May 3, 2024, by Ben Atkinson

Reflections on the Teaching and Learning Conference Pt 1

In a two-part series, we will be reflecting on the recent Teaching and Learning Conference which took place on the UoN UK campus on the 23rd and 24th April 2024.

This first post discusses the keynote presentation from Professor Carl Gombrich, the Dean and founder member of a new university called the London Interdisciplinary School. In his presentation titled ‘Interdisciplinary ways to view the world’, Professor Gombrich presented some of the new approaches being put into practice at the London Interdisciplinary School. Here is a new approach to the traditional model of University study in the UK, with students choosing their own path through a series of options that allow them to focus on their own interests towards graduating with a degree that takes into account their individual research interests.

Of particular note in this keynote presentation, was an assessment which built in the use of ai from the start and asked raised the issue of what AI may mean for interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary learning, and for student assessment more widely. Students were tasked with writing a critical article with the support of Chat GPT, while at the same time keeping a video or written log of where the ai tool had been used within the work and the process through which the students had to guide and push the ai tool in order to get out of it any kind of content which might be useable at an academic level. In addition, students were asked to critique their use of ai and comment on the extent to which the ai supported or hindered their work from an theoretical perspective.

In one example shared during the keynote, a student discussed the great lengths they had to go to in order for Chat GPT to produce any response that even began to answer the question posed. In a fascinating video blog, the student discussed spending hours trying to train the ai tool by asking more and more detailed questions. In this way they were able to slowly coach Chat GPT into providing a more specific answer. Even then, there were concerns about misinformation and the factual accuracy of responses. In the end, the student concluded that the amount of time and effort needed to ‘train’ the ai tool, greatly outweighed the benefit for an academic research paper. However, the student did find ai to be useful in some other scenarios including asking the tool to provide a summary of a longer piece of writing, reduce word count or check spelling and grammar errors (as is already the case in tools like Grammarly).

This keynote presentation was not the only paper at the conference which focused on the use of ai. There were several other notable examples, including a presentation from colleagues in the School of Biosciences on the use of ai to support students on placement tasks and a paper discussing the development of the ‘I in Ai’ course developed for staff at UoN.

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