On Tuesday 12th December, I attended the ALT (Association for Learning Technologists) Winter Summit. The theme of the Conference was Ethics and Artificial Intelligence (AI). We heard from the following speakers:
- Helen Beetham, Researcher and Consultant
- Mary Jacob, Aberystwyth University
- Olatunde Durowoju, Liverpool Business School
- Dr Tarsem Singh Cooner, The University of Birmingham
There was also a student panel at the end which looked at the student experience of AI and their ideas for moving forward with using AI in a higher education context.
The speakers covered topics such as ethical problems and concerns with the use of AI, accessibility and AI and there was a case study showing how AI was used in a session with social work students at the University of Birmingham. It was a really enjoyable day and I learned a lot!
I’d like to share three ‘takeaways’ that I had from the ALT Summit.
Firstly, many of us are aware of some of the issues surrounding the use of AI. For example, the use AI tools takes a huge amount of energy; there are issues around equity and student access to paid for services and tools; there is an impact on student learning; we have also heard in the news that a number of larger companies have sacked ethical advisors and much more! However, one thing I have had experience of in my own work and that was raised at the Summit, was the sheer amount of secrecy behind the training of artificial intelligence models. How are these models trained exactly? Who is training them? What impact does this have? We know about the issues around encoded bias the models and we know that some of the people involved in this training process are underpaid but I definitely want to find out more!
Dr. Olatunde Durowoju spoke on ‘Achieving Inclusive Education in AI’ and has written an article on this in 2023. His talk was really interesting and spoke about some of the positive aspects of using AI and how this can benefit students such as those with neurodiversity, who are learning English as a second language or who have a disability. Examples were given of the use of AI in higher education and how this can help students improve their English language proficiency, how it can help address a cultural gap, how it can help reduce student anxiety around the quality of the work they produce and it can assist those students who may have diminished capacity due to other responsibilities (e.g. caregivers). Some of the examples given included using AI to summarise text to help gain a better understanding of it, improving the quality of writing through prompt engineering, using Chatbots to help with out-of-hours engagement and using AI to pluralise perspectives on a specific topic.
Finally, the student panel gave a real insight into how students are using AI currently, how they perceive its future use and what they would like to see moving forward from their institutions. Students on the panel were from universities such as Sheffield Hallam University, Edinburgh Napier University and the University of Kent. The students were also at different places in their University studies so there was a good range of perspectives across the students. Two of the things that students said they wanted were:
- More consistent guidance on the acceptable use of AI in their studies across the departments in their institutions but also across UK institutions in general. They believed this would help students be less confused about when and how they can use it.
- More education on the use of AI from their institutions on the problems of using AI such as perpetuating bias and academic integrity concerns.
Thank you to ALT for another wonderful conference and to the speakers for sharing their knowledge and expertise. I will definitely be exploring some of the issues and opportunities that have been mentioned in more detail.