Using AI as a teaching partner: enhancing critical thinking and digital literacy in microbiology

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping higher education, offering both opportunities and challenges for teaching and learning. As generative AI tools become increasingly accessible, instructors must balance the benefits of enhanced productivity with the responsibility to teach students how to engage with these tools critically and ethically. In our 200-level Introduction to Microbiology course, we developed a series of scaffolded activities to promote digital literacy, responsible AI use, and critical evaluation of AI-generated content. Structured course activities allowed students to practice effective prompting, evaluate AI-created summaries, and identify inaccuracies and false references. Ultimately, this allowed students to generate and critique their own AI-assisted unit summaries for their course learning portfolios. Informal feedback from 100 students revealed that two-thirds of students felt the activities clarified the benefits and pitfalls of AI, while about half reported learning new information about the technology. The feedback emphasized that the assignments revealed AI's limitations and reinforced the need to verify its outputs. The activities also aligned with broader curricular goals around digital literacy and critical thinking. Overall, integrating structured AI-focused activities can empower students to apply AI responsibly, but with a critical lens of its limitations.