I would love this to be like an assistant, not the teacher: a voice of the customer perspective of what distance learning students want from an Artificial Intelligence Digital Assistant

TL;DR

This study explores distance learning students' perceptions of an AI digital assistant, highlighting its perceived benefits like real-time support and personalization, while addressing ethical, privacy, and operational concerns for its design.

Contribution

It provides novel insights into students' perceptions of AI assistants in distance learning, combining interviews and peer comparison to inform design considerations.

Findings

Students see AI assistants as useful for real-time help and academic support.

Concerns include ethics, privacy, and potential misuse of AI in education.

Students value personalization and emotional support from AI tools.

Abstract

With the release of Generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, an increasing interest in using Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been observed across domains, including higher education. While emerging statistics show the popularity of using AI amongst undergraduate students, little is yet known about students' perceptions regarding AI including self-reported benefits and concerns from their actual usage, in particular in distance learning contexts. Using a two-step, mixed-methods approach, we examined the perceptions of ten online and distance learning students from diverse disciplines regarding the design of a hypothetical AI Digital Assistant (AIDA). In the first step, we captured students' perceptions via interviews, while the second step supported the triangulation of data by enabling students to share, compare, and contrast perceptions with those of peers. All participants agreed on the usefulness of such an AI tool while studying and reported benefits from using it for real-time assistance and query resolution, support for academic tasks, personalisation and accessibility, together with emotional and social support. Students' concerns related to the ethical and social implications of implementing AIDA, data privacy and data use, operational challenges, academic integrity and misuse, and the future of education. Implications for the design of AI-tailored systems are also discussed.