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

Here’s a story that’s going to make you angry, and maybe a little sad.

Students at the University of Staffordshire enrolled in a government-funded coding apprenticeship, hoping to pivot into cybersecurity or software engineering. Instead, they got a course where the slides were written by AI, the voiceover was AI, and the lecturer seemed to be reading from it without much engagement. One student, James, confronted the lecturer during a recorded session, saying: “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.”

He’s not wrong.

The course was part of a programme designed to help adults retrain for digital careers. 41 students signed up. What they found was a PowerPoint deck with suspicious file names, American English that had been sloppily converted to British English, and content that occasionally referenced US legislation for no reason. An AI voiceover reading the slides would suddenly switch to a Spanish accent for 30 seconds, then back to British. That’s not a glitch you get from a human recording.

James and another student, Owen, raised the issue early on. They went to the student representative, who told them the university’s response was essentially: teachers are allowed to use a variety of tools. That’s a polite way of saying “we don’t care.”

Eventually, the university actually posted a policy statement on the course website justifying the use of AI in teaching. This is the same institution that, in its public-facing policies, warns students not to outsource work to AI or pass it off as their own. So the double standard is pretty glaring.

The Guardian reviewed course materials and ran them through two AI detectors — Winston AI and Originality AI. Both flagged the materials as having a very high likelihood of being AI-generated. The students didn’t need a detector. They noticed it in the first class.

This isn’t an isolated incident. A Jisc survey of 3,287 higher education staff found that nearly a quarter are using AI tools in their teaching. The UK’s Department of Education has praised generative AI as transformative. But for students, the experience is demoralising. On Reddit, UK undergraduates complain about lecturers copying and pasting ChatGPT feedback. In the US, students leave negative reviews about professors who rely on AI.

One student in the Staffordshire course put it well: “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.”

That’s the core problem. If the lecturer is just reading AI-generated slides, what value are they adding? The students could have done that at home. They paid — or the government paid — for expertise, guidance, and human insight. They got a robot reading a script.

James is particularly frustrated because he’s mid-career. He can’t afford to waste two years on a course that was done “in the cheapest way possible.” He feels stuck. I don’t blame him.

I understand the pressures on lecturers right now. Budgets are tight, workloads are heavy. But using AI to generate course materials isn’t a solution — it’s a shortcut that devalues the entire educational experience. If universities want to use AI as a tool, fine. But they need to be transparent about it, and they need to ensure the quality is there. This wasn’t quality. This was a cost-cutting exercise dressed up as innovation.

The lecturer in the video laughed uncomfortably when confronted. He said he appreciated people being candid. Then he changed the subject to another tutorial he made — using ChatGPT. “I’ve done this short notice, to be honest,” he said.

That pretty much sums it up.