Artificial Intelligence in education

Senior Professor Sue Bennett: Hi, I'm Sue Bennett. I'm the Interim Deputy Vice Chancellor, Academic Student Life here at the University of Wollongong. We're really excited to be embracing generative AI in our learning and teaching.

We've been engaging with AI through the lens of cautious curiosity, balancing the need for integrity through an interest in being able to support students and staff with learning and teaching. We're now at the point where we can bring together all of our efforts so far and take a more strategic and institution wide approach to how we will use generative AI in education.

Our long term aim is to transform the ways that we learn, teach, work, assess, and to prepare our students for a world in which AI will be integrated into their future professional lives. We're taking an evidence based, and collaborative approach to the risks and opportunities of generative AI. Through governance and ongoing consultation, we will maintain transparency and accountability.

Our approach to using generative AI is framed around 4 pillars.

The first pillar is integrity, so that is about designing secure assessments so we can really be sure that the performance of a student is the performance of that student. We have assessments that are helping students to learn, so assessment for learning, as well as having assessments that are assessing what students have learned. So that's assessment of learning. For example, it's looking across a degree program and working out where there are points for meaningful assessment across that program. So that's what's called programmatic assessment.

Another one of our pillars is about empowerment. So that's ensuring that our students and staff are confident users of generative AI, that they understand what it is useful for and how it can be used, and they feel confident to use it for those purposes.

And one of the enablers of empowerment is increasing our AI literacy. So ensuring that that is embedded not just in training programs, but in our own practise day to day and our conversations about generative AI.

Another one of our pillars is inclusion. So we know that digital inclusion is important across all of the range of technology enabled activities, and AI is no exception. Having access to the tools that you need and then beyond that, having the knowledge and the confidence to be able to use those tools are all elements of our inclusion approach.

And our fourth pillar is innovation. So we're committed not only to embedding AI in our current practise, but to be constantly looking for new innovations.

We know this is a very fast moving field and we also know that fantastic ideas for integrating AI are going to come from our own use by students and by staff.

So all together this reflects UOW's commitment to maintaining academic integrity and the quality of learning and teaching in an AI enabled world. We're also supporting staff and students to engage and innovate ethically and responsibly with AI. And that commitment to innovation is going to inform our design of authentic assessment, our approach to programmatic assessment, and our commitment to responsible experimentation with generative AI.