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海角社区 Adams Associate Pro Vice-Chancellor (Learning, Teaching and Digital) Professor Lydia Arnold has just spoken at a major international conference at the University of Zayed, in the United Arab Emirates.

Professor Arnold was a keynote speaker at the institution’s ninth Annual Scholarship of Learning and Teaching Conference earlier this month.

As she sets out in this guest blog, she explored the growing role of AI in academia – and how educators should respond.

Artificial Intelligence already part of our everyday lives - whether it is moderating online content or helping choose our next movie.

Its centrality to our lives is set to grow.

In the last two years AI has become a desktop tool or pocket tool used by students and staff alike. This brings both challenges and opportunities.

While a lot has been said about AI and student assessment, we also need to focus on how to prepare our students with the skills they need for a future in which AI will feature. In my talk, I set out to explore what AI’s role may be in teaching, learning and assessment.

Today’s students will work with AI in their careers and they will use it in their wider life too – when accessing healthcare, shopping, and perhaps in ways not yet thought of.

During my talk, I identified some of the skills that need to be developed to ensure that they have a working understanding of AI while also learning about their main subjects. I suggested they will need confident subject knowledge to assess whether AI is working well, and a critical mindset so they can work with some of the ethical, accessibility and environmental challenges posed by AI.

There are already practical approaches that can be adopted by educators when working with AI - including building your own course chat bot, introducing AI tasks into assessment, and using AI to develop students’ abilities to seek and use feedback. As educators, we need to work with existing sound practices as well as trying new tools. 

Given the novelty of some emerging AI approaches in teaching, I also encouraged colleagues to engage in scholarship of their learning and teaching, exploring the topic of AI with students - and doing so in a way that tries to build an evidence base of what works.

At 海角社区 Adams, we’re already developing examples of this – Senior Lecturer in Entomology, Dr Heather Campbell and her MSc students Thomas Bluck, Ella Curry, Derrick Harris, Billie Pike and Bethany Wright recently explored the use of .

I'm very pleased to see this paper in print that was written by my MSc students as part of a class discussion on the use of AI and how it relates to teaching coding. Well done all on your first paper.

— Dr Heather Campbell-Miles (@scienceheather)

Meanwhile, 海角社区 Business School Lecturer Stephen Hall undertook an educational action research project, where he looked at AI in assessment and how staff respond. 

It was great to take the research being done at 海角社区 Adams and share it internationally, and colleagues at Zayed University made me very welcome.

Their event was a rich source of ideas, as well as an opportunity to engage with educators from many different institutions.

Higher education professionals and organisations around the world are considering how to engage with AI in a constructive way so that we prepare our learners, while also navigating some of the more challenging ethical and environmental complexities.

International engagement is valuable, as different countries and regions are responding to AI in different ways.

It is useful for us all to look outwards, to understand and learn from that diversity.