Exploring the Effects of "AI-Generated" Discussion Summaries on Learners' Engagement in Online Discussions

Discussion summaries have been considered important for promoting peer interactions in online discussion forums. However, most previous research only focused on student-generated summaries and their impact on learners in the summarizing roles. Even though recent artificial intelligence (AI) progress has demonstrated the possibility of generating decent forum post summaries, little attention has been paid to the educational implications of such auto-generated forum post summaries. To further understand the perceptions and reactions of students to AI-generated forum summaries, this research used a Wizard of Oz approach to collect students’ online discussion forum log data with and without the “AI-generated” summaries. The results indicated that making an auto-generated summary available for students might not necessarily boost their interactions and engagements, especially for inactive students. However, the summary could serve as a reminder for students to participate in the discussion forum in a timely manner. Future research is needed to investigate whether the timing of providing an auto-generated summary might influence its impact. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.