February Essential Insights

Key Presentation Highlights

The emergence and acceleration of AI and technologies has come with great implications for education, teaching and learning. Students can easily access and use AI, yet that does not mean they are receiving the kind of learning experiences that are required or being fulfilled in their education. There remains an important question about how best to use these technologies to maximise rather than to replace learning which is partnered with questions concerning assessment and academic integrity.

Increasingly discussion within the higher education sector is focused on the ‘crisis’ of AI and academic integrity. Many of the traditional approaches adopted by universities to teach and assess can be completed by technologies. Students can use technologies to shortcut tasks and in some cases cheat assessments. There is currently no reliable means of detecting AI or accurate data on how many students are using AI in their assessments.

This is a very difficult and complex situation where there is to rethink how assessment is done to ensure that students are doing their own work and receiving quality education. One of the most significant challenges regarding assessment integrity and AI is how to get a meaningful sense of the student throughout their time in a program. There is no simple or straightforward solution to this.

There are three key ways to approach the issue:

Human authenticity

• Questioning what is the real authentic human piece of what it means to be a student or graduate in our programs.
• Highlighting there is something fundamental that a teacher does as a human being when teaching or executing a lesson plan. While teachers also use AI, they are also responsible for managing the teaching and learning environment, and delivering the lesson plan. This is something that AI cannot do.

Programmatic Assessment

• When learning is a developmental journey, the more a programmatic approach is taken, the more insight into the student journey across the program.
• It can be difficult to see and track the learning trajectories of students. Programmatic assessment provides a sense of how students are progressing over time and gives more confidence that it is the teacher who is completing the assessments and progressing through the program.
• Advantage of this approach is thinking about how assessment tasks connect with one another over the duration of the entire program. This exists in medicine programs, and also to an extent teaching programs. It is more challenging in flexible programs such as HASS.

Assessing the learning process

• GenAI can do a process of showing the working despite using AI.
• Shift conversation to looking to evidence that learning has occurred rather than looking for evidence of cheating.
• The question of validity – what is the assessment designed to measure?
• Recognition that students also exist in a complex environment. There are internet resources, peers, multimedia resources. There is a need to consider the entire ecosystem of their learning environment. The better the ecosystem is captured, the better teachers can adapt.

Resources mentioned:

Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency – Artificial Intelligence

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