How might we empower students (and ourselves) to Stay Musical?
Stay Reflective is a guided reflection and journaling tool. Whether you’re a student, working professional or in-between, it offers questions, prompts, and AI follow-ups to enable you to journal and navigate life’s ambiguities through empowerment and self-discovery.
At the start of 2024, we had the unique opportunity to test out many of our ideas with a selection of Music Technology (MTEC) classes at Foothill College. Under the guidance of Bruce Tambling, an award-winning music producer and esteemed instructor, this collaboration sought to explore the synergies between human creativity and AI in fostering deeper self-awareness and engagement.
By inviting students to reflect on their musical journeys, goals and plans, our pilot hoped to open new avenues for personalized learning and impactful introspection.
In this case study, we will look at our Stay Reflective pilot “Stay Musical” that we recently completed at Foothill College. We will look at how it came together and implemented and explore the impact AI-enhanced reflective journaling had on music technology students.
The Experience: Implementing an AI-Driven Reflection Pilot for Music Technology Students
Bruce Tambling is an award-winning music producer and full-time tenured professor at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, California. A long-time reader of my blog on quantified self, note-taking and self-tracking, we bonded over potential for a novel AI-powered reflection tool that he might try out with students in his next music classes. He agreed to contribute some initial questions, aligning with his goals for upcoming music classes, and I volunteered to set up an initial reflection experience we could test out and improve upon together.
The central goal of our pilot with Tambling and Foothill College was to invite students to reflect at the start of their semester on their musical journey, goals and intentions for the semester ahead. We wanted to explore the value of answering a few human created and chosen questions along with an opportunity to refine and personalize using AI-generated follow-up questions.
We called it “Stay Musical,” and the reflection experience was mapped to coincide with the course kick-off, a moment when students might be debating whether the course was right for them and what skill-building and projects that they might want to focus on. The initial objective of our pilot was to get students to reflect and then share their reflections or learning with their fellow classmates.
Embedded in their course portal, Tambling would offer an elective, extra credit assignment to all of his students. On the assignment page, we introduced the product and experience, shared how to use the app, added a key best practice (“Be Verbose”), and elected to share over a sample response and AI-generated follow-up questions.
Here were the five core questions:
- What sparked your interest in music and music technology?
- Are there any particular artists, songwriters, mix engineers, or producers who inspire you? How do they influence your approach to music?
- What are your goals for this music technology class? What do you hope to gain or achieve by the end of it?
- In what aspects of music production or technology do you feel the need to enhance your skills or knowledge?
- What would success look like or feel like for you after this course?
The app then used a simple implementation of Generative AI to then create personalized follow-up questions, which students could then answer to refine, reconsider or extend their reflective thinking.
Here are some screenshots from mobile view:
To complete the assignment students could either share their actual responses or a short note describing what they learned. This proved a good initial solution since it removed the added requirement of integrating Stay Reflective with Canvas, the school’s learning management system (LMS). This approach also created better privacy, since students were giving explicit and active control over if and how they would share.
Finally, we included a final voluntary question for product feedback.
(NOTE: Anyone can try the “Stay Musical” reflection experience here.)
The Results: Outcomes and Impact
For this pilot, we had three key metrics:
- PARTICIPATION RATE: Would students reflect through a facilitated reflection experience?
- REFLECTION ENGAGEMENT RATE: Which questions would students respond to?
- AI ENGAGEMENT RATE: Would students respond to personalized AI generated questions?
Overall, the results of our pilot were demonstrably positive. No technical issues were reported by the students. Moreover, facilitated by the app, we saw that students reflected and also used and liked their AI follow-up questions. The professor got student engagement and, using the data, he learned key insights and trends about his students’ needs and goals.
Here is a chart showing the response length of core questions:
According to a straightforward analysis, we saw:
- >50% Participation Rate: Considering this was an elective assignment for a heterogeneous cohort of music technology students, meaning younger and working professionals students, we were pleasantly surprised that over 50% of students who were invited to reflect did reflect.
- High Reflection Engagement Rate: None of our five core reflection questions were skipped, and, in fact, all had a positive engagement and response rate. Interestingly, the question with the highest word count of responses was the “What sparked your interest in music and music technology?” which speaks to the power of an open-ended rapport building first question.
- >90% utilization of AI generated questions: Even with our limited AI implementation, we were overjoyed to see such a positive uptake in answering these personalized AI-generated follow-up questions. Almost none of the students skipped these questions, and several had their longest responses to their AI questions. This speaks to the potentially benefit and increased engagement when offering a dynamic AI moment for learning or reflection.
Here is an example wordcloud of responses to the first question:
More important than anything, we witnessed that nearly all of the participants authentically tried to reflect on themselves, their journey and what might be ahead for them as musical creatives. Many shared a deep personal connection or story about their interest in music and music learnings. Several clearly indicated and verbalized their creative learning and career next steps as well as challenges ahead.
Even though we didn’t expect much direct product feedback, we were happy to see several students did share their takeaways. Here are some notable quotes:
- It was good. I think the questions are very open ended and require a fair amount of self-reflection. It was helpful to me in that it sorted out why I want to go down this path and what I want to get out of it. Great questions.
- Very enjoyable! As a new student who just started taking music technology classes with the intention of furthering my production skills, these questions helped me reflect on why I am putting energy towards this area of my life and what my goals are. Not only did this exercise push me to think deeply about my intentions and move past the desire of “just creating music,” I also feel more confident and more in touch with my musical side.
- I was surprised to receive good quality questions. Though some questions are a bit too early for me to answer. It would be great if AI can detect how far I am in this musical journey and adjust questions accordingly.
- Good and helpful
- Oh, I get it, AI just kind of helps the process of thinking.
- It was helpful, and the AI-generated questions were solid yet a little bit broad, I didn’t know what to record for some of them.
- Twas fun! I felt like I didn’t really know how to answer a lot of the questions. I think, because I know so little about music technology, it’s hard for me to talk about it. I don’t know any of the major concepts, skills, tools, etc. to be able to talk about it!
- It’s very cool that the AI creates additional questions based on my initial answers!
While Tambling primarily received and reviewed responses directly in his LMS, we did some additional data analysis on aggregated results with word clouds and ChatGPT that showcased key themes, top goals and particular areas most students wanted to focus on.
All in all, we saw clear evidence of the utility of reflection for students in their creative and personal growth as well as the empowering benefit of AI’s role in facilitating these personal reflection journeys too.
Looking to empower how you journal and reflective? Try Stay Reflective today.
Conclusion: Lessons Learned and Future Directions
In summary, our Stay Reflective pilot at Foothill College demonstrated how integrating AI-enhanced reflective journaling into education can significantly deepen students’ engagement with their learning, foster a greater sense of self-awareness, and enhance their creative and technical skills.
By collaborating with Bruce Tambling, we created “Stay Musical,” a novel use of reflection technology and AI to engage music technology students. We identified and created engaging questions to get students to reflect on their journey and plan what’s ahead.
The pilot saw significant participation and engagement with over 50% of students embracing the reflective exercise. Stay Reflective’s AI follow-up questions proved useful and help too with more than 90% (of those participants) engaging with their personalized AI-generated follow-up questions.
Besides getting great engagement from the students, the professor received an aggregated analysis showing key themes, top goals and particular areas most students wanted to focus on too.
We received positive qualitative feedback like: “It was helpful to me in that it sorted out why I want to go down this path and what I want to get out of it.” and “I was surprised to receive good quality questions.”
The success of the Stay Musical Pilot app in fostering meaningful reflection among music technology students at the start of their courses motivated us to extend the pilot to a second opportunity, and we are happy to announce that we recently launched a new end-of-course reflection for Tambling’s classes. We hope to share those results and a deeper end-to-end data analysis soon.
By leveraging personalized, AI-generated prompts for reflection, we believe this innovative approach not only supports students in articulating and pursuing their educational and career aspirations but also sets the stage for new ways technologies like AI can be leveraged to enrich educational experiences, career journeys and creative projects.
The overwhelmingly positive feedback from students and the tangible outcomes observed—increased engagement, enhanced self-awareness, and a deeper connection to their musical aspirations—reaffirm the project’s foundational belief: that the integration of technology in learning and life, when thoughtfully applied, can elevate the human experience rather than detract from it.
As Bruce Tambling put it:
“The Stay Reflective Experience has expanded my horizons as a teacher and has helped empower my students to navigate the exponential synergy of human creativity and AI. I’m super excited about the opportunity to integrate LLMs (like OpenAI and ChatGPT) into our Music Technology (MTEC) classes at Foothill College, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in music technology education.”
By continuing to bridge the gap between technology and human self-awareness, we hope to support more teachers, coaches and reflection facilitators in their quest to engage and enrich the reflective, learning and creative journeys of more students and learners across various fields and industries. There is a huge potential for AI to enhance the reflective practices, creativity and personal journeys of all of us one journal entry at time.
Are you an educator, coach or facilitator of reflection? Contact us because we’d love to work together developing a human centered AI reflection journey for your needs.
From design and implementation to analysis and refinement, this pilot offered a host of learnings and opportunities for what’s ahead. We have validated key aspects of our user experience, technology and core value propositions. Most importantly, this pilot has not only underscored the indispensable value of reflection in the learning and creative process but also showcased the potential of artificial intelligence to act as a catalyst for personal growth and self-discovery.
Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies especially large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are transforming society, learning and creativity. While many worry about the impact of AI on cheating, jobs and much more, at Stay Reflective we are leaning into the unprecedented opportunities AI offers. We believe AI can enhance learning experiences, cultivate greater self-awareness, empower self-reflection and even enable a new forms of creativity. In fact, our AI-driven reflection and journaling Stay Reflective app was developed with a unique vision towards transforming how individuals engage with reflection and personal growth.
As we look to the future, the lessons learned from this pilot project will guide further refinements of the Stay Reflective app. We’ve already added several UI/UX improvements based on user feedback and are continuing to refine our AI services to provide the most benefit. Our central mission remains to make it easier for anyone to reflect more often and better.
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