The e-bike metaphor: relieving, strengthening or shortcutting

Recommended for: A session where students reflect on their own study behaviour

Background for the instructor

An e-bike gets you further, but what you learn depends on how you use the support. Stop pedalling and cover the same distance with less effort, and you skip the exercise that builds fitness. Use the motor to take on steeper hills or longer routes, and it widens what you can reach. AI works the same way, and the metaphor lets students say which of the two they are doing without having to defend AI or attack it.

Procedure

1. Introduce the metaphor and the three roles it makes visible.
   • Relieving: having an essay written and skipping the learning along with the work.
   • Strengthening: using AI to brainstorm and then analysing the result critically.
   • Shortcutting: saving time on a peripheral task in order to spend it on the main analysis.
2. Ask students to take a recent assignment and classify how they used AI in it: relieving, strengthening or shortcutting. What did that do to their own learning?
3. Have them do the same forward-looking for an assignment still to come, and say what they intend to do differently.
4. Close on the question the metaphor is really for: which thinking do we want to keep strengthening in this course, and where can AI help us get further?

Discussion questions

• Where is the line between shortcutting and relieving in this discipline?
• Can a use be strengthening for one student and relieving for another?
• What would you have to give up to make a use strengthening rather than relieving?

Assessment opportunity

Students submit the classification of their own AI use alongside an assignment, with a short justification. It is the reasoning that is assessed, not the category.

Reference

• Last & Sprakel (2026), Chatten met Napoleon 3.0
• Didactische tip in voorbereiding: "Hoe begin je het gesprek met je studenten over AI?" (VU Centre for Teaching & Learning, 2026)