Professor Katie Holt incorporates new techniques to improve student understanding of AI tools

Katie Holt, Aileen Dunham professor of history at The College of Wooster, has used Wikipedia in her classroom since 2017 to strengthen her students’ information literacy skills. Recently, she expanded her approach by developing an assignment that also helps students think critically about generative AI. Holt discussed her pedagogical practices in an article she wrote for Wiki Education.

In the article, Holt explained that her previous conversations with students about AI mostly focused on academic integrity and the importance of doing original work. Her new assignment, developed in collaboration with Wooster’s director of educational and emerging technologies, Jon Breitenbucher, encourages students to think more critically about AI as an information source and to compare and contrast AI research with other informational sources, including traditional encyclopedias and Wikipedia.

As a result of the assignment, she finds students came away with a much better understanding of the pros and cons of each medium. The project also succeeded in giving them a “newfound sense of the importance of improving freely accessible information about historical topics available for the general public,” she added.

In addition to comparing information sources, Holt’s students examined the accuracy of the information and whether there were biases in the way events were explained. “Our class discussions and student reflection push them to consider how and why some topics get more coverage than others, identify crucial content gaps, and do the research and writing to make Wikipedia more representative,” Holt said. Students practiced their own communication strategies through oral presentations, TikTok videos, Instagram posters, and Wikipedia entries.

Since Holt started using Wikipedia in the classroom, her students have made well-researched contributions to address gaps in the resource’s coverage, especially in the areas of Latin American and Latinx topics. As a result of this work, they have added more than 400,000 words, more than 4,000 references and had their work viewed more than 42.5 million times. In 2025, Holt was appointed to the Humanities and Social Justice Advisory Committee for Wiki Education, a spinoff of the Wikimedia Foundation, which builds connections between universities and Wikipedia.

Holt hopes the lessons her students learned via this assignment will be carried forward into their future careers, especially if they are asked to use AI in the workplace. “It’s important that they understand potential pitfalls and the need to not take output at face value,” she said.

Posted in Faculty, News on January 21, 2026.