On Wednesday (29th October 2025) members of our Masters in Online Teaching Community of Practice were invited by our colleagues at the Open University of Sri Lanka to join them for the final event in their ten-webinar series on the use of GenAI in education.
The speaker was Professor Helen Crompton, Executive Director of the Research Institute for Digital Innovation in Learning at ODUGlobal, Professor of Instructional Technology, and Director of the Virtual Reality Lab at Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia, USA.
Professor Helen Crompton, Old Dominion University, USA
Professor Crompton gave a fascinating insight into the pace of development of GenAI, and compared its significance in causing a complete shift in educational practices commensurate with the development of the printing press, and the world wide web. She spoke about the various major players at the current moment – ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and DeepSeek, for example, with more appearing all the time – and how their availability needs to revolutionise how we approach education, and in particular assessment within education. The notion of rote learning and assessing by memory is becoming a thing of the past (‘Hurrah’ some might say!). We need to think about how assessment can work with these tools, rather than trying to ban or avoid them. We can ask students to critique the outputs of GenAI in response to particular prompts, demonstrating their understanding of the topic, or to write a piece in parallel to GenAI and comparing the two responses. We need our learners to understand how to use GenAI, and to be conversant with the fallibility of these tools. Rather than copying and pasting the AI output and submitting it, we need learners to engage with the output, critique it, find the flaws, and in the process realise that these tools are not perfect and cannot be relied upon without checks.
A recording of the webinar will soon appear on the YouTube channel for the GenAI webinar series run by the Open University of Sri Lanka’s Open Education unit. All ten of the webinars have a home here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLd4ezLHf_qqcK-c-SfOuzlO_6M_AePgRG