How are you feeling about the rapid advancement of GenAI and its influence on your work and teaching? An action plan for GenAI has been set in motion at UTS, but levels of engagement, usage of the tools and knowing how to get academic integrity support are currently widely varied within our community. With GenAI already rife in industry and tools advancing at a rapid pace, how can we help support everyone to be skilled up in this space? And how can we design this support to be playful and active, but also sustainable and easy to update?
One way forward to get us all aligned with effective, ethical engagement with GenAI is the release of a new Canvas course offering introductory, self-paced training for UTS academics. The objectives of this course will be for you to:
- locate and use GenAI tools
- understand how key guidance from TEQSA and UTS informs what we do
- contextualise and apply UTS’s 5 principles for the effective use of GenAI
- allow for time to keep exploring GenAI
An Education Portfolio production
To start designing the course, the recently formed Education Portfolio came together on campus for a full-day hackathon. Our portfolio is made up of people with a range of skills such as learning design, operations, media production, communications, curriculum design and approval, connected intelligence, inclusive practices, academic literacies and teaching & learning research.
Once we split into groups, it was clear there were benefits to drawing on our collective strengths, with each of us offering different skills and experiences. There were opportunities for operational staff to suggest ideas to learning designers, or for media specialists to share animation concepts with curriculum advisors. As well as learning from each other, this was a chance for us to simply get to know colleagues we otherwise might not have worked with (and have fun doing it!).
Group work (with GenAI as a bonus team member)
The pressure was soon on for the various groups to brainstorm and form ideas for our modules, with an afternoon deadline to present our ideas (and win prizes). We all dispersed into different locations to deliberate on our top secret plans, with our team taking the strategic decision to base our start-up at Mrs & George cafe so we were within reaching distance of coffee.
Blogs on this topic are always a good source of inspiration, and our team opted to use a myth-busting blog by University of Sydney’s Danny Lui as a starting point. Maybe our modules could start with a myth about AI and then we can challenge that through activities and reflection?
It soon became apparent that the blog, published over a year ago, was dated in some aspects. Some members of our group used GenAI tools to assist us further, with prompts being refined to help determine what was more relevant for our current purposes. This in itself busted one of the myths – that GenAI content is dated! We then used a Miro board to plan and visualise how different themes could be explored through resources and activities. Throughout the process, it was clear that, when understood and used properly, the latest tools can create effective shortcuts without stifling creativity.
Multiple ideas for one deliverable
Common themes and ways of working were exposed in the rapid-fire 3-minute group presentations at the end of the day. Most of us expanded on the brief, incorporated chatbots (including one called ‘Chatwick’), some had tailored pathways for progression, and others showed an overall plan with one or two sample modules.
As someone who was not on one of the winning teams, I can confidently say that there were no winners here. Okay, okay, there was a winning team, but all of the teams had gems that will contribute to the final version of this training. The challenge now is to harness all of this energy and distill a myriad of ideas into a single course that will meet the needs of our academics. A pilot course will be developed in October, with a plan to launch an initial version in early November. Watch this space!