This post was written by John Robison, Lecturer in Philosophy. A longer version of this post first appeared in the philosophy blog, the Daily Nous.
A successful humanities course helps students cultivate critical, personally enriching, and widely applicable skills, and it immerses them in the exploration of perspectives, ideas, and modes of thought that can illuminate, challenge, and inform their own outlooks. One major part of making a humanities course successful in that way involves crafting assignments that have students exercise and develop the relevant critical thinking skills.
Historically, the out-of-class essay assignment has been among the best assessments for getting students to most fully exercise and develop those skills. Through the writing process, students can come to better understand a problem. Things that seem obvious or obviously false before spending multiple days thinking and writing suddenly become no longer obvious or obviously false. Students make up their minds on complex problems by grappling with those problems in a rigorous way through writing and editing.
Unfortunately, since ChatGPT became widely available, out-of-class writing assignments keep becoming harder to justify as major assessments in introductory level humanities courses. The intense personal engagement with perspectives and cultural artifacts central to the value of the humanities is more-or-less bypassed when a student heavily outsources to AI the generation and expression of ideas and analysis. As ChatGPT’s ability to write convincing papers goes up, so too does the student temptation to rely on it (and so too does the difficulty of reliably detecting AI). Having experimented very extensively with ChatGPT, I have found that, at least when it comes to introductory level philosophy courses, the material that ChatGPT can produce with 10 minutes of unsophisticated and uninformed prompting rivals much of what we can reasonably expect students to produce on their own, especially given that one can upload readings/course materials and ask ChatGPT to adjust its voice (the reader should try this).
Against this backdrop, I spent lots of time over the AY 2024-2025 winter break familiarizing myself with LockDown Browser (a tool integrated with Canvas that prevents access to and copying/pasting from programs outside of the Canvas assignment) and devising a new assignment model that I have very happily been using this semester.
The assignment is a multi-day in-class writing, where students have access through LockDown Browser to: PDFs of the relevant readings, a personal quotation bank they previously uploaded, an outlining document, and the essay instructions (which students were given at least a week before so they had time to begin thinking through their topic).
On Day 1 in class, students enter a Canvas essay-question quiz through LockDown Browser with links to the resources mentioned above (each of which opens in a new tab that students can access while writing). They spend the class period outlining/writing and hit “submit” at the end of the session.
Between the Day 1 and Day 2 writing sessions, students can read their writing on Canvas (so they can continue thinking about the topic) but are prevented from being able to edit it.
On Day 2, students come to class and pick back up right from where they left off.
A “Day 2” session looks like this:
(One can potentially repeat the process for a third session. I had my 75-minute classes take two days and my 50-minute classes take three days.)
This format gives the students access to everything we want them to have access to while working on their essays and access to nothing else. While it took lots of troubleshooting to develop the setup (among the many complications were that links behave differently depending on the operating system), this new assignment model offers an important new direction worthy of serious exploration. I have found that it preserves so much of what we care about most with out-of-class writing assignments: students can think hard about the topic over an extended period of time, they can make up their minds on some topic through the process of sustained critical reflection, and they experience the benefits and rewards of working on a project, stepping away from it, and returning to it (while thinking hard about the topic in the background all the while). Because the setup documents each day’s work, it invites wonderful opportunities for students to reflect on their writing process (what are they seeing themselves prioritizing each session, and how/why might they change that process?). The opportunities for peer review at different stages are also robust. Something in the direction of this multi-day in-class LockDown Browser essay assignment-type is worthy of serious consideration in intro-level courses.
For those interested, I have made a long (but timestamped) video that illustrates and explains in great detail how to build the assignment structure in Canvas. I hope you find it helpful.
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