GenAI Newsletter Issue 1

This is the first in a series of GenAI newsletters which is aimed at helping staff integrate GenAI into their curricula and pedagogic practice. While acknowledging and addressing concerns, our approach remains positive and committed to enabling our students to make the most of the opportunities GenAI offers.

GAI Canvas Course

There is a comprehensive on-demand Generative AI Canvas course, designed by the Centre for Innovation in Education (CIE) colleagues and open to all staff. It includes topics such as GenAI tools, case studies and academic integrity considerations. Please visit the Canvas site to find out more.

GenAI Fest

Hosted by the Centre for Innovation in Education, GenAI Fest 2024 was a series of sessions in September to support and inspire our academic and professional services community in the new academic year. You can find all the session recordings and relevant resources by visiting this GenAI Fest event Padlet.

Generative AI Network (GAIN)

The Generative AI Network, hosted by CIE, now has over 250 members across both UK and international HE institutions, and will be hosting bi-monthly webinars and events across 2024-25.  If you are interested in joining GAIN, please contact gain@liverpool.ac.uk.

Assessment Redesign

Colleagues in CIE are working on a resource where academic staff can upload examples of how they are redesigning and amending their assessments, in the light of GenAI. In the next newsletter, we will share the link and more details.

Assessment redesign was an element of the GenAI Fest event (above) and the resource for that can still be accessed – which features a lot of examples which staff might find useful.

Another tool to help colleagues think about how best to assess students in the context of GenAI is our CIE asessment designer GPT tool. How to use: press the ‘help me to design an assessment’ button as your first step, and then follow the steps that the tool gives you. It will ask a series of questions: the level of the students, the Learning Outcome/skill/ability to which the assessment is tied, how many students there are, and the academic discipline. Answer the questions in the chat bar, and it will generate an assessment idea for you. It will also suggest ideas for incorporating AI into the assessment process.

Call for Research

Developing Academic Practice Journal

Following the success of the Pedagogic Research Conference 2024, a special issue of Developing Academic Practice invites contributions in areas of developing academic practice, leadership and innovation in relation to generative artificial intelligence (AI) that show a forward-looking scholarly approach to how AI has been used in innovative ways in practice for learning and teaching, especially how evaluative judgment has been supported in the context of generative tools that can be transferred from one practice to another. The vision for the issue is something that people can read and use, so we encourage submissions concerning innovative practice. You can find out more here about the special edition journal, including a call for papers.

SEDA Generative AI and Multimodal Learning Project

Staff members from CIE are currently working collaboratively with academics from multiple universities across the UK and beyond on a project to explore the impact Generative AI has on multimodal pedagogies. The project seeks to determine whether Generative AI makes multimodal forms of pedagogy (where different modes of information (text, sound, image, video, etc.) are combined, transposed and transformed) more accessible and inventive, ultimately leading to more complex or alternative ways of making meaning. This project has received external funding from the Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA) and will ultimately produce a published guide for educators on incorporating GenAI into multimodal pedagogy. For information on this project or to potentially contribute a case study, please contact CIE.

Thought Piece

One reflection from numerous colleagues when thinking about how we cope with GenAI in the University context was about how technology shifts what students can achieve and what we can expect from them. As certain previously time-consuming or laborious tasks are automated - be it checking spelling, presentation, crunching data or scouring texts – there is more scope for students to demonstrate higher-order learning. Thereby one of the ways in which will need to adapt our assessment of student work is by being very clear with students that the bar has been raised, and the disciplinary specificities of what we now are hoping to see from them. I have blogged about how technology raised the bar for me, at the tail end of the last century, and GenAI will continue to push it higher!

Podcast: Learning to AI

There is a University of Liverpool series of our own podcasts on GAI and its use in Higher Education, Learning to AI.

GenAI and HE in the news

At the end of July the QAA (Quality Assurance Agency) published a piece on The opportunities Generative AI offers to higher education and graduates of the future. This is a report on an ongoing QAA project, and is well worth a read – and while cautious in some areas it is an upbeat take on what our students can gain from learning about GenAI.

Stanford University’s Human Centred Artificial Intelligence (HAI) Project published a piece on Covert Racism in AI: How Language Models Are Reinforcing Outdated Stereotypes – which has some really useful links. On a more positive note, Riana Pfefferkorn also has a post on the HAI site At the Intersection of Technology and Civil Liberties where she talks about her hopes to develop more trustworthy GenAI – it will be interesting to follow her work on this.

In Nature last month, a piece entitled AI firms must play fair when they use academic data in training highlighted the use of academics’’ work in the training of GenAI tools – which may well make us wonder what our own work we may one day find shuffled back to us a query we make at a GenAI system!

References and Useful Links

To contribute content for future newsletters or for queries related to this one, please contact Professor David Webster: dw24@liverpool.ac.uk

 

 

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