Co-Creating AI-based Seminar Activities

Co-Creating AI-based Seminar Activities: Reflections on Innovation, Inclusion, and AI

By Dr Kerem Öge, Assistant Professor, PAIS, University of Warwick

As someone who researches facial recognition technologies and teaches politics, I’ve long been fascinated by how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping our world and what that means for higher education. In 2023, I proposed a new module at the Department of Politics and International Studies (PAIS) titled Politics of Artificial Intelligence, driven by a simple but powerful idea: what if students and staff didn’t just learn about AI, but learned with it?

This blog is a reflection on my journey to create AI-based seminar activities through a co-creation model. Working alongside my brilliant student partner Leonardo Pignatari Aboutboul, we explored how generative AI can make teaching more inclusive, innovative, and engaging. The results have exceeded our expectations.

Why Co-Creation?

Co-creation means more than consultation. It’s about giving students real agency to shape content, activities, and even assessment design. Inspired by Bovill’s (2020) work on student-staff partnerships, I wanted to explore how co-creation could support more inclusive, interdisciplinary learning especially when tackling complex issues like AI ethics, global justice, and democracy. Rather than delivering a pre-packaged module, we decided to build one collaboratively.

We started by asking: how can we turn AI from a topic into a tool for learning? Together, with Leonardo, we surveyed the literature to identify core intersections between AI and politics, such as ethics, security, automation, democracy, and co-wrote inclusive learning outcomes and lecture content. But the real innovation came in the seminar design.

We created three main AI-based activities:

Fake Interviews with AI

In this activity, students take on researcher roles and interview key stakeholders, such as military leaders, tech CEOs, activists, civilians, all impersonated by ChatGPT in imagined research interviews (see Figure 1 for the prompt). This method boosts their qualitative research skills and ethical awareness of AI use in controversial areas such as security.

‘Engaging, fun, and surprisingly effective for critical thinking,’ one student reflected during a trial.

Figure 1

Political Campaigns

In this activity, students run simulated political campaigns using ChatGPT and DALL·E to produce speeches, slogans, posters, and social media posts. They step into ideologically diverse roles and debate ideas they didn’t necessarily agree with. It is immersive and inclusive. In trials, students wanted to test the boundaries of what AI could (and couldn’t) generate.

Debating with AI

For this activity, students debate ChatGPT on topics such as predictive policing and global AI inequalities. In trials, we configured the AI to take a "technological pessimist" stance and gave students 10 minutes to challenge it, followed by a reflective presentation on the experience (see Figure 2 for the prompt).