Back down to Middlesborough today for a packed agenda. James got the ball rolling with a discussion of Middlesborough College’s experience as a Microsoft Innovative Educator Expert, and using badges – both digital and physical – to motivate staff to engage with their CPD offering. I think we got some good ideas from this one. They were using leaderboards, but with only the top three visible so as to reduce the risk of demotivating people.
Next, Malcolm led a discussion about modern alternatives to vivas which is an approach Durham is evaluating. This led on naturally to a wider discussion on the validity of assessments in the Gen AI age. There feels like a growing consensus on the need for vivas of some kind, whether digital or a sample of students, but practical and ethical issues abound. If it works as intended, I think Studiosity could be on to something with Validate.
We of course talked about Einstein, and though this particular service was shut down quickly enough (thanks to Einstein’s estate), the service was build on open technology and is relatively easy to recreate. In what I can only describe as ‘a bit of gossip’, we speculated on whether or not the whole service was a scam designed to entrap students, as there have been some reports of students who signed up for the service receiving blackmail style emails. It’s wild out there.
Other topics of conversation included Newcastle’s move to all 20 credit modules, amusing as at Sunderland we’re in the process of doing the opposite, moving everything to 30 or 60 credits; we talked software and processes for maintaining an internal knowledgeable; peer learning as an approach to alleviating imposter syndrome; had a look at Blackboard’s alternative to Canvas Catalog; and discussed access to premium Gen AI tools. On that topic, we’re all using CoPilot because it’s being bundled with our Microsoft site licenses, but on cost grounds only Northumbria are offering anything in addition – Claude.ai which, from my experience, I suspect is much appreciated by their school of Computing and Information Sciences in particular.
Rounding off the day, Bob from Middlesborough College demonstrated their in-house Inspire AI tool, which is a series of Gen AI ‘widgets’ designed to produce specific types of content based on a simple form, no prompt engineering required. It reminded me of TeacherMatic which we have experimented with, but Inspire was completely tailored to Middlesborough’s needs and requirements. On the back-end it’s using GPT 4.1-mini, but it can be updated with other models, and staff reported that the tool was very easy to use, and has been saving them time as they outsource low cognitive capacity tasks to it such as generating individual lesson plans or bespoke case studies.