openAIED SIG Seminar: Generative AI and Higher Education: Where are we and where are we going?

Professor John Domingue (STEM)

Wednesday 6th December | 10:00-11:00 AM

Abstract

It has been barely a year since ChatGPT burst onto the world. This high exposure of Generative AI has forced universities to reflect upon and rethink many aspects of the way they teach and assess. Building on AI research, innovation and deployment which stretches over a decade, since the beginning of 2023 we have been exploring the potential of Generative AI to aid in OU teaching and learning. In this talk I will report on early results, including proof of concepts, in the areas of content generation and digital assistants for students and outline possible future directions.

Bio


John Domingue holds a position of Professor of Computer Science, at the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) at the Open University and serves as the President of STI International, an organization specializing in semantics and responsible for the ESWC conference series. With a career including serving as KMi Director from 2015 to 2022, Prof. Domingue has contributed over 240 refereed articles in fields such as semantics, AI, the Web, distributed ledgers, and eLearning.

From 2017 to 2021, he led the first of five themes on University Learners for the £40M Institute of Coding, an initiative aimed at increasing the number and diversity of computing graduates in the UK while strengthening the connection between university teaching and corporate training. Between 2022 and 2023, Prof. Domingue spearheaded a project to develop a smart national educational content platform that incorporated cutting-edge AI techniques to support further education educators. Since 2023, he has been at the forefront of examining the impact of Generative AI on higher education. His newest project is SAGE-RAI: Smart Assessment and Guided Education with Responsible AI which will use Generative AI to develop and deploy an AI assistant to support teaching and learning.

Show & TEL 13th Dec 2022

Tuesday 13th December (9.30am – 12pm)
AGENDA & ABSTRACT
Link to Recording

Join us for the last time this year for openTEL Show & TEL seminar, chaired by Jessica Carr and presentations from Duygu Bektik, Francisco Iniesto, Jenna Mittelmeier, Maria Aristeidou, Fridolin Wild, Koula Charitonos, Andrew Brasher and Paul Astles.

All are welcome!

AGENDA

9:30am – 10:00am: Steering Group – OpenTEL ’23 onwards (Updates from the Chair Eileen Scanlon)

10:00am – 11:30am: Presentations

10:00am – 10:30am: Updates from previous and current OpenTEL fellows

10:30am – 11:30am: Updates from SIG leads and OpenTEL members on current and future projects

11:30am – 12:00pm: Goodbye from Eileen Scanlon

ABSTRACTS

Title:
EdTech Forum
Presenters:
Fridolin Wild

Title:
Joint webinar series with UNHCR
Presenters:
Koula Charitonos

Title:
Module Maps
Presenters:
Andrew Brasher

Title:
The role of Learning Design at The Open University in supporting student retention and success
Presenters:
Paul Astles
Abstract:
This talk would begin by framing what the role of a learning designer is at The Open University (OU). We would then move to focus on the work that the OU Learning Design (LD) team have been doing around workload and retention. A brief overview of how real time student feedback is used within module presentation is followed by the impact that course workload, specifically overloaded or unbalanced content, has on student retention and how we use a specialised tool to map workload, activity types and constructive alignment.  We then will discuss the role LDs play in the identification and implication of design decisions, communicating outcomes with module teams and application of the ICEBERG model (this model is used at the OU as a rationale for our approach to impact student retention and success).

open & Inclusive SIG: Expanding the notion of accessibility? Linguistic accessibility of educational materials

logoopen & Inclusive Special Interest Group
Tuesday 1st November (14:00 – 15:30 BST)

To all our speakers and attendees who always take time out to join us for the Open & Inclusive SIG, we say “thank you it has been an eventful year”. For the last time this year, we have our very own Dr. Irina Rets who will be discussing about her recent Research Project. All are welcome as usual!

                                                   Link to Recording

Abstract
The C-19 pandemic has given momentum to the pedagogy of care approaches – approaches which demand flexibility and sensitivity, for instance, with deadlines and individual needs of learners, and which emphasise that access to learning should be seen as part of a societal issue or an institutional approach to teaching, rather than as a deficit situated within the learner.

While accessibility research has been mainly addressing the needs of disabled learners – in the aftermath of the pandemic – should accessibility research focus more in-depth on other groups of learners, such as, for example, international learners?

This interactive talk will present the linguistic accessibility framework developed in a doctoral thesis (Rets, 2021). We will discuss why there was a need for this framework, and what research methods were used to develop it. We will also talk about how to apply this framework to teaching, and what implications this will have for the learner, teacher, and the educational institution.

Author Bio:
Dr Irina Rets is a Doctoral Researcher in educational technology, based at the Institute of Educational Technology (IET), the Open University (OU), UK. She also holds a doctorate in applied linguistics from Volgograd State University (Russia). Irina’s research interests lie at the intersection of education, technology-enhanced learning, and applied linguistics.

As part of her PhD, she investigated the accessibility of online education to English learners. Irina has used a variety of methods to explore this topic, as well as the topics of other research projects she has provided research consultancy for: eye-tracking, online measures of learner behaviour; statistical modelling, advanced qualitative analysis of the data from over 40 interviews she has conducted to date; cluster analyses; analysis of longitudinal reflective learner diaries; analysis of surveys; participatory research.

Irina is a Fellow of Higher Education Academy (FHEA). Before her PhD at the OU, Irina taught a variety of academic university courses to undergraduate and graduate students in English-medium settings. She was involved in all stages of the teaching of these courses: from course design to course delivery and assessment.

 

Connected Higher Education in Crisis Contexts Webinar (October)

Knowledge Exchange event: Financing for scale
Monday 31st October (14:00 – 15:30 BST)

We are excited to announce that our next CLCC / UNHCR / OU Knowledge Exchange event will be held in collaboration with the Humanitarian Education Accelerator’s Community of Practice.  This session will focus on Financing for Scale and will be at 3pm CET on Monday 31st October (please note the from Sunday 27th October the clocks will go back in Denmark which may cause some confusion in calendars).

The session will explore the options for funding of innovative education initiatives and will be based on a Financing Scale Learning Paper by Kate Dodgson, who will be one of the presenters.  We will also have a presenter from Kepler, who have recently managed to scale out into Ethiopia, and who will share some of the learnings from this process.  We will also hear from a donor on their perspective of this scaling process and who will share some insights from their side.

For more information about this series of events please get in touch with Dr Koula Charitonos, Institute of Educational Technology, Open University at koula.charitonos at open.ac.uk or Francis Randle, Division of Resilience and Solutions, UNHCR at RANDLE at UNHCR.org.

If you would like to be sent a meeting request for these events please contact openTEL.

Connected Higher Education in Crisis Contexts Webinar (October)

Knowledge Exchange event: Financing for scale
Monday 31st October (14:00 – 15:30 BST)

We are excited to announce that our next CLCC / UNHCR / OU Knowledge Exchange event will be held in collaboration with the Humanitarian Education Accelerator’s Community of Practice.  This session will focus on Financing for Scale and will be at 3pm CET on Monday 31st October (please note the from Sunday 27th October the clocks will go back in Denmark which may cause some confusion in calendars).

The session will explore the options for funding of innovative education initiatives and will be based on a Financing Scale Learning Paper by Kate Dodgson, who will be one of the presenters.  We will also have a presenter from Kepler, who have recently managed to scale out into Ethiopia, and who will share some of the learnings from this process.  We will also hear from a donor on their perspective of this scaling process and who will share some insights from their side.

For more information about this series of events please get in touch with Dr Koula Charitonos, Institute of Educational Technology, Open University at koula.charitonos at open.ac.uk or Francis Randle, Division of Resilience and Solutions, UNHCR at RANDLE at UNHCR.org.

If you would like to be sent a meeting request for these events please contact openTEL.