Ed Tech for Grad School: Doing More with Less
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Grad students, though they do a lot of writing (and perhaps because they do), are not famous for being good writers. But perhaps AI is changing the game.
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Grad students are sometimes an overlooked community on college campuses. They’re a smaller group than undergraduates, of course, and they have a different relationship to the university, whose broad cultural mandate is to educate the future citizens of the world. They have one foot in both camps — student and teacher. And we were curious, How do grad students at UIC use educational technology? Are they forward thinking, embracing the newest tools as fast as they come out? Or has their training made them skeptical of new tools?
Before you keep reading, if you’re a grad student at UIC and you have thoughts about this, we would love to hear from you. Email LTS’s learning design specialist, James Sharpe, and set up a time to get some coffee!
Questions
- What tools or apps do you rely on to manage your schedule, track tasks, or stay organized? How do they help you?
- Are there any tools you’ve found particularly helpful for balancing coursework, research, and other responsibilities? Why?
- What tools or platforms do you use to find and organize research materials (e.g., journal articles, books)? How do they improve your workflow?
- Which writing tools (like Grammarly or AI tools) do you use, and how do they support your writing process?
- What’s one tool or app you think every grad student should know about, and why?
- Have you ever been disappointed by a tool? What didn’t work for you, and what would have made it better?
It’s A Spectrum
One of the first things we noticed was that grad students seem to fall along a spectrum in their uptake of ed tech. Some prefer the old school mindset — pen, paper, a quiet library and as much time as the world can give them. Others say hey, why sweat the repetitive stuff? If a system of levers and pulleys can make my bibliography for me, show me the schematics.
It’s probably not too surprising that this spectrum exists. And it’s also not surprising that ed tech differs depending on the kind of grad work you do. Humanities grad students are, perhaps, a little more inclined toward pen, paper, and library. (I confess — as one myself, I certainly lean this way). STEM grad students, on the other hand, may lean more favorably toward adopting new tools for making life easier. After all, there’s a chance they’re making the tools themselves.
Insights
So how do grad students manage their busy lives? Regardless of the way a grad student leans, it looks like almost all of us are combining digital and analog tools to make it through our programs. The responses we received from informants painted a picture of grad students constantly experimenting with how to do more with less — becoming, as modern parlance has it, “super users,” whether that means super users of AI or just journals.
Our engineering grad student explained, for example, that they use a website (gizmoa.com) to create schedules for their work, then supplement that by “mainly relying on alarms and the Notes app on my phone for keeping track of tasks.”
Our education grad student reported using Excel to construct broad schedule outlines, then using a physical journal to fill in the details. Asked about what tool they find especially helpful, they commented “I use my paper planner religiously; it helps me to keep track of everything I need to get done in school and at home.”
Grad students do a lot of writing, obviously, and one of the biggest tasks they face is mastering the art of citation management. On this point, my experience can provide a kind of baseline for comparison. Throughout my master’s degree (in English) I relied on a popular citation management application, Zotero, to keep track of my projects. As I prepared my first publication, however, my thesis supervisor advised me against it on the grounds that academic journals (in the humanities) tend to have their own stylistic requirements, often just slightly different from the familiar formats of the Chicago Manual of Style or the Modern Language Association’s format. Instead of using a software that automatically formats things, then going back in and revising any residual errors (which turns out to be surprisingly time consuming), she recommended I just practice compiling bibliographies as I go in the style of the journal I aimed at publishing with. I did, and I never looked back.
I seem to be in the minority, though. Our education grad student uses Zotero “to organize my research materials,” recording their reading notes in the app as they go and tagging articles to map relations between multiple sources. They also use a tool called Coggle to create mind maps during the “ideation phase of my research.”
Our engineering grad student uses a program tailored to STEM’s academic conventions: “I use Overleaf for writing my engineering reports in IEEE format. It has a feature that helps keep track of citations by adding specific sections for each reference.” Outside of engineering reports, they use Google Drive to organize their libraries of files, code, and other resources.
Grad students, though they do a lot of writing (and perhaps because they do), are not famous for being good writers. But perhaps AI is changing the game. Our engineering informant reported using ChatGPT to help with the tone of their writing (STEM writing, of course, can sometimes seem “dry”). He asks the AI questions like “How can I make this sentence more friendly or welcoming?”
Grammarly, which UIC provides to students for free, can also be used for this kind of task, and our education informant remarked that Grammarly in particular “has actually helped remind me of certain prescriptive grammar/punctuation rules I’ve forgotten, like when to use a comma to combine independent clauses, or when to use which vs. that as pronouns. I’ve found that after reviewing those mistakes through Grammarly enough times, I’ve actually learned when to use what and don’t find those mistakes popping up as often anymore!”
I seem to be the antiquarian again, but I am an English PhD student, so that’s not so surprising. I still believe in the old religion, as it were, whose gospel was simply “if you want to write better, read better writing.” The rules of grammar, so far as I understand, are ultimately flexible, and there is much more to learn about how to write good sentences from the store of good sentences, never more conveniently available than today, than in an algorithmic mechanization of a certain snapshot of grammatical correctness. ChatGPT, how do I make this paragraph sound less stuffy?
Conclusions — “More Research Is Currently Needed”
This is the cliché about research; it always concludes with the need for more research. We would love to hear about how grad students feel about AI in higher education, but besides ChatGPT and Grammarly for writing help, it doesn’t look like our first round of interlocutors had much need of them. In fact, it looks like our grad school informants were more tuned into highly specialized applications that met highly specific needs.
The phrase “information overload” is fifty years old now, and today it seems like it’s not just information that there’s “too much of.” There are a million tools out there to experiment with, and who has the time to try them all? But that’s just one more reason for us to keep talking to students and hearing about what works and what doesn’t.