AI and peer reviews in higher education: students’ multimodal views on benefits, differences and limitations

Abstract

Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, educational researchers and practitioners have sought to understand the ways in which these new generative AI technologies might influence education. This article describes one such effort. The focus of the investigation was chatbots responding from large language models to the review of open-ended student work. Specifically, the authors examined university students’ multimodal views of the benefits and limitations of AI reviews as compared to human feedback. The participants were postgraduate students in a public American university. The students’ opinions of their experiences with both types of reviews were expressed linguistically, visually and gesturally, and they were submitted to discursive and socio-semiotic analyses. The results revealed a preference for human reviews. Nevertheless, the participants also identified several benefits for AI feedback, as well as ways in which it had complemented human reviews, overwhelmingly welcoming its addition as part of their educational experience.