Implementing Open Educational Resources (OERs) and Artificial Intelligence at a higher education level in an Engineering ESP course

Enfoque

Higher education institutions have been searching for online solutions to aid both learners and lecturers, hence, the Internet has become a natural and inherent way to spread knowledge. Within this current widespread technological environment, Open Educational Resources (OERs)  and Artificial Intelligence (AI) softwares have emerged as new ways of learning, presenting an enormous impact in educational areas. In fact, they can boost pupils’ engagement, digital media employment, collaboration, bottom-up practices and a learner-teacher approach where pupils are both the creators and the consumers of the learning content.The main objective of this study is to create an innovative teaching plan about industrial design engineering contents addressed to 1st year undergraduate students who have to do a final written task linked to drawings by using AI (i.e. “Chat-GPT” or “Google Bard”). Another objective is to promote peer-work and critical thinking by the completion of discussion activities in pairs or in groups. Concerning the methodology, by employing OERs such as Padlet, Mentimeter, Google Drive and the moodle version of the university virtual classroom will facilitate students’ learning process and will enable them to gain virtual and technological skills as well as develop team-building and communicative skills by interacting with their classmates with digital tools. The sample consists of an innovative didactic plan aiming to study a unit of the course where 35 students from a public university will learn technical English as well as other skills such as collaborative learning, reading comprehension, grammar, listening comprehension and writing performance. A task divided in a pre-task (a mentimeter activity); a main task, where students will have to create groups of three/four people and work on an activity using a Padlet as well as discussing what drawings they would need to produce for manufacturing and installing. The students would have to discuss and create a response to this task and post it through the use of the padlet resource. Afterwards, each group would defend their answer and subsequently, the teacher would provide feedback through the Virtual Classroom and would discuss all the alternatives with the students. With regard to the post tasks, students will have to undertake a collaborative task by gathering the response to this task and the feedback given by the teacher to write an ultimate piece of writing. For doing so, they will use Google docs from Google Drive as well as the assistance from Artificial Intelligence tools such as Google Bard or Chat-GPT from AI to take some ideas to compose their final piece of writing. Results of the implementation of OERs and AI on these tasks completion supported through the use of technological and digital resources have proven to enhance students’ motivation and creativity. This innovative teaching plan will allow educators to prove that using AI, specially Chat-GPT and Google Bard as well as OERs as Mentimeter, Padlet and Google Drive within the contents of a subject can foster and increase students’ writing skills, creativity, and digital and technological skills.