Rather than be deterred by fears surrounding data privacy and cheating, universities must actively embrace generative AI to prepare students for the future of work and to enhance personalised learning and the accessibility of education, conference delegates heard.
“Students will go on to get jobs where they use AI… if you’re not preparing them because of fears of AI then you’re doing them a disservice,” Ryan Lufkin, vice president of global academic strategy at Instructure told delegates of CanvasCon 2024 in Barcelona.
“We need to move beyond the focus on cheating and teach students to use AI in pursuit of learning not instead of learning,” added Lufkin at last week’s event.
According to a 2024 survey of nearly 3,000 students and instructors across North America, 45% of students currently use AI as compared to only 15% of instructors.
However, 58% of students reported feeling that they do not have sufficient AI knowledge and skills, and 48% do not feel adequately prepared for an AI-enabled workplace.
Nearly three-quarters of students said that they expected their university to offer more courses on AI literacy.
There is no right or wrong because there are no taillights to follow so it’s going to be about adaptive thinking, experimentation and taking risks
Martin Bean CBE, the Bean Centre
Using AI in the classroom has the power to transform personalised and lifelong learning opportunities, delegates heard, enhancing the accessibility of education by taking content that’s been developed by academics and teaching staff and tailoring it to individual students’ needs.
And yet, currently, 36% of European institutions haven’t developed guidelines around the use of AI.
So, what’s behind universities’ hesitancy?
“I don’t think any of us predicted how rapidly generative AI would change and the opportunity of educational technology,” online education expert Martin Bean CBE told The PIE News, identifying four major challenges for universities’ uptake of AI.
Bean identified four major challenges to institutions’ uptake of AI, including the rapid pace of change, the lack of policy and regulatory framework, “there is no right or wrong because there are no taillights to follow so it’s going to be about adaptive thinking, experimentation and taking risks,” said Bean.
“And the final challenge for universities is, who do you bet on?
“Because it’s going to be difficult to bet on more than one large language model, and how do you do the due diligence on that vendor to make sure that they’re treating your data?” Asked Bean.
Speakers at the conference shared best practice and anecdotes about using AI as a force for good, with several sessions hearing how AI has the power to transform the personalisation of learning and increase access to education.
Leon van Bokhorst, senior lecturer at Fontys University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands, built a feedback loop implemented by the university using AI to help students take ownership of their feedback.
“Professionalisation means that we as teachers become students again. I get feedback on my feedback – there’s a double loop,” Bokhorst explained.
We need to teach students to use AI in pursuit of learning not instead of learning
Ryan Lufkin, Instructure
“As the world becomes a more complicated place with the flow of humans – whether those humans are moving for work, moving to study or whether they’re moving as refugees – we’re going to need technology to do what technology does best in education, which is open up access to high quality education experiences,” Bean told The PIE.
Former vice chancellor of the Open University and founder of FutureLearn, the UK’s first at-scale provider of Massive Open Online Courses, said his vision for launching FutureLearn in 2012 was to go beyond the OU’s 270,000 students.
“We knew we wanted to open ourselves up to millions of people all over the world, and the only way we could do that was through the application of technology,” said Bean.
On top of EdTech expanding access to education around the world, Icelandic student at the University of Florida, Jóhanna Bjartmarsdóttir, shared her experience of advocating for disability accessibility and the role of AI to create equitable education spaces.
Bjartmarsdóttir, who has ADHD, autism and severe dyslexia, and was hospitalised for much of her schooling in Iceland, didn’t get the necessary credentials to go to university in the country and has since founded HARTs EdTech company to support institutions create more accessible learning environments.
Central to HARTs’ work is supporting institutions to build virtual learning environments and use AI to personalise courses towards individual students’ learning styles.
“We have a long way to go, but the disability community has been advocating for so long for more virtual and online environments and was always told no, and then Covid happened and overnight everything became online. So that’s why I was able to get into the University of Florida,” said Bjartmarsdóttir.
“As we think about instructional design inside Canvas [learning platform] we need to think about accessibility not as an afterthought or a nice to have, but a fundamental building block,” added Bean.
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