Students Views of Grammarly as a GenAI tool for academic writing in an ODeL course

Abstract

Within the past two years, GenAI-based conversational large language models and other chatbots have created tremendous hype and have grown exponentially. GenAI tools have highlighted the need to investigate this phenomenon in different contexts. This prompted an investigation of the views of student teachers about leveraging of Grammarly as a GenAI tool for academic writing in an online course. An exploratory qualitative design study foregrounds the constructivist-interpretative perspective study. A sampled eight participants for the online interviews were selected. The semi-structured interviews were conducted online in Microsoft Teams. The interviews were recorded, transcribed and downloaded. A manual approach was employed, and the themes were identified as guided by the thematic analysis process. To ensure the trustworthiness of the data sets and the identified themes, the participation validation process was used as a measure of the credibility of the data. Participants echoed the sentiments of the usefulness of the generative AI tool to promote academic writing and increasing communication prompts in enriching teaching and learning experiences.

Presenters

Micheal M Van Wyk
Professor, Curriculum and Instructional Studies, University of South Africa, Gauteng, South Africa

Details

Presentation Type

Paper Presentation in a Themed Session

Theme

2025 Special Focus—Learning from Artificial Intelligence: Pedagogical Futures and Transformative Possibilities

KEYWORDS

Academic writing, Artificial intelligence, Constructivist-interpretative Perspective, Qualitative Exploratory Design