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Perspectives from students using ChatGPT in a large enrollment fully online GIS Course

December 17, 2024
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The GEOG 150 Digital Earth course introduces students to the principles and practice of geographic information science (GIS) for spatial data management and analysis. The course is taught by Dr. Shiv Balram and attracts between 250-300 students in recent offerings. It is delivered fully online with content lectures, practical data-oriented computer labs and a diverse range of application examples. Students engage with all areas of GIS with the course concepts organized as show below to transform learners into functional spatial data analysts.

In the course, students are encouraged to use ChatGPT in an ethical way and with certain restrictions:

  1. Cannot be used to fully complete an assignment
  2. Hallucinations must be addressed, and
  3. Biases must be identified.

Anonymous feedback from 259 of 293 students in the Fall 2024 offering of the course paint an evolving picture of how the ChatGPT technology is being used for learning as well as the challenges and opportunities being encountered.

ChatGPT Context

Before taking the course, 89% of the students used the free version of ChatGPT and the remainder using the paid version. In terms of whether ChatGPT can perform tasks assigned to it, 41% agreed and 42% reported being neutral.

While 58% reported using it because it was free, 60% are willing to take out a paid subscription to access more services. This points to a more sophisticated ChatGPT end user in the long term.

The top three frequency of usage reported were:

  • irregular (36%), 
  • multiple times per week (18%), 
  • and once per week (17%).

ChatGPT Affordances

Students reported using ChatGPT across multiple contexts in the course.

They agreed the technology was useful to:

  • help understand GIS concepts in general (52%)
  • understand complex concepts from the lectures (59%)
  • summarize complex text (51%), and
  • to prepare for exams by generating sample questions and study materials (44%). 

Interestingly, students also agreed that ChatGPT is not useful to help find specific answers to questions (51%), develop responses to written questions (52%) and using good prompts to complete the entire assignment (70%).

This ChatGPT usage pattern in the course is promising for learning and academic integrity. The reason may be due to the repeated emphasis each week of best practice ethical principles.

ChatGPT Concerns

Students reported being concerned about their over-reliance on the technology becoming counter productive to critical thinking (45%). But while 57% are concerned about the quality of the ChatGPT outputs, 38% agree they are excited to be using the technology for learning and research as well as to seek out new ways to use ChatGPT (36%).

At an institutional level, students were concerned about violating academic policies (63%) and academic standards in the discipline (64%). However, when asked about their concerns whether using ChatGPT can get them accused of plagiarism, 52% agreed while 33% were undecided.

This points to a clear need for decisive guiding policies at all levels of the learning environment.

Student Perspectives

For students recommendations on how to integrate ChatGPT into the course, the responses were creative and include:

  1. Asking ChatGPT to solve a GIS problem and then critiquing the output to produce a higher quality understanding,
  2. Train ChatGPT to recognize cognitive patterns in the course, and
  3. Develop materials to teach students how to better use ChatGPT.

In response to the downside of integrating ChatGPT into the course, the overwhelming responses were:

  1. Erosion of critical thinking and real learning, 
  2. Long term technology dependency and addiction, and 
  3. Homogenous thinking conditioned by the technology.

These snapshots from the GEOG 150 Digital Earth course provide a window into the evolving affordances, concerns and students perspectives about ChatGPT. They provide valuable guidance on transforming learning and teaching to be more accessible, engaging and relevant.

GEOG 150 is a course taught by Dr. Shivanand Balram in the Geography Department at SFU and focuses on the application of geographic information techniques for analysis and problem-solving in multiple contexts. Check out our courses for more.

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