We’ve now got our standard meeting format in place – Lean Coffee discussion for the first 20 minutes and a focused discussion for the final 25 minutes.
For the February Lean coffee we managed to discuss two topics:
Approved/approving AI tools within institutions: The discussion focused on the challenges and strategies involved in approving AI tools within educational institutions. Institutions are considering the Microsoft route to ensure alignment with data governance, security, and ethics. The rapid pace of AI development poses challenges, prompting a shift from approving individual tools to providing overarching guidance.
There’s an emphasis on reviewing learning and teaching (L&T) tools for AI features and ensuring compliance with data management policies. Concerns are raised about accessibility disparities between free and paid tools, and the disruptive introduction of AI tools like Copilot.
Institutions discussed the need to understand the broader landscape of AI tools and focus on identifying needs before adopting specific technologies. The discussion also touched on the need to move beyond viewing AI as merely a cheating issue, acknowledging its potential impact across all areas of higher education.
How to stay up to date: With this one people mentioned being ‘overwhelmed by the sheer volume’ of information, ‘information overload’ and raised issues including ‘How to decide what is important’ and ‘what needs actioning now’. This is something we agreed to take away and investigate, we will report back in next few weeks.
AI Literacy was our focused discussion this month. Members spent the first ten minutes in break out groups discussing the issue, with the task of sharing two key points back. Key points and issued raised were:
- Using generative AI as a framework to engage people for general digital literacy
- Need to have basic core modules so that everyone has the same baseline understanding
- The challenge of keeping training up to date
- Criticality and trust evaluation
- Responsible use
- How is generative AI seen within assessment literacy
- Overarching policy with flexibility at faculty/course level
- Information literacy is increasingly important, this could be part of libraries activities
- of those claiming to be experts to ensure quality training for staff
- Some misunderstanding of generative AI capabilities due to poor skill levels
- Don’t assume that students know more about generative AI
We finished by asking for volunteers to form a working group to collaborate on defining AI literacy for the sector and had a marvelous 11 volunteers. We’ll report back on group activity.
Our next meeting is 20th March at 3.30pm. Sign up here.
Guests shared the following resources during the discussion:
- https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/ai-in-academic-practice-7045331862348554240
- http://rundown.ai/
- AI Practitioner Competence Framework
- AI Task Cards
- https://twitter.com/i/lists/1676686461876203520?s=20
- https://ctl.ox.ac.uk/ai
- https://theresanaiforthat.com/
Find out more by visiting our Artificial Intelligence page to view publications and resources, join us for events and discover what AI has to offer through our range of interactive online demos.
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Get in touch with the team directly at AI@jisc.ac.uk