Back to Basics: teaching digital reading and the age of AI
By Jon Chandler (UCL) and Jamie Wood (University of Lincoln)
Much of the debate about generative AI in higher education has focused on the “death of the essay” and whether machines will make independent research and deep reading redundant. These concerns are particularly strong in the Humanities and Social Sciences, where essay writing has long been a central part of the learning process. But the real issue is not that AI has destroyed traditional forms of learning; it’s that we already lacked robust ways to teach students how to read and write effectively in digital spaces.
Shortly before ChatGPT entered public consciousness in late 2022, we completed a QAA-funded project, Active Online Reading (AOR), that explored how students read online for their studies and how universities supported them to do so. We wanted to find out what students did when reading online and what pedagogies worked. We discovered that student practice varied greatly, that many struggled with reading online and that approaches to teaching students to read digitally in online spaces were not particularly well developed.
Generative AI only intensifies these challenges. It increasingly mediates students’ encounters with texts by outsourcing processes of summarisation, annotation, and note-taking which are crucial stages of the “reading into writing” process. If students rely on AI to “read” for them, how can we assess genuine comprehension or critical engagement? As we argued in AOR, strategies such as collaborative annotation and structured scaffolding of digital reading can help develop students’ skills as online readers. These approaches foreground transparency, reflection, and peer interaction, which are the very qualities we need to develop among our students if they are to engage critically with AI.
Our AOR research also identified several worrying disjunctions.
- Academics recognised that online reading is vital for learning within their discipline, but few of them devoted much time to helping students learn how to do it effectively.
- Support was available, but it tended to sit within study skills or library teams, often disconnected from core degree programmes.
- Students reported that the move to university was accompanied by often unexpected difficulty in reading, but this was rarely acknowledged or addressed in transition modules.
We recommended closer collaboration between academics and skills development and library teams, more attention to transition, in particular a greater understanding of how students are taught to read before they arrive at university, and more sustained thinking about the specific skills that are necessary for reading online. This more integrated approach should, we believe, be adopted when we think about AI. Rather than focusing solely on preventing misuse, we should ask: Why do students turn to AI? How do they use it? What works and what doesn’t? And what specific skills do the need to use is more critically?
Our research that we will be presenting at ALT-C 2025 suggests that students tend to over-rate their own skills as AI users while judging their peers as ineffective and uncritical. This suggests a potential mismatch between perception and practice, which can only be addressed by careful and transparent teaching.The core skills that degrees in the Humanities and Social Sciences have long cultivated – analytical thinking, deep reading, independent research, critical reflection, and problem-solving – remain crucial to informed engagement with (or disengagement from) AI. Neglecting these basics potentially undermines students’ ability to engage productively with a whole host of digital tools, of which generative AI is just the most prominent and recent example. The frameworks for cultivating reading practices that we identified in AOR are both human-centred and digitally literate, and can potentially help students navigate a world where reading is increasingly mediated by machines, but still fundamentally a social and intellectual act.
ALT’s Annual Conference is one of the UK’s largest conferences for learning technology and digital education professionals. The conference provides a valuable and practical forum for practitioners, researchers, managers and policy-makers from education and industry to solve problems, explore, reflect, influence and learn.
ALTC25 will take place in Glasgow on 23 and 24 October 2025. Register closes 20 October 2025.