Reimagining Literature Evaluation Pedagogy Through AI-Generated Podcasts: Pharmacy Students' Perspectives and Critical Appraisal

This study explores pharmacy students' perspectives on applying their newly formed literature evaluation skills to evaluate AI-generated podcasts. The podcasts were short overviews of the articles assigned to the students to present to facilitators. Academic staff used each study article to generate podcasts with an AI platform. Students listened to an AI-generated podcast on their assigned article following a skills assessment and provided an appraisal of the information. Academic staff prompted them to evaluate the podcast for accuracy, misleading and omitted information, and their desire to utilize an AI podcast for their learning in the future. Qualitative evaluation of the students' responses was performed using coding of "agreement, disagreement, or neutral" by three academics. If a student did not address a prompt on the discussion board, other components of their response were still considered. In total, 230 responses were evaluated, and most students agreed that the podcast was accurate (169/230, 73%), not misleading (125/217, 58%), but neglected to include important information (168/218, 77%). Most students (124/227, 55%) agreed that they would use the AI-generated tool for literature evaluation in the future; however, students who disagreed with future use cited its oversimplification and generality. This educational activity required students to engage with an AI-generated podcast after completing a literature evaluation and to evaluate its effectiveness as an adjunctive learning modality.