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Month: October 2025

Sunderland Education Conference 2025

Published 8th October 2025
Photo of the conference venue state
Education Conference 2025

We’ve had a rebrand. Now that we have a new Deputy Vice Chancellor who has changed the title to DVC Education, our annual Teaching and Learning Conference has been renamed to the Education Conference to match.

The day began with welcome messages from the DVC, and our VC, David Bell, who talked about the challenges of identifying truths and falsehoods in our increasingly siloed and partisan culture, and the importance of ensuring students develop critical thinking skills to cope in both education and employment.

The keynote talk was delivered by James Coe, Associate Editor (Research & Innovation), at WonkHE, and a local lad from the North East. The key message of his talk was about the challenges and pressures students now face as a result of cultural changes since his own time at university, back in ye olden days of 2011, before the start of £9k student fees and a time when he received a £4k bursary. Now that students face far harsher financial challenges and graduating into a stagnant labour market, James talked about how pressures have flipped, with students now having to fit in lectures and study around work, rather than the other way round as it was in the recent past and, I would argue, how it should be. This leaves them a lack of space and time to study and benefit from the formative experience of being a student.

The name of the day may have changed, but something that stayed the same was the always excellent student panel discussion. I have always found this very useful and insightful. This year a lot of the discussion was about the real world use of generative AI tools, as might be expected. The panel talked about how they are using these tools to help structure their work and adjust their writing voice, and were well aware of the dangers of overuse and offloading their thinking to these tools. Specifically, they commented about a fear that they would reduce their writing skills. I was also pleased, if that’s the right word, that the panel echoed my concern that the University does not provide sufficient and clear guidance for students on what they are and aren’t allowed to use exactly, and how they are allowed to use them.

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Navigating Academic Integrity in a GenAI World

Published 2nd October 2025


AI Language Feedback Loop

I joined this UCISA webinar at almost the last minute, when I found out that they were going to be talking about Cadmus via the HeLF email list. Cadmus is something I need to learn a lot more about in connection with a project I’m involved with this year.

It opened with Julie Voce, of City St George’s, University of London, delving into some of the challenges the sector is facing in relation to generative AI. She talked about human-based detection of AI plagiarism by looking for hallmarks of LLM content, such as the use of words like ‘delve’ and the em dash—for an explanation of why this is problematic, watch Etymology Nerd’s short on the feedback loops which I’ve embedded above—Julie also talked about a practice she has observed in staff, finding that some people will dock students a few percentage points when marking if they suspect LLMs have been used, but can’t prove it.

This led on to Tom Hey’s case study on their use of Turnitin’s AI detection tool at Leeds Beckett. They have been a longtime user of Turnitin’s authorship tool which launched in 2019 to help detect contract cheating, and adopted the AI detection tool when that launched as it was already part of their license, academics wanted it, and they didn’t want staff using unauthorised tools at their own discretion. Tom reported good success with this, but noted that it had to be framed by their ‘Academic Honesty Policy’ for staff and students, which emphasises that these tools are a backstop to help academics, and are nor foolproof detectors of plagiarism. In the chat, someone posted a link to a Jisc paper on the validity of AI detection systems which makes for interesting / depressing reading (delete as appropriate).

Finally, Chie Adachi from Queen Mary University presented about their experience of using Camdus to support assessment during a pilot which ran over the previous year. Unfortunately I didn’t get to see the tool itself or learn much about it, but the results of the pilot were very positive, with 82% of students reporting a positive experience, a 7% increase in average grade, and a 38% decrease in first time failure rate.

Another couple of useful links from the discussion which I thought worth sharing: A Harvard Business Review article on how ‘workslop’ is harming office productivity, unfortunately behind a paywall, but you may have access through your Library, and a report from MIT (PDF), on the impact of Generative AI on business to date – “95% of organizations are getting zero return”.

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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