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As the evidence from generative AI in higher education starts to roll in, it is becoming clear that “frictionless” GenAI often undermines learning. GenAI products designed to minimise the user’s effort to obtain a polished answer or document undermine intellectual work such as questioning assumptions, reframing problems, or revising claims. As this interaction paradigm establishes itself in higher education (surveys consistently report student usage at approximately 80%) the consequences of uns...
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The UTS Health Faculty's GenAI-ENHANCE Summit provides an annual snapshot of the leading edge applied research that's testing the potential of GenAI to deepen learning in their diverse health programs, as well as how GenAI is changing professional practice. CIC's Simon Buckingham Shum was honoured to give the keynote, painting a broader contextual picture, before the program deep-dived into specific contexts. Continuing the theme of his recent work, he explored the intersection of 3 concepts:...
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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 platfo...
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What does it take to get Copilot working well with finance data? New work led by Shane Lee sheds light on the “invisible labour” often required for AI productivity gains... We all recognise the marketing discourse around GenAI promising staff empowerment and rapid productivity gains. However, Shane Lee’s work injects a dose of reality, documenting how sociotechnical realities on the ground can introduce ‘friction’ before such gains are realised, requiring various “workarounds” (an established c...
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GenAI tools offer students an additional 24/7 partner in their learning, while learning analytics offer solutions to personalised feedback to foster self-regulated learning. How can both work together in a single tool, within the context of a learning design? Generative AI (genAI) tools – especially large language models (LLMs) - are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in education, providing yet another partner for students in their learning. Their 24/7 availability and conversational functions o...
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CIC's director Simon Buckingham Shum delivered two keynote addresses recently, framing AI as thinking tools in the context of the global polycrisis... In his talks to the Societal Impact of AI Symposium at UNSW Sydney, and the international Online Teacher Education Conference, Simon argues that the societal and educational implications of significantly degraded/collapsing, interacting systems are profound, and education is called to equip our students for this. It is in this context that dialog...
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"Learner flourishing" is a wholistic concept that reflects current concerns that education must cultivate the whole person for the turbulent times ahead. A special issue dedicated to how this intersects with AI has just come out... There is growing emphasis on flourishing as a fundamental concept for our times, possibly more helpful than "sustainability" as argued by John Ehrenfeld: "flourishing — the attainment of the full potential of living creatures." When it comes to learners, Frank Ma...
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Learning analytics offers promising solutions for personalising student learning and support, yet adoption remains limited due to implementation challenges and unclear impact. The missing piece? Learning design, which provides the context needed to transform data into meaningful insights into students’ learning. CIC's Lecturer Dr Lisa-Angelique Lim addresses this gap in teaching her subject Crunch: Learning Analytics for Performance and Improvement, part of the Graduate Certificate of Learning ...
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Yuveena Gopalan's doctoral research is studying how successful researchers learnt their craft. The first major publication from her PhD has just come out, distilling the insights from interviews into a conceptual framework. Strange as it may seem, relatively little is known about how academic researchers learn. Yes there are training courses to build specific skills, but all the evidence from workplace learning studies shows that this is not how professionals in other sectors learn. Co-supervis...
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