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Tag: CPD

NELE: February 2025

Published 28th February 2025

It’s the glorious return of NELE! The North East Learning Environments user group. Except, not really, because the first meeting of reformed NELE was in November, and I got a cold the day before and couldn’t go. NELE is the same group of folks as per ALT North East, but we have mutinied and left the umbrella of ALT, to become NELE once again, which it was before we partnered with ALT. Times change, organisations change, logos change, but the people and the purpose remain.

Today we talked a lot about ePortfolio systems, sharing our experiences of Mahara, both hosted and self-administered, PebblePad, and other bespoke solutions such as using OneNote and the NEE Pad solution for healthcare professionals in the region. The one area of consensus was that whatever solution you choose, take-up rates remain modest. At Sunderland, we’re looking at potentially replacing Mahara following disappointment with the Canvas integration, but after hearing what folks are paying for PebblePad, I don’t think we’ll be going down that route. Neither did OneNote come out of the discussion well, with people noting major problems with syncing and complications caused by multiple versions of the app, all looking and working a little differently.

The second topic of conversation was around digital accessibility and VLE threshold standards, and how to maintain a minimum level of quality. It’s interesting to see a few institutions are picking up on the idea of baseline standards of some kind, a topic we’ll come back to in a future meeting, as we’re doing some good work on this at Sunderland. I learned about Global Accessibility Awareness Day which is going to be on May 15th. That’s going to present a good opportunity to do some awareness work leading up to it.

After lunch we had a tour of Teesside’s new BIOS building for health sciences, which is where all of the photos come from today. They have an interactive room powered by Gener8, which is a lot like our Immersive Interactive room, but the technology has come along a bit. Projectors are low profile and flush to the ceiling, very inconspicuous, and there are infrared sensors all along the top of the walls to make the ‘touchscreen’ functionality work. We also had a look in their simulation suite, which includes a whole surgery room, and the microscopy lab was very impressive, with microscopes able to output to screens for everyone to see.

Finally, we had a discussion about note taking applications and approaches, commenting on how these kind of skills are not taught as part of course work, but only, at best, in optional study skills sessions usually run by the library. Some of the software we looked at included Obsidian and Notion.

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Generative AI: A Problematic Illustration

Published 14th February 2025
Screenshot of a slide from the presentation, showing some delicious pancakes
Mmm… pancakes…

To give the workshop its full title, Generative AI: A Problematic Illustration of the Intersections of Racialized Gender, Race, and Ethnicity. Facilitated by Nayiri Keshishi from the University of Surrey and Dustin Hosseini from the University of Glasgow, and based on Dustin’s blog post. Hands down, the best session on generative AI I’ve attended over the past two years. It was so good I’m going to rework the timetable of our PG Cert to include a version of this for the cohort I’m currently teaching.

Why was it so good? Because it took some of the ethical issues over the use of generative AI and turned them into an interactive session where we, as participants, could interrogate the problems for ourselves. This was done via the medium of a seemingly innocuous prompt which was put into an image generating AI system: ‘Create an image of a sweet, old X grandmother making pancakes’, where X was a given nationality, e.g. Russian or American. We were then asked to analyse the generated results using a framework which asked us to consider atmosphere, decor and clothing, and expressions and ethnicity.

Discussions about what we can do about this included cascading the learning and knowledge more widely, which is why all of the slides and resources to deliver the session have been published under a Creative Commons licenses on ALDinHE’s website. Another suggestion was to document the issues we encounter when using these technologies and share them on relevant forums and social spaces, and finally, what I think is the best and most useful thing we can do as educators, is to embed AI literacy in the curriculum.

The only note I had coming out of the session was that there was a statement, an assumption, that all of these new AI companies are making huge amounts of money. There is certainly a lot of money moving around in the space, but it’s all speculative investment on presumed future returns. In actuality, OpenAI lost $5 billion last year, and they’re on track to lose another $10 billion this year.

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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AI and Assessment Workshop

Published 22nd January 2025
Perplexity AI User Interface
Screenshot of Perplexity search options

Today I attended one of our own AI and Assessment Workshops to see what advice and guidance we are giving to academics and what their feelings and needs are around this topic. This is a new run of sessions which we have just started, and has been organised by one of our academics working on the topic alongside a member of my team.

Despite having published staff and student guidance documents and a dedicated SharePoint space to collate resources and our response, I found from conversing with staff at this event that there is still a prevailing feeling of lacking steer and direction. People were telling me they don’t know what tools it’s safe to use, or what students should be told to avoid. We also had a lot of people from the Library Service today, which is perhaps also indicative of the need for firmer student guidance.

I was pleased to note that there is some good practice filtering through too, such as using a quiz based declaration of use which students have to complete before unlocking their assignment submission link. We talked about adding this to our Canvas module template for next academic year, that’s something one of the academics suggested to us. On the other hand, I found people were still talking in terms of ChatGPT ‘knowing’ things, which is troubling because of the implication that these systems are more than they actually are.

While much of the session took the form of a guided dialogue, my colleague was also providing a hand’s on demo of various systems, including Perplexity which people liked for providing links out to the sources it had used (sometimes, not always), the ability to restrict answers to data from specific sources, such as ‘academic’, but noted a very US bias in the results, a consequence of the training data which has gone into these models. I was quite impressed when I tried to ‘break’ the model with leading prompts and it didn’t indulge me.

A new tool to me was Visual Electric, an image generation site aimed at producing high quality photo-like images. I have thoughts on some of their marketing… But I’m going to try and be more positive when writing about this topic, as I find it very easy to go into a rant! So instead of doing that, I have added a short disclaimer to the bottom of this post, which I’m also going to add to future posts which I write about AI.

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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Personal Safety Training

Published 5th December 2024


It’s okay, he has his safety tie on

This month’s big team meeting was given over to the University’s Security Manager for a session on personal safety, and touched upon conflict management. More security than safety then, but ‘safety’ is a friendlier term. When I think of personal safety I tend to think more along the lines of the great Colin Furze and his shenanigans.

It was unexpected training, and pretty useful. We learned about de-escalating situations from a number of problem-based learning scenarios, the institutional and personal responsibilities with regards to duty of care and health and safety, and what the University is doing to keep us all safe at work. This includes, however you feel about it, the network of 400 security cameras on Sunderland campus, the relatively new wider campus card controlled building access, and the Estates team are pushing for us to get a system called Safe Zone which is an app based panic button. We are, apparently, the only university in the North East not already using this.

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Helping Students Develop Critical Thinking Skills When Using Generative AI (Part 2)

Published 27th November 2024

Part two of Kent’s Digitally Enhanced Education series looking at how generative AI is affecting critical thinking skills. This week we had stand out presentations from:

Professor Jess Gregory, of Southern Connecticut State University (nice to see reach of the network, well, reaching out), who presented on the problem of mastering difficult conversations for teachers in training. These students will often find themselves thrust into difficult situations upon graduation, having to deal with stubborn colleagues, angry parents, etc., and Jean has developed a method of preparing them by using generative AI systems with speech capabilities to simulate difficult conversations. This can, and has, been done by humans of course, but that is time consuming, could be expensive, and doesn’t offer the same kind of safe space for students to practice freely.

David Bedford, from Canterbury Christ Church University, presented on how the challenges of critical analysis are not new, and that anything produced as a result of generative AI needs to be evaluated in just the same way as we would the results of an internet search, or a Wikipedia article, or from books and journals. He presented us with the ‘BREAD’ model, first produced in 2016, for analysis (see first screenshot for detail). This asks us to consider Bias, Relevance, Evidence, Author, and Date.

Nicki Clarkson, University of Southampton, talked about co-producing resources about generative AI with students, and noted how they were very good at paring content down to the most relevant parts, and that the final videos were improved by having a student voiceover on them, rather than that of staff.

Dr Sideeq Mohammed, from the University of Kent, presented about his experience of running a session on identifying misleading information, using a combination of true and convincingly false articles and information, and said of the results that students always left far more sceptical and wanting to check the validity of information at the end of sessions. My second screenshot is from this presentation, showing three example articles. Peter Kyle is in fact a completely made-up government minister. Or is he?

Finally, Anders Reagan, from the University of Oxford, compared generative AI tools to the Norse trickster god, Loki. As per my third screenshot, both are powerful, seemingly magic, persuasive and charismatic, and capable of transformation. Andres noted, correctly, that now that this technology is available, we must support it. If we don’t, students and academics are still going to be using it on their own initiative, the allure being too powerful, so it is better for us as learning technology experts to provide support and guidance. In so doing we can encourage criticality, warn of the dangers, and encourage more specialised research based generative AI tools such as Elicit and Consensus.

You can find recordings of all of the sessions on the @digitallyenhancededucation554 YouTube channel.

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Helping Students Develop Critical Thinking Skills When Using Generative AI (Part 1)

Published 20th November 2024

From the University of Kent’s Digitally Enhanced Education series, a two-parter on the theme of how generative AI is affecting student’s critical thinking skills, with the second part coming next week. We’ve been living with generative AI for a while now, and I am finding diminishing returns from the various webinars and training I have been attending. Nevertheless, there’s always new things to learn and nuggets of wisdom to be found in these events. The Kent webinar series has such a wide reach now that the general chat, as much as the presentations, is a fantastic resource. Phil has done a magnificent job with this initiative, and is a real credit in the TEL community.

Dr Mary Jacob, from Aberystwyth University, presented an overview of their new AI guidance for staff and students, highlighting for students that they shouldn’t rely on AI; for staff to understand what it can and can’t do, and the legal and ethical implications of the technology; and for everyone to be critical of the output – is it true? Complete? Unbiased?

Professor Earle Abrahamson, from the University of Hertfordshire, presented on the importance of using good and relevant prompts to build critical analysis skills. The first screenshot above is from Earle’s presentation, showing different perceptions on generative AI from students and staff. There were some good comments in the chat during Earle’s presentation, on how everything we’ve discussed today comes back from information literacy.

Dr Sian Lindsay, from the University of Reading, talked about the risks of AI on critical thinking, namely that students may be exposed to a narrower range of ideas due to the biases inherent in all existing generative AI systems and the limited ranges of data they have access to, and are trained upon. The second screenshot is from Sian’s presentation, highlighting some of the research in this area.

I can’t remember who shared this, if it came from one of the presentations or the chat, but someone shared a great article on Inside Higher Ed on the option to opt out of using generative AI at all. Yes! Very good, I enjoyed this very much. I don’t agree with all of it. But most of it! My own take in short: there is no ethical use of generative artificial intelligence, and we should only use it when it serves a genuine need or use.

As always, recordings of all presentations are available on the @digitallyenhancededucation554 YouTube channel.

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Inclusive Learning Festival

Published 17th September 2024
Slide showing diversity of student body at Sunderland
Some stats on the diversity of UoS students

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.

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Institutional Experiences of Microsoft Copilot

Published 6th August 2024
Diagram of MS Copilot architecture
Diagram of Microsoft Copilot Architecture

November 2023, I wrote a rambling post about my thoughts on generative AI and where it was going to go for the ALT Blog. I made a prediction there that someone was going to buy a site license for ChatGPT, and lo! This HeLF discussion was about exactly that. Sort of. It’s Microsoft’s Copilot tool that the majority of people are going for, because we are all, or mostly, existing Microsoft customers and they are baking it into their Office 365 offering. Though there are a couple of institutions looking at ChatGPT as an alternative.

Costs and practically was a big issue under discussion. Microsoft are only giving us the very basic service for free, and if you want full Copilot Premium that it’s an additional cost of around £30 a month per individual. Pricey, but it gets worse. They have tiers upon tiers, and if you want to do more advanced things like having your own Copilot chatbot available in your VLE for example, then you’re into another level of premium which goes up to hundreds a month.

We also discussed concerns about privacy and data security. If Copilot is given access to your OneDrive and SharePoint files for example, then you need to make sure that everything has correct data labels, or else you run the risk of the chatbot surfacing confidential information to users.

At Sunderland we have no plans for any premium generative AI tools at present, the costs are just prohibitive. And it’s not just at this level, the entire field of generative AI is hugely expensive and completely unsustainable. So I’ll end as I began, with prognostications: OpenAI is haemorrhaging money, they lost over half a billion dollars last year. They are living on investment capital, and unless the finance bods start seeing a serious return, they are going to pull the plug. Sooner rather than later I reckon. I don’t think OpenAI will go under exactly, but I do think they are going to get eaten by one of the big players, Microsoft most likely. A lot of headlines were made last year about Microsoft’s $10 billion investment, but people haven’t read the fine print – that $10 billion was in the form of server credits, so Microsoft is going to get that back one way or another. I’m going to give the AI bubble another six to eighteen months.

What will come after that? Generative AI isn’t going to go away of course, it’s a great technological achievement, but I think we will see a shift towards smaller models being run locally on our personal devices. It will be interesting to see how Apple Intelligence will pan out, they aren’t putting all of their eggs into the ChatGPT basket. And as for the tech and finance industries? They’ll just move onto the next bubble. Quantum computing anyone?

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International Education for Sustainable Development Conference

Published 16th July 2024
Photo of energy consumption slide
Global Primary Energy Consumption by Source

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.

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AI-Augmented Marking

Published 26th June 2024
Chart showing correlation of human and KEATH.ai grading
Accuracy of KEATH.ai Grading vs. Human Markers

This was a HeLF webinar facilitated by Christopher Trace at the Surrey Institute of Education, to provide us with an introduction to KEATH.ai, a new generative AI powered feedback and marking service which Surrey have been piloting.

It looked very interesting. The service was described as a small language model, meaning that it is trained on very specific data which you – the academic end user – feeds into it. You provide some sample marked assignments, the rubric they were marked against, and the model can then grade new assignments with a high level of concurrence to human markers, as shown in the chart above of Surrey’s analysis of the pilot. Feedback and grading of a 3-5,000 word essay-style assignment takes less than a minute, and even with that being moderated by the academic for quality, which was highly recommended, it is easy to see how the system could save a great deal of time.

In our breakout rooms, questions arose around what the institution would do with this ‘extra time’, whether they would even be willing to pay the new upfront cost of such a service when the cost of marking and feedback work is already embedded into the contracts of academic and teaching staff, and how students would react to their work being AI graded? Someone in the chat shared this post by the University of Sydney discussing some of these questions.

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