In this seventh instalment of our AI-skills seminars, we look at the student thesis / independent project / written assignment, and the challenges that AI presents when students can work without direct supervision. Here our starting point is not AI, but looking carefully at what the writing task is for, what the student is focusing on at a particular instant, and asking ourselves 'what type of writer do we want the student to become?' Once we answer this, then we can turn our attention to how we can guide them there, how we can use AI to support this, or constraints in use to limit problems. Finally we turn our attention to how we change assessment to account for AI: do we simply use communication (where trust is a major part of the equation), or can we start to think about how to restructure tasks and assessments to ensure the students engage in tasks in a way that aids their learning, regardless of whether AI is present or not?

Here is the recording of the seminar given on zoom on June 4th 2026

Here are the PDF slides of the talk.

Here are the papers we specifically mention in the talk. The first asks what sort of writing do we want to develop, and the second looks at how we need to restructure assessments to ensure student compliance whether AI is present or not