Postgraduate students' voices on leveraging Grammarly as an AI-paraphrasing tool in academic writing

Abstract

The hype around the generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tool, ChatGPT3.5 and recently an updated version of ChatGPT4.0 for generated text, whereby Grammarly for paraphrasing, had exponentially changed the landscape of artificial intelligence (AI) in teacher education. How can lecturers and students leverage the hype created by GenAI tools since it launched two years ago? Grammarly as a paraphrasing AI tool has highlighted the need to investigate this phenomenon in an open distance e-learning context. This prompted an investigation of the views of postgraduate students about leveraging Grammarly as a specific AI paraphrasing tool for academic writing in an online course. An exploratory mixed methods design study foregrounds the pragmatic perspective study. A sample of 34 respondents and six participants were selected for the semi-structured online interviews. Respondents completed the highly reliable self-designed online questionnaire, Grammarly survey (α < .89). Semi-structured interviews were conducted online in Microsoft Teams. The online interviews were recorded, transcribed, and downloaded. To analyse the data, a generative AI-qualitative software, NVivo 14 was employed, data were imported, and the themes were generated as guided by the NVivo thematic analysis process. To ensure the trustworthiness of the data sets and the identified themes, the participation validation process was used as a measure of the credibility of the data. Participants echoed the sentiments about the usefulness of generative AI tools to promote academic writing, creative design, and increasing communication prompts in enriching teaching and learning experiences. An awareness of and ethical considerations for using Grammarly and other generative AI tools are important considerations before adopting paraphrasing tools.