Designing for Interaction Transparency: Empowering Learners and Teachers in GenAI-assisted Learning

Supervisors: Célina Treuillier, Denis Lalanne

Student: TBD

Project status: Open

Year: 2026

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) is now widely adopted across diverse contexts, with thousands of users using it daily. While it offers many opportunities and the potential to augment human abilities, for instance by accelerating certain tasks and saving time for higher-level cognitive work, it also raises important concerns. One major risk is the reduction of users’ cognitive engagement: as reliance on GenAI grows, individuals may gradually lose ownership over their work. In educational settings, this is described as cognitive offloading, which can strongly impact the learning process. To mitigate associated risks, there is a need to understand the dynamics of Learner-GenAI Collaboration and associated learning outcomes. This is crucial to ensuring that GenAI acts as a scaffold for learning rather than a substitute for thinking.

The goal of this project is to design, develop, and evaluate an interactive tool that translates raw interaction data into meaningful visualizations and insights supporting:

  • Learner Agency: empower learners with visualization to reflect on their current GenAI usage and maintain ownership of their work.
  • Pedagogical Insight: provide teachers with meaningful data about learners’ GenAI usage, supporting process-based assessment of learning and moving beyond the traditional product-based assessment.

As part of this Master project, the student's work will focus on the following tasks:

  • Design and Prototyping: Conceptualize and design innovative UI components that characterize Learner-GenAI collaboration (e.g., distribution of the work completed by GAI vs. the human, timeline of edits, effort indicators...).

  • Technical Implementation: Improve the technical structure of an existing interactive tool and incorporate visualization components, for both learners and teachers.

  • Evaluation: Design and conduct a user study to evaluate the developed tool. More specifically, evaluate its impact on learners’ agency, as well as its usefulness for product-based assessment of learning.

Keywords: Human-Computer Interaction, Learner-GenAI Collaboration, Educational Technology, Interactive Interface, Data Visualization, Process-based Assessment

Desired Skills (or willingness to learn):

  • Technical skills:

    • Experience with prototyping tools (e.g. Balsamiq, Figma)
    • Proficiency in Python and Web Development
    • Experience working with GenAI APIs
    • Data Logging and Processing
    • Visualization Tools (e.g. D3.js, Plotly, Matplotlib, etc.)

  • Research and Analytical skills:

    • Data Analysis
    • Experimental Design

The candidate should have a strong interest in User-Centered Design, and be interested by interdisciplinary project (technology and education).