Category Archives: teaching

Artificial intelligence inserting doubt into the relationship between educators and learners

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As the various responses are washing over us in education about the implications of artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT, I’ve thinking about its consequences for the relational aspects of education.

Just as deep fake video, AI generated images and even naturalistic voice platforms make us second-guess the veracity and provenance of what we are seeing or hearing, human-like text generation has inserted a doubt into our minds. The first doubt is of the educator of their own skills; can they discern what is student-generated work and what is not? The second is the more obvious question of whether the work they are spending time grading and giving feedback upon is the words, thoughts and accurate reflection of a human’s learning. In combination, these doubts therefore become present whenever a lecturer sets about the task of grading and/or giving feedback on student work: has artificial intelligence has been used or not? So the potential impact on students, who are putting in time and their original work, is their work is, by default, potentially being treated with distrust from the start.

Robot
Photo by Alex Knight on Pexels.com

This leads to the other area of doubt, which is on the learner’s part. They may doubt that their work or effort is being taken at face value as their own effort. Secondly, taken to the next logical level, they may doubt that any personalised feedback and grades they seemingly receive from a human educator may in fact have been generated by AI. This ‘weaponisation’ of AI can be by both sides looking for efficiency, or simply a crutch to prop up a lingering doubt that their own work is really any better than AI (yes, academics have imposter syndrome as much as students).

While I don’t fully subscribe to the thesis from Adrian Wallbank’s piece in The Times Higher that AI should be resisted and kept completely away from the classroom (good luck policing that), I agree that assessment should be used as a process for students to reflect on their learning:

“What I suggest ought to be assessed (and which helps us navigate some of the issues posed by ChatGPT) is a record of the student’s personal, but academically justified, reflections, arguments, philosophising and negotiations. Student work would then be a genuine, warts-and-all record of the process of learning, rather than the submission of a “performative” product or “right argument”, as one of the students in my research so aptly put it. This would enable our students to become better thinkers.”

Ben Thomson, the excellent technology journalist (another sector and profession that is having an existential moment of crisis about AI), also contributes a parent’s view of the education situation and says the new skills learners could develop are editing and verifying information. It’s not a bad point and perhaps an obvious end-point for the information abundance students live within now and in the future. Seeking out the human skills needed to work with AI-generated content and assessing those skills is a good way to go.

As I gather advice and resources for colleagues to help us mull over the short-term and long-term strategies we need to employ, I don’t think I can resist any longer the thought that this is a game-changing moment for education. In a YouTube video, from  in Charles Knight, he puts it well: the economic model upon which higher education has be operating – that is, the time-pressured systems of assessment for staff and students, relying often on precarious labour – has left itself vulnerable to gamification. I’d argue that gamification of that system is now in the hands of everyone, staff and students. Knight rightly calls that now is the time for appropriate resourcing of staff workloads to enable them to design assessments and time to grade them. I can only add to that, investing in people – those who teach and support learners – is more important than paying money for technologies to catch people out. As many before me have observed, the latter is an arms race that cannot be won. Teaching and learning is relational and it’s through prioritising that with time, money and status will higher education be equipped to deal with the doubt and distrust inserting itself between educators and students.

Trouble ahead for digital education? The risks of forgetting and distancing of education from the digital

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I’ve had a rising sense of unease in the last few months about the future role of the digital in education generally. I have a hunch that everyone feels they have ‘been there, done that’. But have they really? Even as mantras like “we’re not going back to what was before” are being repeated, I’m not sure that makes it true. I think we might be reverting to the familiar and I think there is quite a bit which could be lost as a result.

I’m not an advocate for using technology for the sake of it, but in the past few years digital practices have permeated learning and teaching, throwing up fascinating results. Mainstreaming accessibility and (some specific) inclusion practices is one. The world of assessment, especially exams, has been turned upside down. Student and staff have increased digital confidence and selected skills have improved significantly.

I think the badmouthing of ‘online learning’ in society (in journalism and politics especially) has made it difficult for universities to declare they are building their capacity in this mode, especially for undergraduate teaching. Avoiding saying ‘online learning’ has also resulted in a very fluid situation with terminology, making it even harder to pin down what is being discussed.

There is also a reduction of digital education to effectively mean ‘online lectures’, often through Zoom, which was a dominant teaching approach during emergency remote teaching. Needless to say, this is one of many possible approaches, and at that, it’s not one I would say delivers anything different pedagogically. For flexibility and accessibility, yes, it has benefits, but not much value added for learning (except where is no longer a ‘lecture’). Digital education is so much more than online lectures. Where it can really excel is as space for agency and empowerment of learners, but that doesn’t make headlines.

I am hearing from colleagues across higher education institutions that going ‘back to campus’ is the driving message. It’s understandable; we’ve all missed the buzz of being co-present in the same space and the optics of looking like you are teaching ‘on the cheap’ isn’t a good look.

20130116 Time by kbrookes CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

I’ve been using the pendulum swing as an analogy for what is happening; a short-term re-engaging with on-campus teaching at the expense of thinking about the digital, but it will settle in a year or two somewhere between the two. But I’m not so sure now. When working from crisis to crisis, our brains don’t allow us to use our long-term, learning memory. Meaning much of what was learned by educators in the past few years will be lost. But worse than that, our personal experiences will be overwritten by the narrative that ‘online’ was awful. So opportunities will be lost to experiment, to fail and learn. Why, when we are pouring our energy back into face-to-face, would we think to explore gentle and inclusive digital practices like asynchronous tasks, student choice in modalities of engagement, on-campus use of technologies etc.?

I hope I’m wrong. I know there are pockets of long-term change out there, but I’m not seeing it mainstream.

I’d welcome your thoughts.

School of Computing 3rd September 2020: Resources and References

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Here are my keynote slides and the Mentimeter responses.

Resources (Sorry, these are mostly for Edinburgh Napier staff only)

The Digital Support Partnership 12 Principles for Online Learning and Teaching

Example week by week module planner

Touch Point Module surveys

Moodle Help! How to I teach online? Community (Self enrol)

Digital Tools webinars Tues-Fri 12pm daily

Help with Teaching Online – Q&A (Mondays)

References

Bali, Maha (2017) ‘Inequalities within Digital Literacies’in  https://library.educause.edu/-/media/files/library/2017/8/2017nmcstrategicbriefdigitalliteracyheii.pdf

Berg, Maggie, (2013) The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy

Beetham, Helen (2017), Digital literacy and democracy, https://helenbeetham.com/2017/02/22/digital-literacy-and-democracy/

Eng, Norman (2020) What Frustrates Students Most About Online Classes (Covid-19 Edition) https://normaneng.org/what-frustrates-students-most-about-online-classes/

Farrell, O., Brunton, J. (2020). A balancing act: a window into online student engagement experiences. Int J Educ Technol High Educ 17, 25 https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-020-00199-x

Hodges, Moore, Lockee, Trust and Bond, (2020) The Difference Between Emergency Remote Teaching and Online Learning, Educause Review, https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remote-teaching-and-online-learning

Laurillard, D. (2012). Teaching as a Design Science: Building Pedagogical Patterns for Learning and Technology. New York and London: Routledge.

Naffi, N., Davidson, A.-L., Snyder, D. M., Kaufman, R., Clark, R. E., Patino, A., Gbetoglo, E., Duponsel, N., Savoie, C., Beatty, B., Wallace, G., Fournel, I., Ruby, I., & Paquelin, D. (2020, August). Disruption in and by Centres for Teaching and Learning During the Covid-19 Pandemic Leading the Future of Higher Ed. International Observatory on the Societal Impacts of AI and Digital Technology (OBVIA). https://www.docdroid.net/L0khasC/whitepaper-disruption-in-and-by-centres-for-teaching-and-learning-during-the-covid-19-pandemic-leading-the-future-of-higher-ed-21-08-2020-pdf

Neroni, J., Meijs, C., Gijselaers, H. J. M., Kirschner, P. A., & Groot, R. H. M. De. (2019). Learning and Individual Di ff erences Learning strategies and academic performance in distance education. Learning and Individual Differences, 73(February 2018), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2019.04.007

Stanford, Daniel  (2020) Videoconferencing Alternatives: How Low-Bandwidth Teaching Will Save Us All https://www.iddblog.org/videoconferencing-alternatives-how-low-bandwidth-teaching-will-save-us-all/

Swansea Academy of Learning and Teachin, ‘ABC at Swansea University’, https://salt.swan.ac.uk/abc-learning-design/

UCL Designing programmes and modules with ABC curriculum design https://www.ucl.ac.uk/teaching-learning/case-studies/2018/jun/designing-programmes-and-modules-abc-curriculum-design

A seminar on roadblocks to using technology-enhanced learning

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Photo of sign saying 'Road closed'

Road closed for Edinburgh playing out

I attended a really interesting presentation this morning by Joel Smith on research he conducted with Laruen Herckis on the ‘Complex Barriers to Instructional Innovation with Technology’ at Carnegie Mellon University in the US. The seminar did two things which made me very glad I attended. Firstly, the research findings aligned closely to my own research, even though their disciplinary approaches (philosophy and anthropology) are different, which is always encouraging. Secondly, it reinforced to me the importance of educators having space and support to talk about, and develop, their understandings of teaching, before conversations about specific methods or technologies are discussed. I want to facilitate these very conversations and this is the reason I did a PhD in this area, and why I want to do more teaching. It’s nice when a seminar validates your life choices.

Their final report is yet to be published, but you can read about it briefly here. They identified four ‘roadblocks’ to educators at their institution using technology for teaching and learning.

1. Collaborations often failed because of miscommunication around priorities. This can be avoided if there is someone, a ‘champion’, to co-ordinate and clarify communication.

I recognise a lot of my previous work as a learning technologist in this point; I often found myself doing the ‘chasing up’ emails with academic staff, detailing actions to be taken and expected time-frames. Without that, things often fell apart.

2. Institutional structures and processes are out of sync with individuals careers, institutional support for teaching, technology infrastructure and global changes in technology.

Yes, there is never really the time to take a step back and dig deeper into teaching. In previous roles I’ve had, there have been years when there was never a good time to take annual leave, as all non-teaching time was spent developing online teaching content or staff development. Joel spoke about how achieving tenure was a priority for educators in his institution and, until that point, they could not afford examine their own teaching. There is also a slow/fast mismatch between higher education and technology (there is a really interesting examination of this by Land and Bayne 2008), although I think anyone working at a HEI these days is most likely reconciled to the inevitability of restructuring, change, etc. The slowness of higher education can mean wide-scale adoption of technology is a deliberate act, so perhaps hasty mistakes are avoided. On the other hand, the look-and-feel of many VLEs can give the sense of being in a time-machine. I don’t really believe that universities need to be on top of all the new technologies, but I do think they have a responsibility to be ahead on the big issues like data use, ethics and ways technology and human behaviour are enmeshed and changing each other.

3. Concepts of ‘good teaching’ held by educators are extremely strong and difficult to displace, even in the face of evidence-based alternatives. 

I think it is even more than this – we can hold two contradictory ideas of ‘good teaching’ as simultaneously true. As humans we tend to compartmentalise, and I have seen educators who put teaching in their discipline in one box, and put teaching in all other disciplines in another box and never the twain pedagogies shall meet. Examples include remarks about discussion boards, MCQs, reflective writing ‘not working in my subject’. Also, changing (or really expanding) these mental models of ‘good teaching, takes time. Again, the extended support, or indeed provocations, from colleagues to help this happen need to be planned for and resourced.

4. The academics who took part in this research had strong identities as teachers and their actions were strongly influenced by student satisfaction. This led to a reluctance to change their teaching or adopt new methods for fear of alienating their students.

One subjects of this study was quote on their desire not to embarrass themselves in front of students. In my research, a number of lecturers stated similar concerns, often with technology eliciting strongly negative emotions. The point about teacher identity and perceived threats from technology were also present in my research, although some were more comfortable embracing external influences on their teacher identity.

Their recommendations for addressing these roadblocks were that polices and practices needed to facilitate conversations to uncover educators’ mental models. At the end I asked Joel a question on how to have those important conversations about conceptions of teaching at an earlier stage of the process (i.e. before decisions are being made about technology). His answer was that university administrators have understand this and put in place procedures to enable this happen. I couldn’t agree more. We are fortunate in countries like Ireland and the UK that universities provide

professional development and qualifications in teaching, particularly to new staff. However, I can see that in the 10 years since I obtained my PgCert in teaching, educational research and thinking has moved on. It would be good to see policies put in place to sustain and develop these conversations about conceptions of teaching throughout an educators’ career.

What I learned working on an e-learning helpline for students and lecturers

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Life ring

‘Help’ by Neil Turner CC BY-SA 2.0 https://flic.kr/p/b9JrVF

After I completed my PhD I took a six-month contract in a large, well-resourced university doing ‘e-learning support’. The work was very similar to parts of my previous learning technologist roles elsewhere, but the scale of everything was much bigger. Additionally, it was my first time working within a department with no academic or teaching remit and the culture and language around the use of technology reflected that.

The university provides and supports an impressive array of digital products for teaching and learning: VLEs (more than one), assessment tools (including text matching and peer assessment), classroom polling, digital exams, lecture capture, video streaming, virtual classrooms, digital reading lists and eportfolios, to name a few. For each tool there was a named individual in my team with the expertise and vendor relationship to deal with unusual problems. I was impressed with the commitment my colleagues showed for providing the best possible service to the end users. Requests for support came to me through the call management software, so all my communication with people who needed help was through typed messages. It functioned as a very efficient, transparent system where the busy-ness  of the queue could be seen at a glance and calls passed between individuals as needed.

I can’t put an accurate figure on it, but would appear that the majority of lecturers were using these tools by rote. Courses were rolled over from semester to semester, assessment dropboxes set up as they were previously and, if there were discussions about why certain tools were being used, there weren’t happening within my earshot. What’s more, courses all had named secretaries who were responsible for student enrolments and administration of assessments. So, for example, a course secretary would follow a checklist of how to set-up a Turnitin dropbox. Again, a highly efficient process which frees up the time of the academic, but for every box ticked or not ticked within the set-up screen there are pedagogical implications, yet the lecturer has no input and probably little or no awareness that there are such choices available. And this is before any discussions take place about whether Turnitin is actually an appropriate tool to be using for assessment.

The increasing ease-of-use of software makes it more accessible and efficient to use if there is little or no learning curve. However, this very ease-of-use means that we don’t have to think about it much and this can be a problem. Teaching with digital technologies should be a considered and constantly re-evaluated process. Indeed, my PhD research found that the majority of lecturers were constantly balancing the costs and benefits to them and their students when they used digital tools. But if the the tools are practically friction-free to use, or someone else is there to do the legwork of setting things up or solve the problems, then the educator is at a remove from the consequences of using them, and therefore from thinking about deeper implications.

I believe that education in all disciplines should explicitly incorporate pedagogy into the curriculum. I also believe that this should include directly addressing digital citizenship, starting with educators role-modelling appropriate digital citizenship. This can be a simple as an announcement outlining why they made choices to use (or not to use) certain digital tools for teaching and learning. In doing so, they would be encouraging their learners to think about the choices that we make about technology every day. It could even be the first step to becoming an open education practitioner.