Theory into practice

Have a look at the new Theory into Practice blog for tips on linking theory and practice.

Abigail Ball : 15 Apr 2024 09:00 |  Tags: Practice Research Teaching Theory |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

BERA_blog

The British Educational Research Association (BERA) blog has a range of topical subjects you may be interested in reading such as AI and sustainability:

https://www.bera.ac.uk/blog

Abigail Ball : 08 Apr 2024 10:39 |  Tags: Research Teaching |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Collaborating with AI – Writing an assignment

Rob Liu-Preece is the Academic Technologist for PAIS, Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Warwick. He has also been an IELTS marker for Writing and Speaking for 20 years and previously taught Academic Skills to international students both in the UK and overseas for 20 years.

This is the second of two posts written by Rob about AI and the ANTF Project:

While many have expressed fears that the advent of AI may threaten future employment, others have emphasised that those able to work with AI may well be in the most secure forms of work. This assignment is designed to deploy a relatively undemanding writing task which students will hopefully be motivated to carry out, being on a topic of their choice and hopefully enable them to sustain interest through the stages of writing, reading an AI answer, re-drafting and then commenting on it. I hope students will benefit from being unconstrained by academic demands as they compose a short piece of writing on a topic familiar to themselves. Additionally, that might help increase the learning take-aways they generate having completed the process. I have included an example to help students undertake the novel experience of writing with AI operating as a kind of writing assistant.

Aims of the Assignment

• To provide a motivating topic for students to write about, review and redraft.
• To practice collaboration on writing with AI.
• To enhance students understanding and awareness of significant features of their writing.
• To improve their appreciation and ability to compare human-created and AI-generated writing.
• To practice collaborating with AI to produce an improved finished piece of writing.

Learning Objectives:

• To increase understanding of the difference between a human and machine written response.
• To improve the ability to collaborate with AI to enhance a written response.
• To recognise the strengths and weaknesses of AI generated content.

Instructions:

You need to complete 4 activities for this assignment.

1. Choose a cultural artefact important to you. Write 500 – 600 words on why it’s important and what insights it carries.
2. Then write a prompt for Chat GPT and generate an answer.
3. Re-write your original incorporating new content gleaned from Chat GPT. Highlight the additional content in italics.
4. Write 2-4 paragraphs comparing human-created and AI-generated writing.

Abigail Ball : 25 Mar 2024 09:00 |  Tags: AI Assessment Rob Liu-Preece Writing |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

AI Marking Criteria

Rob Liu-Preece is the Academic Technologist for PAIS, Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Warwick. He has also been an IELTS marker for Writing and Speaking for 20 years and previously taught Academic Skills to international students both in the UK and overseas for 20 years.

This is the first of two posts written by Rob about AI and the ANTF Project:

The sudden explosion in the availability and use of generative AI technology, especially by university students has left education professionals in a position of playing catch-up. With ChatGPT gaining 1 million users in just 5 days and 100 million in 2 months, I feel like educationalists have just arrived at the point of coming up for air. As part of that process, I’ve written marking criteria aimed at marking the use of AI by students completing assignments.

I think in a learning environment characterised by uncertainty and disruption, students will benefit from an explicit expression of how the university wants them to use AI. Applying a marking framework like this could also lessen the need for tutors to follow a punitive/academic integrity route for dealing with misuse of AI. It could achieve this by opening up and defining ‘poor academic practice’ more closely aligned to AI as an alternative. I also hope this type of approach will help steer the development of pedagogy and AI, providing a structure for on-going debate and discussion. Lastly, having a set of criteria like this enables reverse engineering of training and coaching on AI for both students and tutors.

To address these issues, I’ve written a set of marking criteria based on the existing Politics and International Studies assignment marking criteria for undergraduate students. I would anticipate students including a short report to their written assignments covering their use of AI. The framework is based around 2 main categories, namely appropriacy of use and awareness of key issues. The criteria is by no means a finished piece of work, is not necessarily fit for purpose and hasn’t undergone any road testing or standardisation. Rather it is designed to signal a possible route forward for those of us concerned and interested in shaping the take-up of AI in education. It does raise some thoughts in my own mind about whether such an approach is the right way to go. Should we be setting or defining an orthodoxy in quite tight terms for AI use, like this? Is a literacy model approach implied here the correct one, or would a better way be to focus on conscious use of AI by students?

Please note I used Google Gemini to help with the overall structure of this blog and for the statistics in the first paragraph.

Abigail Ball : 18 Mar 2024 09:00 |  Tags: AI Marking Criteria Rob Liu-Preece |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Reflection in the creative arts

Have a look at this TalkingHE podcast by Dr Annamarie Mckie on using reflection in the creative arts.

Abigail Ball : 11 Mar 2024 09:00 |  Tags: Art Creativity Reflection |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

L&T Chat Show Podcast

You may find this podcast called "Pedagogy on the rocks" with Dr Nicola Grayson interesting as they discuss deep learning, surface learning and The Infinite Monkey Cage.

Abigail Ball : 04 Mar 2024 09:00 |  Tags: Learning Teaching |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Co–creating wellbeing activities for students

Dr Elena Riva, Head of Department at the Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning – (IATL) – University of Warwick reflects on Co-creating wellbeing activities for students.

Abigail Ball : 26 Feb 2024 09:00 |  Tags: Co-Creating Ntf Teaching Wellbeing |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Want to create a Digital Community? Some insights from our WBS module

Building digital communities is seen as a way to create connectedness and a sense of belonging and at the same time is seen by digital marketers as a tool to create brand loyalty and drive business. This year - for the first time - we have created a module at WBS that provides students with insights on how to create digital communities. Based on three weeks of teaching, here are some key things to keep in mind when creating a digital community (for any educator reading this blog who teaches year 1 undergraduate students, what about creating a digital community for ‘commuting students?’).

So, what is important to consider when creating digital communities?

1. Define your purpose and target audience (we used Design Thinking to help us with this step)

One example of a digital community that defines its purpose and target audience well is Barry’s Bootcamp. The purpose is defined as providing high-intensity, boutique physical and digital fitness experiences that cater to individuals seeking challenging workouts and a dynamic community environment. Its target audience primarily includes fitness enthusiasts who value being part of a motivated, like-minded community that holds each other accountable.

Equinox Fitness sells a sense of belonging to achievement-oriented metropolitan influencers who want to define their life by both vitality and success. They strive to promote an ethos of achieving equilibrium between physical discipline, career ambitions, creative pursuits, and relationships by offering programming spanning mediums like dance, art, podcasts and more alongside Founder training.

2. Choose the right platform (for our own digital community we created we used Discord)

It is important to identify the right platform to reach your audience while creating digital communities. The current social media landscape hosts a variety of channels including Facebook, X, Instagram, Blog posts, Newsletters and TikTok among others. Different platforms appeal to different people based on age, interest, location etc. The focus should begin with first identifying your audience, then deciding on the most appropriate platform and communication channels to build a community.

We thought that the Kenyan company Healthy U chose their platform (Facebook) well. Questions that informed their decision-making for creating a digital community included: How can we best reach a community of individuals in Kenya and Uganda that is keen on living a happier, healthier life by consuming alternative health and organic food products? What product or service are we providing? Who is our audience? What platform do they commonly use to interact socially? What is the best way to engage with them and is this achievable on that platform?

3. Foster a welcoming and inclusive environment

We suggest creating a sense of belonging from the start: When you create a community, it's essential to provide a sense of belonging to ensure that participants feel welcomed. For instance, consider Asian Beauty's approach: when you join their community, they ask several questions about your preferences, such as 'What do you believe this community is about?', 'What is your skin type?' and also instead of ‘what is your name’: 'How would you prefer to be called?’

4. Create engaging content and activities

Another important thing to consider when creating digital communities is creating interesting content and fun activities to get each member engaged and interested in participating. To illustrate, our chosen industry was the racecourse industry. Here, the community owners offer members first-hand access to events and shows through displaying them on the membership apps and newsletters. Members are also given intel on renovations ongoing at the racecourse to ensure that they get first-hand access to the exclusive renovated spots by seeing them through an interactive map.

5. Build relationships and connections

Building relationships, connections, and networks among the wealthy seems to be one trend that we saw across many communities, and it is one of the primary aims of racecourses, such as the Warwick Racecourse. It can certainly be linked to capitalism and reflects how economic and social capital often intertwine. The influence of wealth in this community, and in many others, influences the access to opportunities.

6. Measure success and iterate

To know the performance of one of the digital communities that we reviewed, we measured the engagement rate of Asian Beauty on discord and found that the community has a relatively high engagement rate with 14,3% of members online at the exact time when we checked out the community (1 Feb 2024 12.30pm).

7. Promote your community outside your community

While Asian Beauty has very engaged members, we felt they could do better in promoting their community. Some suggestions:

Market your community through various channels to increase membership, e.g., for google search unlocking first page visibility.

• Advertising: A/B test with Google ads optimization
• Organic approach: write more blogs / articles that contain popular keywords that are trending. e.g., for beauty communities, the keyword 'skin barrier' on Google Trends increased by 1.5x in 2023; tap into these conversations!

Level Up Online Presence: Dive into the Digital Dialogue

• Create a social media that could attract more members. Conduct survey and apply design thinking (building personas) to find the suitable social media for Instagram/TikTok/Facebook
• Be where your audience is, e.g., for beauty communities, #KoreanSkincare on TikTok has 9.9m engagement, joining this conversation might increase visibility.
• Engage with influencers beyond the community wall!

8. Belonging and responsiveness

The one aspect successful communities have in common is that they do create a sense of belonging - with members feeling safe to communicate. This leads to our final tip: Be responsive: Address member concerns, be transparent and keep the community informed. This might require a good team of moderators across various time zones. It might also require AI, something we are going to focus on in the coming weeks.

For the next four weeks, we will drill down on specifics of important concepts and technical aspects in digital communities. For example, understanding user behaviours is essential to manage digital communities. Theoretically, we will discuss users’ innate psychological needs that motivate them to come to digital communities and how users engage with different affordances (action possibilities) provided by digital communities to satisfy those needs based on academic research. Practically, we will develop hands-on skills to analyse and understand user behaviours in digital communities, such as regression analysis and sentiment analysis with user data. We will explore other important agendas in a similar manner, such as user social networks, AI considerations (e.g., chatbots), and current challenges to digital communities (e.g., fake news).

Disclaimer: We wrote this blog collectively in one workshop. We used GenAI to provide us with the structure and found illustrative examples through internet research.

For further questions on the Creating Digital Communities module, please contact Isabel Fischer: Isabel.fischer@wbs.ac.uk

Abigail Ball : 19 Feb 2024 09:00 |  Tags: Amira Badri Angie Nasirumbi Anindya Dena Boluwatife Buraimoh Bowen Zhang Community Digital Isabel Fischer Jingya Wen Milind Bage Qinyao Li Samantha Reindorf Seyoung Seol Swara Kalghatgi Tiang-Bahumi Kgothule Yichen Zhao Yimeng Zhu Zhiping He Zhuochen Wu |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Digital Technologies and student experience

Have a look at this L&T Chat Show podcast featuring Dale Mineshema-Lowe talking about digital technologies and student engagement.

Abigail Ball : 12 Feb 2024 09:00 |  Tags: Digital Student Teaching |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Third Space Perspectives

Have a look at this website and blog dedicated to exploring perspectives on integrated practice and third space professionalism in Higher Education:

https://thirdspaceperspectives.squarespace.com/

Abigail Ball : 05 Feb 2024 09:00 |  Tags: Research Space Teaching Third |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem