CIC’s Lisa-Angelique Lim was engaged on multiple fronts at ASCILITE: here’s the lowdown…
ASCILITE25 (Nov 30 – Dec 3) brought together the Asia-Pacific region’s leading Educational Technology voices to Adelaide. This year’s focus on AI exemplifies the conference’s ongoing commitment to addressing the most pressing and transformative issues in higher education. As the region’s most established and influential gathering for educational technology research and practice, ASCILITE provides a platform for rigorous inquiry into how emerging technologies are reshaping teaching, learning, and assessment.
Panel: Leveraging Collective Wisdom to Understand Students’ Perspectives of AI in Higher Education
Moderated by Associate Professor Trish McCluskey (Deakin University), the panel comprised Prof Kelly Matthews (UQ), Prof Margaret Bearman (Deakin), Prof Michael Henderson (Monash), Dr Aneesha Bakharia (UQ), and CIC’s Dr Lisa-Angelique Lim, who are some of the AI in HE Project team, a multi-institutional project investigating students’ perspectives on AI in higher education. We shared the project conceptions, challenges, and what collective wisdom looks like in action. The panel discussed the process involved in undertaking this multi-institutional project.
Challenges and opportunities in a project like this:
- A key challenge is managing the large and diverse project team (19), and the particular leadership opportunities created for the Early Career Researchers.
- Another is managing expectations and ensuring the project maintained its strategic direction while enabling all team members to contribute or lead in various disseminations.
- Key to managing this challenge was the Governance Group, whose role was to provide oversight of the project – not so much in terms of setting rules of engagement, but more so to make strategic decisions around project activities and to maintain awareness of the outputs being disseminated by various subgroups.
- Working groups were key to the productivity strategy given the size of the project team. The project morphed over time, from its beginnings as a large survey study with focus group discussions, to co-labs involving students and staff to make sense of the opportunities and tensions afforded by AI in learning, feedback, and academic integrity. Working groups facilitated the operationalisation of these activities, with junior researchers leading and contributing their distinctive expertises and skills.
Multi-institutional ethics. One of the questions that piqued the audience was how ethics review was managed across four institutions, knowing that each institution may vary in their guidelines. Our approach was to initiate ethics with the institution that was the easiest to work with, and then ratify the approved ethics with the other institutional HRECs.
Practical lessons for future consortia. The panel hoped that the session was useful to those considering similar multi-institutional projects. Our project has shown what’s possible with the right people and backing.
Read the article: McCluskey, T., Henderson, M., Matthews, K., Bearman, M., Lim, L.-A., Bakharia, A. (2025). Collective wisdom in action: Lessons from a multi-university collaboration on student voices and Generative AI. In S. Barker, S. Kelly, R. McInnes & S. Dinmore. (Eds.), Future Focussed. Educating in an era of continuous change. Proceedings ASCILITE 2025 (Conference Companion Materials). Adelaide Convention Centre, Adelaide, Australia (Nov 30 – Dec 3, 2025). https://doi.org/10.65106/apubs.2025.2775
Battle of the bots: A seriously fun panel
With the rapid advancement of generative AI technologies, numerous large language models (LLMs) and conversational agents have emerged—notably ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. While commercial bots are increasingly used across all spheres of life including education, critical questions remain for education:
- To what extent are they useful for teaching and learning?
- How do outputs from different models differ in ways that are optimal for education?
Along with this, there is also an awareness that commercial LLM tools – since they are trained on information from the internet – are inherently biased toward dominant perspectives; this has implications on their fitness for supporting students to learn. Thus, the work by Professor Vanessa Andreotti (University of Victoria) and her team – described in detail in Burnout From Humans – to push back on this very limitation provides an interesting counterpoint. They developed an experimental chatbot designed to push back against the ‘transactional’ nature of most generic chatbots which are designed to answer questions and complete tasks as requested by users. Rather, this “meta-relational AI” emphasises collaborative sense-making, and also purposefully moves away from the dominant colonial expressions, by drawing on more indigenous ways of expression. Can such a bot be more helpful for teaching and learning?
The session pitted three bots against each other: Gemini, Claude, and Aiden Cinnamon Tea (a meta-relational AI hosted in Claude). CIC’s Lisa-Angelique Lim wielded Aiden, against fellow bot-battlers UQ’s Aneesha Bakharia (Gemini) and ECU’s Antony Tibbs (Claude). A specially selected panel and the audience judged outputs across three scenarios where educators might use chatbots:
- aligning graduate attributes to activities
- analysing learning data for actionable intelligence
- suggesting Socratic dialogue to help students overcome confusion in learning.
While Claude emerged as the overall winner in the eyes of judges and audience, the meta-relational AI outshone both other bots in the Socratic dialogue scenario. Judges and audience members were particularly impressed by this bot’s ability to demonstrate genuine empathy and sensitivity in the generated dialogue, highlighting the potential value of meta-relational AI in fostering supportive dialogues that enhance student learning.
Session abstract: Wheeler, P., Simpson, C., Taleo, W., & Tibbs, A. (2025). Battle of the Bots: Generative AI tools head-to-head. In S. Barker, S. Kelly, R. McInnes & S. Dinmore. (Eds.), Future Focussed. Educating in an era of continuous change. Proceedings ASCILITE 2025 (Conference Companion Materials). Adelaide Convention Centre, Adelaide, Australia (Nov 30 – Dec 3, 2025). https://doi.org/10.65106/apubs.2025.2778