journey. Click through the slides below to see some examples of how genAI can role play scenarios to help you learn.
There are many different approaches you can take to learn something new. genAI can create resources or a scenario which facilitates different approaches to creating understanding and building knowledge.
Click on the plus (+) icons to learn more about how these genAI prompts can help you build your initial understanding on a topic.
A language-based generative AI, such as ChatGPT, can enhance your learning by linking new concepts with your existing knowledge. It does this by providing contextually relevant responses, understanding input text, and considering the conversation context. Through repeated interactions, the tool helps you make connections, fostering a more comprehensive understanding of the subject.
These prompts instruct the AI, acting as a student, to draw connections between new concepts and prior knowledge on specified topics. The guidance includes instructions on how to structure and present the information.
This process is valuable for pre-lecture preparation and similar situations where understanding the relationship between new and existing knowledge is crucial. If more clarification is needed, follow-up prompts can be used to gather additional information in the ongoing conversation.
In education, analogies function as a valuable tool, helping you to comprehend complex ideas by linking them to familiar concepts. This approach is beneficial for lecture preparation and understanding how new ideas relate to existing knowledge. Generative AI has the capability to create relevant and insightful analogies, contributing to an enhanced understanding and promote active learning.
This prompt instructs the AI to act as a student connecting new concepts with prior knowledge using creative analogies. For clarification or more information, follow-up prompts can seek elaboration on specific aspects or delve into related subtopics. It's crucial to note that the analogies generated may be vague or overly broad, so consider them as a starting point for deeper understanding rather than relying solely on them.
Specific generative AI tools can enhance your content augmentation by accessing the live internet, generating perspectives and connections related to current events. They also facilitate connecting theoretical concepts to real-world examples, enabling practical application and insights.
The prompt below is specifically for the use of internet-connected generative AI models that access real-time information and data from the internet.
This prompt instructs the AI to access real-time internet information for generating responses, a capability found in select generative AI tools. This connectivity allows the AI to provide information fresher than its training data cut-off, making it particularly useful for scenarios like in-class discussions that require up-to-date information. Just as students benefit from linking lecture content to real-world updates, internet-connected AI tools offer users the latest insights, news, developments, and trends.
Some generative AI tools can search the literature and summarise it for you. Tools that do this reliably have access to current academic sources. You should also be aware when using generative AI tools to summarise the literature that you may be required to acknowledge this in your final work.
Elicit.com and Scite.ai are two tools which, when prompted, respond with a summary of a topic including references and links to academic sources. Both can be prompted with general statements, as in the first example below, or with questions, as in the second example:
ChatGPT is an example of a tool that should not be relied on for summaries as its access to academic literature is more not real-time nor comprehensive. However, it will also respond to the above prompts as well as scenario-based ones, and may be a useful starting point if its limitations are kept in mind:
Another way that generative AI can help your learning is by generating a mind map of a topic. This can give you an overview of a topic, including central and sub-concepts, and demonstrate the relationship between them. It’s important to know that ChatGPT and other text-based generative AI cannot create a visual mind map but can create text-based representations that you can convert into a visual representation using other tools.
With further prompting it may also be possible for generative AI to highlight influential thinkers or creators, and their work, within the mind map. As with the above “key experts” prompt, it is important to consider how this is represented and what (or who) might be missing. This will allow you to critically engage better with any inherent biases in what is generated.
Click on the plus (+) icons to reveal information about tasks genAI can do to help you learn, including brainstorming, offering alternate perspectives, structuring a draft and suggesting relevant resources.
This interactive image hotspot provides information on different ways to learn something new. Each hotspot reveals information about tasks genAI can do to help you learn. Hotspots are displayed as plus (+) icons that can be clicked to present the information.
Generative AI can help with brainstorming and identification of areas for focus in your work. Use prompts like the one below and follow up with further prompts to narrow to areas of interest.
Example prompt:
This prompt is designed to use AI in presenting you with alternative perspectives on a given topic. Through a debate with the AI, you can thoroughly examine different viewpoints and considerations associated with the topic, fostering critical thinking and enabling a comprehensive analysis of the subject matter from diverse angles.
Example prompts:
These prompts assigns the AI the role of an expert, instructing it to list alternative perspectives while providing guidance on how to structure and write the completion. With further prompting you can ask generative AI to explain in more depth, provide more examples or expand on ideas.
The purpose is to showcase varied viewpoints on a given statement, offering explanations for each perspective. This is beneficial for exploring different angles and situations where a nuanced understanding of alternative sides of an argument is essential. If additional clarification is needed, subsequent prompts can be used to seek more information.
While generative AI can suggest a structure and starting point for your work, it is usually far preferable to start with your own ideas and understanding, making use of generative AI to help elicit detail and provide you with a draft structure. The following example prompt sets off this process, requiring interaction and answers from you along the way. It aims to draw out knowledge you already have and help you see how it can be structured. Further follow-up questions to the generative AI about the structure can help you refine what it suggests and improve your work as a result.
Example prompt:
genAI tools can be used to focus your attention on experts or key material in an area. Prompting the tool to generate information about who and what to read, look at, or listen to, can be a useful way to cover important aspects of a concept.
Example prompts:
It is important to remember that biases in artificial intelligence may reflect existing social power structures. As a result, you may need to do further work to find voices, views and artefacts from underrepresented groups. Other limitations of generative AI should always be kept in mind when reviewing results.
Key takeaway
Specificity is key! When crafting prompts, remember to provide context and constraints, such as asking for a finite set of results.
Consider
What resources and knowledge will you need to be able to transition from the starting points offered by generative AI to more self-directed learning?