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Sonya's Blog Posts

Navigating the Future: Innovation and Integrity in the Era of AI

I was at St James’ Park today, I believe the local football fans are rather fond of the place, but I was there for Turnitin’s first roundtable discussion since before the pandemic. Trying to start this post with ‘not AI’, we had a look at Turnitin’s product roadmap which is all about the new Feedback Studio. The new version has been redesigned from the ground-up to be screen reader accessible, a common complaint about the old version, and to be fully responsive, rather than Turnitin developing mobile apps for the platform. The rubric manager has also been rewritten to make improvements in managing and archiving rubrics, and adding the ability to import rubrics from common file formats like Excel, rather than the previous propriety format they used. It goes live on July 15th, but institutions can opt-out, and they are expecting a long period of transition. Alas that we are switching to the Canvas framework integration so our staff won’t benefit from this.

And that’s about it for ‘not AI’. In the opening remarks Turnitin presented on the outcomes of a global staff and student survey on perceptions of generative artificial intelligence. Overall, 78% of respondents were positive about the potential of AI, while at the same time 95% believed that AI was being misused. Among students only, 59% were concerned that an over-reliance on AI would result in reduced critical thinking skills (I have thoughts on this that I’ll circle back to later). In the slightly blurry photo above (I was sat at the back) you can see the survey results broken down by region, showing that in the UK and Ireland we are the least optimistic about AI having a positive impact on education, at only 65%, while India has the most positive outlook at 93%. All regions report being overwhelmed by the availability and volume of AI, which is unsurprising when every application and website is adding spurious AI tools to their services in a desperate attempt to be The One that sticks and ends up making a profit. (Side note to remind everyone that no-one is making any money out of actual AI systems in the current boom, these large language models are horrifically expensive to train and run, and the whole thing is being sustained by investment capital in a huge gamble on future returns. What could possibly go wrong!?)

The keynote address was delivered by Stephen Gow, Leverhulme Research Fellow at Edinburgh Napier University, who discussed the StudentXGenAI research project, and the ELM tool at the University of Edinburgh which is an institutionally provided front-end for accessing various language models but which has safeguards built-in to prevent misuse. Stephen reported on the mixed success of this. While it seems like a good idea, and the kind of thing I believe universities should be providing to ensure equitable access for all students, uptake has been poor, and students report that the they don’t like using the tool because the feel it’s ‘spying on them’, and would rather use AI models directly – highlighting issues of trust and autonomy. Stephen pointed us to C. Thi Nguyen’s paper ‘Trust as an Unquestioning Attitude‘ for a more detailed discussion of trust as it pertains to complex IT systems, and how trust should be viewed not as a binary, but a delicate and negotiated balance.

During our breakout roundtable discussions, my group discussed how AI is a divisive issue, people either love it or hate it, with few in the middle ground. There is some correlation along generational lines here, with younger staff and students being more positive, but it isn’t an exact mapping. One of my table colleagues reported having an intern, a young, recent graduate, who refuses to use any Gen AI systems on environmental ethical grounds, while another colleague won’t use it because they fear offloading their thinking skills to it. That was the second time such a sentiment had been expressed today, and it made me think of the parallels with the damage that social media has done to attention spans, but while that concept took a long time to enter the public consciousness (and we are barely starting to deal with the ramifications), there seems to be more voices raising the problem of AI’s impact on cognitive ability, and it’s happening sooner in the cycle, which gives me some limited optimism. Another colleague at my table also introduced me to the concept of ‘AI shaming‘, from a paper by Louie Giray.

Finally, we were given a hands-on experience of Clarity, Turnitin’s new product which provides students with a web interface for written assessments with a built-in AI chat assistant. The idea is to provide students with an AI system that they can use safely, and which gives confidence to both them and their tutors that there has been no abuse of Gen AI to write the essay. I like the idea of this, and I have advocated for Sunderland to provide clear guidance to students on what they can and can’t use, and that we should be providing something legitimate for students which would have safe guards of some kind to prevent misuse. Why, therefore, when presented with just such a solution, was I so sceptical and disappointed; unable to see anything but its flaws? Maybe the idea just doesn’t work in practice.

I was hoping to see and learn more about Clarity today, so I was very pleased that we were given this opportunity. Of course I immediately started to try and break it. I went straight in with the strawberry test, but the system just kept telling me it wouldn’t help with spelling, and directed me to write something addressing the essay question instead. I did get it to break though, first, by inserting the word into my essay and asking it to check my spelling and grammar, but after I had something written in the input window I found that it would actually answer the question directly, reporting that ‘strawberries’ is actually spelled with one r and two b’s. Fail. When I overheard a colleague at another table reporting that it seemed to be directing them to use US English spelling, I decided to experiment by translating my Copilot produced ‘essay’ into Spanish with Google Translate. Clarity then informed me that the assignment required the essay to be in English, a straight-up hallucination as there was no such instruction. What there was, as Turnitin told us, was that the system has been built on US English and can’t yet properly handle other variations and languages. There were also quite transparent on the underlying technology which is based on Anthropic’s Claude model, which I appreciated as I have found other companies offering AI tools to be evasive, insisting that they have developed their own models based on the own training data only, which I’m highly sceptical about given the resource requirements.

Fun as it may be to try and break AI models with spelling challenges, it’s not what they are built for, and there is an old fashioned spell checker built into the text entry box. However, that doesn’t mean that when presented with an AI chatbot in a setting like this, students aren’t going to ask it questions about spelling and grammar. This seems like a perfectly legitimate use case, and the reason I suspect that Turnitin have installed a ‘guard rail’ here is that they are well aware that large language models are no good for this kind of question, just as they are no good for mathematical operations. Or, for that matter, providing straight facts. The development of people using these models like they were search engines should frighten everyone. Our table chuckled when one of us reported that ChatGPT was confidently telling them that Nigel Farage was the Prime Minister (did I say chuckle? I meant shudder.), but more subtle errors can be far harder to spot, and could have terrible ramifications in the fractured, post-truth world we’ve built. I’m sure I’ve said something like this before on here, and I probably will again, but calling these systems ‘intelligent’ has been a huge mistake. There is no intelligence to be found here. There is no understanding. Only very sophisticated predication systems about what comes next after a given input.

I’m most doubtful about the assumptions that students will want to use Clarity in the first place. Am I giving myself aways as old when I say that I would never even contemplate writing something as important as a multi-thousand word essay in an online web interface that requires a stable, constant internet connection? Clarity has no ability for students to upload their written work, and though you can copy and paste text into it, this would be immediately flagged by Clarity as an issue for investigation. There’s no ability for versioning, no ability to export and save offline, limited formatting options and fonts, no ability to use plugins for reference management, etc. I also can’t imagine any circumstances in which I would recommend students use Clarity. It is not an infrequent problem that academics come to us reporting that they have spent hours writing student feedback in Turnitin’s Writing Feedback tool, only to find out later that their comments haven’t saved properly and just aren’t there. It is such a big problem that we routinely train our staff to write all of their feedback offline first, and then copy and paste it into Feedback Studio. Colleagues in the room challenged Turnitin about this, and the response was that in their evaluation students reported being very happy with the system.

Nevertheless, Turnitin believe that some kind of process validation is going to be necessary to ensure the academic integrity of written work going forwards, and I do think they have a point. But the only way I can see Clarity, or something like it working, is if academics mandate its use for assessment with students having to do everything in the browser, in which case unless they are teaching a module on how to alienate your students and make them hate you, it isn’t going to go down well. As much as Turnitin would like it to be so, I don’t think there’s a technological solution to this problem. I increasing think that in order to validate student knowledge and understanding we are going to have to use some level of dialogic assessment, which doesn’t scale in the highly marketised higher education system we now find ourselves in.

AI Disclaimer: There is no ethical use of generative artificial intelligence. The environmental cost is devastating and the technology is built on plagiarised content and stolen art, for the purpose of deskilling, disempowering and replacing the work of real people.
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Innovation and Integrity in the Age of AI

I don’t usually attend these Turnitin product updates, not out of a lack of interest, just because it’s something that lies more with the other half of the team here at Sunderland, so I leave them to it and to cascade what’s important to the rest of us when required. This one piqued my interest though, after seeing a preview of the new user interface at NELE last week. You can see some of the planned changes to the Feedback Studio and the Similarity Report view above. I asked a question about the lack of audio feedback following NELE, and was told that this, along with new video feedback capabilities are on the roadmap and coming soon.

I was also interested in their new Clarity tool, which will allow students to submit or write their work through a web interface, and get immediate feedback with help on how to improve their writing from Turnitin’s AI chatbot. Very similar to how Studiosity’s Writing Feedback+ service works, so that’s going to be very interesting for me to see how that develops.

AI Disclaimer: There is no ethical use of generative artificial intelligence. The environmental cost is devastating and the technology is built on plagiarised content and stolen art, for the purpose of deskilling, disempowering and replacing the work of real people.
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NELE: June 2025

The final NELE meeting of the year took place at Newcastle University, and we began by looking at Northumbria and Durham’s experience of piloting Turnitin’s new user interface for Feedback Studio. It ‘looks’ good, modern and fresh, and there are some good additional features, such as the ability to link Quick Marks to parts of a rubric, but there are also missing features such as peer marking and audio feedback; features not working quite as they should, such as anonymous marking being rendered somewhat moot by the ‘Reveal Identity’ button; and perennial issues which remain unresolved, such as the infinitely nested scroll bars in the rubric view (first photo).

Next up, the team at Newcastle talked about their ongoing experience of using Inspera to manage digital exams. They shared some good practice of using videos within exams, using an example of giving health students an ultrasound recoding to watch and then asking questions about it. They are also still holding the line on proctoring, citing their testing experience of being able to easily trigger far too many false flags. Good for them.

Rounding off the morning, Adam and I from Sunderland, and Dan from Newcastle led a discussion on VLE standards. I liked the work Newcastle have done on a specimen ‘perfect’ module that meets everything to show academics how it’s done, while our ‘MOT’ service, monitoring processes, and friendly interventions with academics on how they can improve their modules, are completing the circle.

After lunch, and some unscheduled physical activity for me (don’t ask), Newcastle presented on their learning analytics system, NULA, which has been developed in collaboration with Jisc. They had very good things to say about Jisc on this one, that they’ve been very supportive and responsive on building ways of monitoring and reporting on the measures which Newcastle wanted to set.

Next, it was Dan from Newcastle again, who talked about their experience of working with students to develop their new module template which has been designed to be mobile friendly first (second photo). Something many of us claim to do, but which actually seems to be quite rare.

Finally, we were joined by Emily from Newcastle’s library team who presented on the things which keep a librarian up at night. It’s AI. It’s always AI. Specifically, every publisher is experimenting with their own generative AI tools to help people find and analyse the resources in that database. The problems are many. First, these features are coming and changing at the whim of the publisher, without warning or any ability to test and evaluate. One particularly egregious example Emily mentioned was a journal that would provide temporary access to their AI search tool to academics who had attended specific training events, or happened on specific buttons and options on their website. Secondly, Emily was deeply concerned about AI literacy and who is responsible for teaching it. It seems to be falling on interested parties in different departments in different places, when it is really something that needs direction and dedicated roles and senior staff sponsorship. Finally there are the hidden costs. While publishers are marketing these services as free improvements to their search tools, in reality they are raising subscriptions costs on the back end, at a time when the sector is struggling and almost every institution is closing courses and laying off staff.

AI Disclaimer: There is no ethical use of generative artificial intelligence. The environmental cost is devastating and the technology is built on plagiarised content and stolen art, for the purpose of deskilling, disempowering and replacing the work of real people.
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TEL Researchers Talk

Screenshot of a Miro board with a timeline of technologies on it
Miro Tech Timeline

I don’t know how I found out about this event, but it was very good! It was a talk by Louise Drumm (Edinburgh Napier), facilitated by John Brindle (Lancaster), examining some of the issues that arise in the intersection between digital technology and educational research. Among the points discussed were how the former is a fast moving, external, source of pressure and change, swimming in venture capital cash, while the latter is often slow, ponderous, and impoverished. Louise talked about agency, and how we, as learning technologists and educators, are expected to be users, often knowledgeable and enthusiastic ones, of technologies and practices regardless of how we may feel about them personally.

Louise created a Miro board for the session in which she had created a timeline of digital technology innovations and events which have emerged throughout her career, grouped into different phases. She opened the board up to the group for us to collaboratively edit, move, change, and add new items, which was chaos, but good, creative chaos! Which was a theme of her talk and of her research practice. Creativity that is, not chaos. Just to be clear.

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Collaborative University-Wide Approach to Digital Transformation

Photo of our stakeholder Venn chart
Stakeholder Venn Chart

No sooner had the Old Boss become the New Boss once again, than she pulled one of her classic Boss moves and sent me away to the other side of the country!

Jisc’s Framework for Digital Transformation in Higher Education has been around for a few years now, with the aim of helping HEIs to transform and improve their digital infrastructure and services. Bath Spa University has been one of the 24 universities piloting this with Jisc, and this event was an opportunity for them to share their experiences with other interested institutions. For Bath, this has included a major VLE upgrade, a transition from Google for Education to Microsoft, and the implementation of an AI chatbot powered by LearnWise.

The day began with a keynote session delivered by senior staff at Bath Spa talking about what they have done and learned, and ended with a panel discussion which included staff from Jisc who fielded all of our questions. A key takeaway, reiterated by Jisc at several points, was that the most important factor for success was that the technology doesn’t matter as much as the people, culture, and processes in an institution: people over technology.

In between we had three breakout sessions covering how digital assessments had been implemented in an arts department with great success; an interactive session exploring the competencies of ‘digital fluency’; and the third on the challenges of developing a collaborative culture within your institution. In this one we explored an alternative to stakeholder mapping, using a Venn diagram to reframe the groups as collaborators that can help us to achieve the goal, instead of more passive people who need to be managed. In my group, photo of our chart above, we used an example of building up a satellite campus, as we were all involved in such a project, at different stages.

Written case studies from 12 of the partners Jisc have been working with, including Bath, are available on their Report and Case Studies webpage.

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New Centre for Teaching Excellence

Photo of a cute squirrel
Photo by Jongsun Lee on Unsplash

We are now the Centre for Teaching Excellence, as of May 1st. Squirrel unrelated. The upper echelons of the University have had a jiggle with the departure of our Deputy Vice Chancellor Academic, so we have been split off from the Centre for Graduate Prospects to become our own service again, bringing us into alignment with the new structure. It’s taken a little while to agree on the new name, hence delayed announcement, but I’ve just updated the CPD page and realised I should note the change.

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Should I Be Researching?

An excellent question, posed by the HeLF folks, to which the only possible answer is a resounding ‘yes’. But that would make for a very short webinar, so we discussed the issues around this too. Obviously a very interesting session for me, as I have been trying to push my career in this direction over the past few years, as you can probably tell, and the work I’ve been doing on Studiosity has afforded me an excellent opportunity to do so.

We had a good discussion on the nature of research and the differences between research and evaluation. The latter, generally, being something which is done for internal purposes and audiences only, while research is likely of wider interest and therefore there is value in sharing via relevant publications. Within our community, however, there may be barriers which prevent, or make it difficult for professional services staff to publish. One colleague mentioned a publication, not named to protect the guilty, which charged for publication, but gave steep discounts to academic contracted staff, but none if you happened to have ‘professional services’ on your contract.

We also talked a lot about ethics committees, which again can be hard to access, with another colleague reporting that they weren’t even allowed to submit something to an ethics panel, while at another institution professional service staff were kicked out of their ethics board because it was felt to be having a negative impact on their REF submission.

That all sounds rather bleak, but there are solutions to these problems. Some people reported having nominal 0.2 academic contracts to get over institutional barriers, while others are running their own internal ethics boards. It was a very good discussion this morning, and something which is going to become a series, so I will be learning and writing more on this.

Relevant related reading: Defining the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, by Ann M. Gansemer-Topf, Laila I. McCloud, and John M. Braxton.

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PSP Refurb

Aha! What have we here then? Another entry into the category of ‘not-work-related-retro-handheld-restoration’ posts. It’s an obscure category, but it’s my blog and I do what I want.

I’ve had an inkling to do a PlayStation Portable restoration for a long time, but anytime I looked into it I was put off by the vast number of tiny, tiny, easily breakable ribbon cables holding it all together. For some darned reason I took the plunge in March, buying a beat-up piece of crap on eBay and I’ve been working on it over the past month. It is now at a point where I am declaring it done. I’m not 100% happy with it. The reproduction shell is pretty good, but it’s not up to the same quality as the originals. I cracked it open for one last time tonight to make some tweaks and I’ve noticed that some of the screw holes are starting to come apart, so this time really must be the last time.

In terms of software modding, it’s been updated to the last official firmware version from Sony, 6.61, and I have installed ARK-4 custom firmware on top of it, which allows me to all sorts of interesting things. Not least of which was side loading the 15th anniversary theme which goes with the shell beautifully.

Big thanks to TotalKommando on YouTube who’s take-apart guide is the best (though I also found others helpful), and for all of his other guides on everything PSP related.

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Supporting Staff and Students in Moving from AI Scepticism to AI Exploration

How could I miss the latest HelF staff development session, as an avowed AI sceptic? Today Alice May and Shivani Wilson-Rochford from Birmingham City University talked about their approach to responding to the emergence of generative AI. As can be seen on the ‘roadmap’ above, this has included an AI working group, collaboration with staff and students on producing guidelines on use, sharing those via staff and student workshops, and collating resources on a SharePoint site. All things which mirror our approach at Sunderland.

Something they are doing which I liked was providing template text which academic staff can copy and paste into their assignment briefs on what kind of AI students are permitted to use, at four different levels from fully unrestricted, to fully prohibited. They are also working on an assessment redesign project which takes the risks of GAI into account, based on work from the University of Sydney which analysed all of the different types of assessment they have and put them into two lanes based on how secure they are to GAI plagiarism. It’s Table 2 on the page I’ve linked to, it’s a very good table. I like it a lot.

Briefly mentioned was the fact that Birmingham are one of the few institutions in the UK who have enabled Turnitin’s AI detection tool, and I would have liked to have learned more about this. From a student survey on GAI, the second screenshot above, concerns about the accuracy of AI detection was one of the big things they raised.

Alice and Shivani left us with plans for going forwards, which is to build a six-pillar framework on the different aspects of GAI’s impact on HE (third screenshot). Pillar 5 is ‘Ethical AI and Academic Integrity’. This one stood out as, once again, the ethical issues of the environmental impact and copyright were raised. Briefly. And then we moved on. It consistently bothers me, and I don’t have any brilliant answers, but I will reiterate the very basic one of simply choosing not to use these services unless they are solving a genuine problem.

AI Disclaimer: There is no ethical use of generative artificial intelligence. The environmental cost is devastating and the technology is built on plagiarised content and stolen art, for the purpose of deskilling, disempowering and replacing the work of real people.
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Studiosity Partner Forum 2025

Today saw me visiting London once again for Studiosity’s fourth annual UK Partner Forum. In the keynote service update from CEO, Mike Larson, it was all AI, all the time. Their pivot to AI powered feedback continues at a rapid pace, and the messaging has changed from personalised feedback provided by actual human beings a few years ago, to, this isn’t fast enough for students who often work in a ‘just in time’ frame, therefore they need feedback in minutes, not hours. They seem to be doing alright from it, as a substantial number of partners have now switched to Studiosity+, and they are working on a new tool for academics to help with course content creation. Previously announced human-powered services, like Study Assist, are still in development, but didn’t warrant a mention in the slides, someone had to ask the question of what was happening with them.

Rebecca Mace, an independent researcher, presented on their work reviewing early real-world usage of Studiosity+, which our pilot on Study Online Canvas has contributed to (I have writing about this forthcoming). Next, Andy Jaffrey from Ulster University presented about their experience in winning the Times Higher University of the Year Award. This was largely tangential, but there was some discussion about values and their emphasis on human-to-human contact, which is why, like Sunderland, they are staying with the Studiosity Classic service.

After lunch we had Sharon Perera and Nathaniel Pickering from the University of Greenwich presenting on their ‘Write With Confidence’ initiative, inspired by our Write it Right. That’s going very well for them, with enough data now to show improved continuation and progression rates, and a 20% uptake across the university. All very similar to our findings. One difference is that they have gone for the AI powered service.

Finally, Nick Hillman from the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) gave the afternoon keynote on the state of UK Higher Education. I feel like Studiosity always has someone offering this kind of perspective at these events, and I always find them fascinating. Some highlights I noted included that 90% of students report using generative AI, but believe that if used for direct cheating they would be caught by institutional policies and technology. Shown in the third photo, above, HEPI surveyed students on institutions going bust and found that 31% were quite or very worried about this possibility. Finally, and related to this, Nick offered a prediction that there would be mergers of HEIs in the next few years to prevent worst case scenarios, but that, like the crisis in FE a few years ago, the sector would leave it too late and wait for a precipitating event to happen instead of getting ahead of the situation. I don’t think there was anything in his analysis that I would disagree with.

Slides from the day and other supporting documentation are available on Studiosity’s website, so you don’t have to squint at the scance few photos I took.

AI Disclaimer: There is no ethical use of generative artificial intelligence. The environmental cost is devastating and the technology is built on plagiarised content and stolen art, for the purpose of deskilling, disempowering and replacing the work of real people.
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