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.
Today I had the pleasure of attending the first RIDL:HE conference at Northumbria University, chaired by Nic Whitton and Alex Mosley, with an online Discord presence facilitated by Malcom Murray from Durham. Rather than my usual boring recap of sessions I attended and what I learned, when revising my notes this time I find that there are some themes which did not emerge, but which I identified as spanning across different sessions and discussions throughout the day. So let’s try looking at it from that lens:
Playfulness: The Research in Digital Learning conference opened by articulating a mission, to make conferences fun and relevant again by injecting playfulness (or mischief, as identified in one of the pillars) and criticality. This in response to a feeling that academic conferences have become too focused on selling services or solutions to problems. “If you enjoy what you’re doing, you’ll do more of it”, as someone said. I was also very pleased when they said that, in accordance with the principle of ‘integrity’, the catering for the conference was entirely vegetarian / vegan, as this has the biggest environmental impact on hosting a conference.
The only way I get to attend conferences of this nature is by submitting something, which makes my boss happy (and is good for me) so I was there to talk about the work we’ve done on a pilot of Studiosity’s Gen AI powered version of Writing Feedback+ on our Sunderland Online version of Canvas. Presenters were briefed to make their sessions fun, interactive, and engaging, so during my talk I press-ganged everyone into joining my new venture, Sonyaosity, to give them a taste of providing feedback on a sample piece of academic writing. The idea was to demonstrate how difficult and time-consuming this can be, and then to compare and contrast this with how quickly Studiosity’s AI can do the same job. It did work, but not as well I would have liked. I used a piece of my own writing on ethical grounds, but Malcom said to me after I shouldn’t have told people this in advance, as it may have made them reluctant to criticise me as much as I wanted them to.
Polycrisis: I was fortunate that due to a shuffle of the schedule I was able to attend two sessions ran by the team behind the University of Banford: Lawrie Phipps, Peter Bryant, and Donna Lanclos. Banford is a hyperreal institution designed to explore the issues facing higher education in an exaggerated, playful manner. See, for example, The Department Most Likely to be Shut Down in Austerity, in the Faculty of Old Things. In the first session we were tasked to imagine ourselves as academics at Banford, being pulled in different directions as the institution pivots around teaching online / in person, or being against / pro AI, at the whims of the senior leadership team.
This introduced us to the concept of the ‘polycrisis’, the constant state of crisis afflicting HE, and the never-ending technological hype cycle which those of us in learning technology are especially burdened with: ‘Meta decides to hype VR again, so teaching has to utilise VR headsets now’; ‘Large language models get good and are rebranded as AI, so now everything needs to have an AI chatbot’, etc. Another aspect of polycrisis came from a session on ‘Becoming a Digital Scholar’ by Dr Jane Secker, who reflected on the whiplash of Covid, pivoting from making all teaching online at the height of the pandemic, to the decrees from government that all teaching had to go back to in person over concerns about students fees. This particularly affected disabled student who, during the pandemic, finally got the teaching and support they had been asking for for decades, only to have it whipped away again.
In the second Banford session the team deconstructed the exercise to explore some of the concepts. This started with an exercise asking us about we feel about the end of learning design – ‘sad’, ‘anarchy’, ‘dystopia’ – before talking about the role of learning designers and how we are particularly exposed as the “first responders” to whatever new thing or policy lands on our heads. There was a good discussion on how austerity and neoliberalism robs us of our time to be able to reflect and understand. After all, there is no time to question what we’re doing if we constantly have to be responding to the latest crisis.
Open Educational Practice: Finally, I was introduced to the term ‘Open Educational Practice’ by Dr Secker, a collective term which encompasses and expands on OER (Open Educational Resource) to include open access publishing, and technologies and pedagogies which encourage collaborative and flexible approaches to teaching and learning. Joining the themes together, I think a good argument could be made for the adoption of OEP in response to some of the crisis which are afflicting HE, such as austerity, marketisation, and the growth of authoritarianism.
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.
The University launched a new Centre for Inclusive Learning in March to help us meet our goals in widening participation and providing an inclusive educational experience for all students. CELT are of course working with them on many objectives, and in this, the Centre’s launch event, we were there to present on how we can help academics with instructional design and universal design for learning.
I was also able to attend many of the other sessions throughout the day, and learned a lot about some great work being done across the institution. For example, in our Faculty of Health, Science and Wellbeing, I learned that in our bank of PCPIs (Patient, Carer and Public Involvement), who are consulted on the delivery of medical and health modules, we now have a considerable contingent with experience of health care systems outside of the UK who are providing valuable insight and perspectives.
In another talk on decolonising the curriculum using a trauma informed approach, there was a great discussion about problematic language. ‘Deadline’, or ‘fire me an email’, for example, but also using ‘Due Date’ when talking about assessments could be problematic for people with experience of miscarriage. I feel like this is an area where we are making good progress societally. I’ve been very pleased to watch the technology sector jettison the language of ‘master/slave’ over the past few years, and more and more systems are now including options for pronouns and preferred name.
But of course, my main purpose on the day was to facilitate our team’s discussion around UDL. I felt that it was important for CELT to be contributing to the conference in some capacity, and I was also able to use the event to give some of my team experience in presenting at a conference. It’ll be good for them! If that’s the direction they want to take their careers of course. So I did introductions and a little bit of context setting, and then handed over to two of my team to tag-team the bulk of our presentation.
It’s that time of year, and I was once again down at our London Campus for block teaching of my module on designing learning and assessment, in the glorious sunshine, but first I attended the London Campus’s first conference on ‘International Education for Sustainable Development’. The conference was booked in before my teaching, and most of the students wanted to attend, so we scheduled teaching around it and I attended the conference also.
The first keynote was very interesting, delivered by our interim Pro-VC for Learning and Teaching, who comes from a background as an evolutionary psychologist. From this perspective she talked about our tendency of ‘future discounting’, sating our present needs over taking action about things aren’t going to impact us for some time. She also talked about how we can overcome this, by framing climate action as something which will benefit our families ahead of ourselves – ‘kin selection’.
Many of the presentations during the day focused on the value of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, and how they can be embedded into teaching and learning, and the morning ended with a panel discussion on how to fit this into the curriculum and the University’s goals. We are aiming to be ‘net zero’ in all campuses by 2040, and fully net zero by 2050, to cover all aspects of University work, including commuting.
In the afternoon there was a good talk about the balance of globalisation versus localisation, and how, for example, home 3D printing has a high energy consumption cost, but savings are made by cutting out transportation costs. There was a great slide in this talk, poorly photographed above, showing global energy consumption by source over the past 200 years, and how reliant we still are on hydrocarbons despite the gains made by renewables in the past couple of decades.
The conference ended with a second panel discussion, considering the impact of generative AI on our efforts to meet the sustainable development goals and the relationship between the SGDs and equality, diversity and inclusion. I was pleased to note the panel’s acknowledgement of the negative environmental impact of the new generative AI data centres, but dismayed that they are all still going to plough on using these tools anyway, and thus bringing us right back to the problem of future discounting.
To avoid ending this post on a negative note, as my thoughts on AI inevitably seem to do, I will paraphrase the most sane man on the panel, ‘the only way out of this mess is to reduce consumption!’, said as he pointed out his ten year old suit. This is the way. Keep wearing the old clothes that are in perfect condition; don’t upgrade your phone every few years; and maybe don’t use generative AI unless you are genuinely using it to solve a problem in the most efficient way, and not just because it’s there and it’s easy and it’s convenient.
I attended my third Studiosity Partner Forum today, which kind of began last night with a dinner and discussion about generative artificial intelligence led by Henry Aider. Generative AI and Studiosity’s new GAI powered Writing Feedback+ service was of course the main topic of conversation throughout the event. Writing Feedback+ launched in February, and they have reported that uptake is around 40% of eligible students, which compares with 15-20% for the classic Writing Feedback service. The model has been built and trained internally, using only writing feedback provided by Studiosity’s subject specialists, no student data. The output of WF+ is being closely quality assured by those agents, and they estimate that quality is around 95-97% as good as human provided feedback.
David Pike, from the University of Bedfordshire presented on their experience with the service in the afternoon. They made it available to all of their students in February, around 20,000, and usage has already exceeded usage of the classic Writing Feedback service since September last year. The average return time from WF+ is around one and a half minutes, and student feedback on the service is very positive at 88.5%. However, he did also note that a number of students who have used both versions of the service stated that they preferred the human provided feedback.
On the flip side of AI, last year Studiosity were exploring a tool to detect submissions which had been written by generative AI. That’s gone. Nothing has come of it as they found that the reliability wasn’t good enough to roll out, especially so for students who have English as a second language. No surprises for me there, detection is a lie.
The keynote address was delivered by Nick Hillman from the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI), who talked about their most recent report on the benefits and costs associated with the graduate visa route. It’s overwhelmingly positive for us as a country, and it would be madness to limit this.
Other things which I picked up included learning more about Crossref, a service for checking the validity of academic references; a course on Generative AI in Higher Education from Future Learn was recommended; and Integrity Matters, a new course developed by the University of Greenwich and Bloom to teach new students about academic integrity.
Finally I was there presenting myself, doing my Studiosity talk about our implementation at Sunderland and the data we now have showing a strong positive correlation between engagement with Studiosity and student outcomes and continuation.
Another out of this world conference this year, but alas nobody who was one degree of separation from walking on the moon this time, as our attention instead turned to… yes, you guessed it, generative artificial intelligence.
The morning keynote was given by Thomas Lancaster of Imperial College London who has done a lot of research over the years on contract cheating, and who has now turned his attention to the new AI tools which have appeared over the past year. Interestingly, he commented that essay mill sites are being pushed to students as much as they ever have, but I suspect that these agencies are now themselves using generative AI tools to displace already low paid workers in the developing world who were previously responsible for writing assignments on demand for Western students.
The first breakout session I attended was ‘Ontogeny: Mentoring students to succeed in a world of AI’ by Dr Thomas Butts and Alice Roberts who discussed how medical students are using GAI and the issues this is causing in terms of accuracy, as these models are often presenting wrong information as truth, which has particularly serious consequence in medicine. There was an interesting observation on culture and social skills, that students now seem to prefer accessing the internet for help and information rather than simply asking their teachers and peers.
The second session was ‘Enhancing the TNE student experience through international collaborative discussions and networking opportunities’ by Dr Jane Carr-Wilkinson and Dr Helen Driscoll who discussed the Office for Students’ plans to regulate TNE (trans-national education), though no-one quite seems to know how they are going to do this. Including the OfS. This was an interesting discussion which explored the extent of our TNE provision (I don’t think I had appreciated the scale before, over 7,000 students across 20 partners), and the issues involved in ensuring quality across the board.
There was also a student panel discussion who were asked about their use of GAI and understanding of the various issues surrounding plagiarism. They demonstrated quite a robust level of knowledge, with many of them saying that they are using ChatGPT as a study assistant to generate ideas, but I did groan to hear one person talk about the "plagiarism score" in Turnitin and how "20% plagiarism is a normal amount", and they don’t worry until it gets higher. The myths penetrate deep.
The final afternoon keynote was given by Dr Irene Glendinning of Coventry University who talked about her research on the factors which lead to plagiarism and cheating. This included a dense slide on various factors such as having the opportunity, thinking they won’t be detected, etc., but nowhere on there were cultural factors identified, and the way that higher education in the UK has been marketized over the recent past. I’ve certainly came across comments along the nature of, if students are paying £9,000 a year on tuition, why not just pay a few hundred more to make assessment easier or guarantee better results? But I’m noticing more and more that people don’t seem to be willing or able to challenge the underlying political decisions anymore.
Attended the second Studiosity Partner Forum in London today, which had representatives from 14 UK HEIs out of the now 23 who are Studiosity users. The opening keynote was delivered by Rebecca Bunting, Vice Chancellor at the University of Bedfordshire, who talked about issues current in HE, with a focus on access and participation. She made good points on the limitations of students going to university, which includes not only things like entry requirements and location, but also what people are able to study once there and how the cost of living crisis is impacting choice. She talked about how this can impact on student retention, which HEIs are held accountable for, but there are often very good reason why students may have to leave their study. Finally, she talked about the concept of the “sticky campus” – keeping students on campus – which is something else universities are often held accountable for as a desirable thing, but which doesn’t work for students in their 30s or who have fulltime jobs, families, etc. Those students want, and need, to be on campus to do what they need for their studies and then get away again as soon as possible. At Bedfordshire, the majority of their students are over 30.
Next was a product update session from Isabelle Bristow, Studiosity’s Managing Director for the UK and Europe. The peer support service which was in early development last year will be available in July as ‘Student Connect’, in which third year students can mentor and guide first year students after training from Studiosity and the university. These mentors are paid at a rate set by the university, and all chat and calls are managed through Studiosity to ensure privacy and confidentiality. Unfortunately this isn’t something we will be able to explore at Sunderland, as we are continuing to keep Studiosity focused at IFY and new undergraduates. Isabelle also talked about a new Writing Feedback feature which will help students to identify where they have used higher order thinking skills – at least in part designed to counter and mitigate the use of generative AI writing.
Simon Reade and Matthew Hare from Sheffield Hallam University then presented on their data dashboard which uses data from the Studiosity API and other sources, and outputs to Tableau. One such chart, showing usage changes over a number of years, is shown (badly) in the photo above. This was a very interesting session for me, as we have just done this ourselves using Power BI. Some of their findings / experience felt very familiar – high usage in Health subjects, low in their Business, Technology and Engineering College (strange bedfellows, but our Business folks can also be hard to engage with new technology and interventions). Another observation they made was that Studiosity seems to hit more demographic groups than those which traditionally access support services, a good thing.
After lunch, Dr Andy Gould from SOAS talked about how they are responding to AI which led into an open discussion. Andy referenced Jisc, who in their response said that a crisis could be used as a driver for change, similar to what I and others said about the pandemic response. The problem is the sector seems to be in perma-crisis. They have co-created a student guide containing a list of ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ as best practice. Andy also talked about the idea of academics using ChatGPT to write student feedback, something students were very against, unsurprisingly, and finally noted that some students have reporting using a paraphrasing service I won’t name to try and ‘launder’ AI produced writing.
Other random points and observations made throughout the day in discussions with colleagues included a note from one institution that has seen Studiosity seemingly widen their participation gap, possibly as a result of higher achieving students engaging with the service to a greater extent. Much of our discussions were on the nature of students wanting to have a personal connection when it comes to seeking support, something Studiosity delivers well, and which may indicate strong use of the new Student Connect service when it goes live. Referencing was noted as by far the most in demand area for support, and again something that may draw them to peer support. Finally, there was a comment about how in some subject areas, such as engineering, students may not get any conventional written assignment until their 3rd year, with 1st and 2nd year assignments focusing on group work. This is an important point for me, and Sunderland, to be aware of as it may help to explain weak uptake in certain areas.
The University of Sunderland has done a lot of work over the past few years to standardise and professionalise our personal tutoring provision and align it with UKAT, the United Kingdom Advising and Tutoring association. It was from this that the Studiosity project began, and when our Pro VC for Learning and Teaching put out a call towards the end of last year for us to attend and present at this year’s conference en masse, I submitted a proposal for my Studiosity pilot year presentation – now in what I hope is its final form, including impact on attainment and progression for the pilot cohort.
Conference sessions I was able to attend as a participant were:
UKAT Curriculum Taster Session, by Karen Kenny of the University of Exeter which allowed me to complete an introductory module.
Empowering Under-Represented Voices, by Rachael O’Connor from the University of Leeds which included a discussion on how tutors can reach and support those students.
Considerations Around Academic Misconduct, by Luke Jefferies from the University of East Anglia – a really good session that deconstructed notions of ‘cheating’ and discussed some of the unspoken and unacknowledged factors which feed into academic misconduct. I had not considered, for example, that in some cultures it is a sign of respect to directly quote others, rather than being taken as plagiarism as it is in UK HE.
Lighting Talks on the significance of graduate attributes, an evaluation of the impact of mindset interventions, and the impact of specialist academic tutors from my colleagues at our London Campus.
Technology in Advising SIG, by Pete Fitch of UCL who led a discussion on what technologies we are using to support tutoring, including learning management systems, ePortfolios, and bespoke timetabling and appointment booking systems.
Understanding Student Finances, by Charmaine Valente from the Student Loans Company who talked about the current loans system in England and Wales which is helpful for PATs to know about to be able to inform students.
Academic Coaching at the University of Wolverhampton, by James Jennings who talked about the dedicated academic coaches they are employing at Wolverhampton to provide dedicated support and pastoral care for students.
Critical Thinking and Tutoring, by George Steele of Ohio State University which was an interesting session to see some of the differences in perspective in the US system, such as students choosing an institution first without knowing what they want to major in. Part of the role of tutors there is to guide students and help them make that decision.
Active Listening for Effective Personal Tutoring, by Angela Newton from the University of Leeds who led an interactive session exploring and evaluating our listening skills.
Attached photos are from the opening keynote speech, George Steele from Ohio State talking about reflective thought, and examples of the Welsh language not trying very hard (I feel like I can get away with this joke by being Scottish).
Slide showing every nation with a space programme of some kind – it’s a lot!
“Why I got out of bed for class today?” Because if I hadn’t, my boss and my boss’s boss would have taken turns to kill me if I had missed our first annual learning and teaching conference.
Back in those heady days of 2019, when we were all young, innocent and care-free, a couple of good friends of mine bought me a ticket to see Nightwish at the Wembley Arena in December 2020 as a Christmas present. Well, there was some sort of global event or emergency or something which means it didn’t happen. It was rescheduled for the following year, and that didn’t happen either. We never did find out why it was cancelled with less than a week’s notice the second time, but our suspicion is that someone in the band got Covid. So it was rescheduled again, for November 2022, and this time it went ahead, and it was wonderful!
Such was this case with our conference too – planned since 2019, and finally taking place two years later. It was every bit as good as Nightwish I swear. We had some 220 people sign-up from all across the University, and my team were out in force, running sessions on CleverTouch boards and working as marshals, making sure everything went without a hitch, and I did my Studiosity impact presentation in one of the breakout sessions.
The conference began with a student panel discussion, talking about their experience of online study over the pandemic, and later as hybrid learners. The OfS could learn a thing of two from them – students want both. The benefits and social connections of in-person teaching, and the convenience of being able to catch-up with recorded and online sessions in their own time. One astute comment was that “engagement is not the same thing as attendance”, and disengaged students can be every bit as much of a problem in-person as online. Their thoughts on solutions were to mix up teaching methods, and to have interactive and group activities that make students want to be there.
Sessions I attended were from Dr Nicola Roberts on ‘Failing to Progress on a Programme of Study: A Statistical Analysis of Factors Related to Criminology Students’, Dr Helen Williams on ‘The awkwardness of transitioning to Higher Education and the implications for student retention’, and Dr Elizabeth Hidson on ‘SunRAE – the Sunderland Reflective Action in Education Conference, Podcast and e-journal contribution to enhancing international initial teacher training student engagement’.
The day wrapped with a keynote by – somewhat unbelievably – Dr Andrew Aldrin, son of Buzz. I was one, single degree of separation from a man who walked on the moon. Andy, as he insisted on being introduced, is the President of the Aldrin Family Foundation which has a mission to educate people, mainly K12 school aged kids in the US, about space, the moon, Mars, and to inspire people into pursuing space-related careers. As the man said, “Kids love space, and dinosaurs, but they get over dinosaurs.” (It was a good job we didn’t have any palaeontologists in the room.)
