The rise of GenAI: Teachers’ voices on collaborative feedback delivery

Since the prevalent use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), its role in academic settings has gained increasing discussion. Many scholars hold the view that teachers possess unique and irreplaceable qualities that are crucial to education and highlight the importance of exploring AI and teacher collaboration (e.g. Chan & Tsi, 2024). However, in the context of enhancing students’ disciplinary writing, it remains an open question what distinctive feedback GenAI and human teachers can each deliver and how they can complement each other to enhance students’ learning outcomes. This study employs empirical data from focus-group interviews and marking journals to investigate how teachers and GenAI co-construct feedback using an interactive AI-assisted platform designed for cross disciplinary writing. The result suggests that GenAI and human educators possess complementary strengths; GenAI excels in providing timely, sentence-level, and form-focused feedback, while teachers bring critical contextual understanding and genre-specific essay-level insights to students. The findings also identify specific areas where GenAI and human teachers may have limitations. Impact on how a synergistic approach can bring the optimal educational outcomes arise from the collaboration between GenAI and teachers is discussed. This research contributes to the ongoing conversation on the future of feedback delivery in an AI-driven world.