{"id":8881,"date":"2025-07-07T08:00:23","date_gmt":"2025-07-07T13:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.everylearnereverywhere.org\/?p=8881"},"modified":"2025-07-07T08:47:03","modified_gmt":"2025-07-07T13:47:03","slug":"lessons-learned-from-incorporating-ai-into-a-pharmacy-ethics-course","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.everylearnereverywhere.org\/es\/blog\/lessons-learned-from-incorporating-ai-into-a-pharmacy-ethics-course\/","title":{"rendered":"Lessons Learned From Incorporating AI Into a Pharmacy Ethics Course"},"content":{"rendered":"

One challenge of incorporating AI into college courses is helping students understand that while AI has its uses, they should be careful about the kinds of work they hand over to it. It may be \u201cintelligent\u201d about some tasks \u2014 summarizing and reporting, for example \u2014 but certainly not all tasks. Happily, I am discovering that students can learn to make that critical distinction and even decide to forgo using AI in some cases. However, students may need multiple opportunities to learn these lessons.<\/p>\n

In an earlier article<\/a>, I wrote about my experience incorporating generative AI into the Pharmacy Ethics course I teach at the University of Mississippi School of Pharmacy. I argued that educators should be less worried about students offloading the research and summary parts of college work and more worried about them offloading the work of forming personal opinions. I explained how in my assignments, which permit the use of AI (as if I could stop it anyway), students struggled to situate their own opinion alongside AI outputs or to use those outputs as a platform for developing their own ideas.<\/p>\n

That was at the transition from the fall 2024 term to spring 2025, and I wrote that I planned to make adjustments to my course to account for this problem. Could I design assignments so that AI played a supportive role in the way students develop and express individual opinions on ethical questions?<\/p>\n

The spring 2025 term recently finished and, while I am glad to say I am somewhat further down the road in incorporating AI, I will certainly still need to make adjustments the next time I teach the course.<\/p>\n

Revising assignments that use AI<\/h2>\n

In this self-paced online course, students consider ethical questions \u2014 the interplay of confidentiality, choice, consent, community, rights, safety, and law \u2014 that will be important to them when they graduate and are working as pharmacists. They learn to examine these questions through frameworks like the Belmont Report<\/a> from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Pharmacist\u2019s Oath<\/a>. They develop command of these frameworks by reading and writing about topics like end-of-life care, reproductive health, and gender-affirming care.<\/p>\n

A multi-part writing activity typically begins with information gathering, like understanding how local elected representatives have explained their votes on healthcare issues, and AI is often helpful for that. Oftentimes elected officials do not make formal statements on pending legislation or on their voting record. AI helps students gather data on elected official\u2019s platforms or speeches to determine how they might justify a particular vote on a healthcare issue.<\/p>\n

Similarly, as I wrote in the earlier article, I use AI myself to develop many of the summaries of legislation and court cases on these topics, and, of course, I acknowledge my use of AI and provide citations to verify the AI output.<\/p>\n

The second part of the assignments often ask students to write an opinion about a challenging problem arising from these topics and to discuss that opinion in the context of the ethical frameworks we are learning about. For example, in a unit with readings about quality-of-life questions, I ask students to discuss if they would rather have physical or cognitive limitations and to analyse their perspective through an ethical framework such as the three ways to value human life (human life is the supreme value, the sanctity or inviolability of life approach, and instrumentality or quality of life approach).<\/p>\n

I wouldn\u2019t think AI would be needed or even helpful to answer a question that begins \u201cWould you rather \u2026 \u201d or \u201cDo you think \u2026\u201d Educators will recognize those as the kinds of questions where we don\u2019t have a right answer in mind. The point of the exercise is to demonstrate the ability to work through a challenging problem. It seems obvious to me that no AI product has the context to summarize a personal opinion before a student expresses it themself, especially on a topic they only recently learned about.<\/p>\n

But AI has become the first place many students turn when they begin an assignment, and, as I explained in the earlier article, I let students know they can use AI to assist them, but they need to include a statement that they used it. Two results of this troubled me.<\/p>\n

First, students often failed to include the acknowledgement. It was as if an invisible barrier kept them from \u201cadmitting\u201d to doing something they were not prevented from doing.<\/p>\n

Second, their opinion was often simply the output of the AI. Many would paste the \u201cWould you rather \u2026\u201d or \u201cDo you think \u2026\u201d question into the query box and turn in the output as their answer. Those students often had nothing or very little of their own to add beyond agreeing with the \u201copinion\u201d AI had produced.<\/p>\n

(As a matter of interest, 95 percent of the time, this was from ChatGPT.)<\/p>\n