Brahm Marjadi (Western Sydney University)
I am thinking about creating an AI-generated family for each student – or each small group of students, depending on the ease of doing this – which my students must ‘look after’ for at least one semester. SoM student cohort size is about 155, and they are divided into 10 groups; but we can go for 20 families to make the small groups more manageable.
My thinking is to give students a pre-defined family, randomly assigned out of a stack of families with different characteristics (ethnicity, age, family structure, socio-economic status, educational attainment, health literacy, English proficiency, urban vs rural, and so on). Then, from time to time I will instruct the students to create/generate an illness or life event (such as puberty, bullying, divorce) for one member of the family. I want the students to explore (1) the impact of that illness or life event to all members of the family, and (2) what community-based service could provide support, if needed. They can engage with generative AI for these tasks, but I will train them to be critical of the information/advice they are getting. Every 2-3 weeks I will ask students to either follow up on their family or to create a new illness or life event. At the end of the semester, I will run a tutorial where students orally share and reflect on their journey with their entrusted family, as well as their learning journey in using generative AI. At this stage I will not make this an assessable task.