In the era of new media, characterized by short-form content, the necessity of education to foster critical thinking skills is greater than ever. Academic writing education, which fundamentally aims to cultivate critical thinking, appears to be the mo...
In the era of new media, characterized by short-form content, the necessity of education to foster critical thinking skills is greater than ever. Academic writing education, which fundamentally aims to cultivate critical thinking, appears to be the most suitable discipline to meet these contemporary demands.
Admittedly, academic writing education continues in many educational settings. Since the advent of generative AI, various attempts have been made to utilize it to achieve educational goals. However, most efforts remain at the level of grafting generative AI onto existing classroom processes. In these cases, learners typically use existing chatbots according to situational needs, such as drafting an outline or deepening a logical structure they have established. While this partial utilization may enhance learning effects to some extent, it is insufficient. Academic writing requires personalized guidance tailored to individual proficiency levels—aiming for the cultivation of critical thinking rather than mere knowledge transfer—and such fragmentary application is inadequate.
Accordingly, this study proposes a new teaching and learning method for academic writing through a generative AI-based platform. Rather than using generative AI partially based on learner needs, the platform enables students to build academic writing competencies by stepping through the entire curriculum. Simultaneously, it allows teachers to monitor and guide the learning process of both the entire class and individual students via a teacher dashboard.
The platform was developed by comprehensively reflecting the "Essay Writing" curriculum as a subject that follows academic writing procedures, actively leveraging the functions of generative AI. It implements three distinct units—Summarizing, Evaluating, and Arguing—allowing learners to build their competencies stage by stage. The platform utilizes generative AI to create reading passages, generate topics and related materials, retrieve and display public service advertisements from the web, and generate various types of charts and statistical tables. It also provides automated assessments of learners' activities. A distinctive feature of this platform is its use of Google Sheets as a database; all learning activities generated or input by students are uploaded to Google Sheets, which are then visualized in various forms on the teacher dashboard. This structure ensures a self-directed learning process for students while enabling efficient management by instructors.
Technically, the platform integrates seven learning modules into a single Express.js-based server to simplify operation and deployment, and it centralizes shared resources such as AI API clients and session stores to enhance efficiency. By leveraging the asynchronous I/O characteristics of Node.js, it handles multiple AI API calls simultaneously, and a single-port design simplifies CORS settings and Nginx configuration. The API follows a RESTful structure with the pattern `/api/module/action`, and all responses are unified in the `{success, data/error}` format to simplify client-side parsing. The platform integrates three AI providers—OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google—to utilize the strengths of each model and ensure availability. Practical techniques such as the `safeChatCompletion()` function to avoid Korean prompt encoding issues and a 5-step Fallback authentication method were applied. In terms of security, sensitive headers are removed via middleware, `httpOnly` cookies and environment variable-based secret management are applied, and the principle of Graceful Degradation is implemented to ensure the server starts normally even in the absence of an API key.