ASAIHL 2026 - Asian Lifelong Learning Conference 2026

This paper documents the design of an AI-assisted research conceptualization workshop intended for graduate students and junior faculty members in higher education. Rather than merely reporting outcomes, the paper foregrounds the pedagogical architecture, sequencing, and guiding principles of the workshop. The design is anchored on a “spiraling” method that structures iterative movement between human reasoning and AI-assisted feedback, enabling participants to progressively refine their research backbone—title, main problem, sub-problems, and results-and-discussion outline—before drafting key manuscript components. The workshop is organized into two face-to-face sessions. The first session focuses on structural alignment, journal targeting, and drafting preliminary sections such as the introduction, significance, and initial methodology. The second session develops the literature review, refines the methodology, constructs a research calendar, and institutionalizes structured self-critique and peer critique. Central to the design is the cultivation of critical reflexivity, ensuring that AI functions as an intellectual augment rather than a substitute for scholarly judgment. The paper argues that this structured, iterative, and reflexive design provides a replicable model for integrating artificial intelligence into research capacity-building initiatives in universities.