A new demographic of working-professional students is seeking advanced degrees online. These students are older and busy. They might be – as is the case for the advanced master of public health online (AMPH) at the Mailman School of Public Health – medical doctors, laboratory research assistants and other healthcare-related professionals, with limited scope to increase their study workload.
This presents a challenge around the best way to bring new technology, such as generative AI, into graduate courses. Even though GenAI tools, like ChatGPT and DeepSeek, have been used in public health to train healthcare workers, engage the public about vaccinations, and assess epidemiological data to predict outbreaks, there is little evidence on how to effectively integrate GenAI tools within online graduate public health education. Our students need more experience using these tools – and so we as educators need to understand how to integrate technology to help them, without taking more of their time. This requires collecting data on their experiences.
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Given the diverse enrolment of our students and their varied experiences of using technology, I had to consider how ChatGPT could be effectively integrated into an AMPH course. Thus, I added AI into an activity at the end of a writing assignment, an approach that is easily replicable. In this context, a small-scale integration means technology was incorporated in a limited way in order to support student learning.
The key elements of my approach were using the SAMR framework and surveying students to understand how they found using ChatGPT in their writing work. It was important to connect the AI tool to the intended learning outcomes. The ability to interpret information in multiple formats, especially factual information, is essential to our AMPH students, who are professionals navigating the healthcare technology landscape.
Find a technology integration framework
To guide the integration of ChatGPT within the Determinants of Health (DOH) course, I used the SAMR model, a popular framework used to evaluate technology integration in educational settings. The acronym – substitution, augmentation, modification and redefinition – looks at technology through a transformational or enhancement lens. The technology incorporated either completely changes how students learn (substitution and augmentation are grouped as “transformation”) or elevates how students learn (modification and redefinition are “enhancement”). I highly recommend this framework for faculty who are new to technology integration.
The redefinition level applied to this project because I enhanced a writing assignment with ChatGPT, but didn’t change it entirely. The DOH course requires students to complete three writing assignments, and at the conclusion of each, students had to ask ChatGPT to create an essay on their topic and then write a paragraph reflecting on their experience, comparing their essay with ChatGPT’s output. While students are familiar with the process of writing and citing academic sources, this ChatGPT activity required them to reflect on how evidence-based information, such as academic articles, is needed to write and communicate about public health topics. Students had to evaluate the content of ChatGPT’s output.
Collect data to improve integration
In order to measure how effective the integration of ChatGPT was, students were also asked to fill out a mid-semester survey through our learning management system. AMPH students completed an anonymous survey after their first assignment and were asked two open-ended questions:
- What went well with using ChatGPT for Writing Assignment #1?
What would you like to see changed about the use of ChatGPT for Writing Assignment #1?
Surveys provide formative feedback that can be used to refine GenAI integration. Based on our survey, it went smoothly. The students, who had no previous experience with ChatGPT, appreciated the opportunity to use it within the course. They understood how to use ChatGPT to identify missing information from their work, recognise their own biases about their assignment topic, and understand that ChatGPT’s citations are not reliable.
These outcomes reflect the effective integration of ChatGPT into the writing assignments; students did not feel this additional task was a waste of time and they even proposed additional ideas for how to use ChatGPT for their academic work.
Prepare students to use emerging technologies in the workplace
A structured approach to integrating ChatGPT into our AMPH courses aligns with our students’ needs. Our programme assessed the time our students had to complete work outside class time in order to consider whether a small ChatGPT task would exceed the study time students have available.
In summary, understanding the demographics of your learners will help you tailor ChatGPT integration. Then, applying a technology integration framework will provide a structure for incorporating ChatGPT into your course. Finally, surveying student experiences with ChatGPT will help improve future integration. Even in this experimental stage, integrating ChatGPT will help students be more prepared to handle emerging technology in their public health workplaces.
Jonathan Zaccarini is a digital learning support specialist in the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University.
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