Students at Staffordshire University Say Their Course Was Basically Taught by ChatGPT

Students at the University of Staffordshire signed up for a government-funded apprenticeship programme hoping to launch careers in cybersecurity or software engineering. Instead, they say they got a course that was largely taught by AI — and they’re not happy about it.

James and Owen were among 41 students on a coding module last year. They noticed something was off almost immediately. The first class featured a PowerPoint presentation where the lecturer’s voice was an AI voiceover reading the slides. Then they spotted other red flags: American English inconsistently edited to British English, suspicious file names, and generic, surface-level information that occasionally referenced US legislation for no reason.

“If we handed in stuff that was AI-generated, we would be kicked out of the uni, but we’re being taught by an AI,” James said during a confrontation with his lecturer that was recorded as part of the course in October 2024. The video is hard to watch. You can hear the frustration in his voice.

The students didn’t just complain once. They raised concerns with the student representative, then directly to the lecturer. In one lecture, James asked the lecturer to scrap the slides entirely. “I know these slides are AI-generated, I know that everyone in this meeting knows these slides are AI-generated,” he said. “I do not want to be taught by GPT.”

The student representative backed him up, saying they had fed this back and the response was that teachers are allowed to use a variety of tools. Another student chimed in: “There are some useful things in the presentation. But it’s like, 5% is useful nuggets, and a lot is repetition. There is some gold in the bottom of this pan. But presumably we could get the gold ourselves, by asking ChatGPT.”

The lecturer laughed uncomfortably and changed the subject to another tutorial he made — using ChatGPT. “I’ve done this short notice, to be honest,” he said.

This isn’t just a one-off incident. The Guardian reviewed course materials and ran them through two AI detectors — Winston AI and Originality AI. Both flagged a number of assignments and presentations as having “a very high likelihood of being AI-generated.” And here’s the kicker: this year, the university uploaded a policy statement to the course website that appears to justify the use of AI, laying out “a framework for academic professionals leveraging AI automation” in scholarly work and teaching. Meanwhile, the university’s public-facing policies still limit students’ use of AI, threatening academic misconduct for anyone caught outsourcing work to ChatGPT.

So the double standard is clear: students can’t use AI, but lecturers can. And apparently, they can use it badly.

One course video this year has a voiceover that suddenly morphs into a Spanish accent for about 30 seconds before switching back to a British accent. That’s not a teaching tool — that’s a glitch.

James is understandably worried. “I’m midway through my life, my career,” he said. “I don’t feel like I can now just go away and do another career restart. I’m stuck with this course.”

This is happening across the sector. A Department of Education policy paper from August hailed generative AI as having “the power to transform education.” A Jisc survey of over 3,000 higher education teaching staff found nearly a quarter were using AI tools in their teaching. In the US, students post negative reviews about professors who use AI. On Reddit, UK undergraduates complain about lecturers copying and pasting feedback from ChatGPT or using AI-generated images in courses.

Look, I get the pressures on lecturers. Budgets are tight, workloads are heavy, and AI promises to save time. But using it to generate entire course materials that you then read off — or worse, have an AI voiceover read off — is not teaching. It’s outsourcing. And it’s insulting to students who paid for an education, not a ChatGPT session.

One student put it well: “I understand the pressures on lecturers right now that may force them to use AI, it just feels disheartening.”

Disheartening is putting it mildly. These students are trying to change careers, to better their lives. And they’re being taught by a language model that can’t even keep its accent straight.