This is such an important article - thank you Helen. The strategies recommended for assessment reform in my country are firmly set at the course wide, or programmatic level. This offers opportunities to rethink how/why/what we assess. And the focus is also on the process of learning. As I step in to collaborate with my colleagues in a large humanities course, I will be bringing the ideas in this article with me.
Thanks Bill. I'm not sure anything 'necessarily' happens, I'm just talking up that direction of travel. Fully aware it is more likely to happen at well resourced universities, and that the least advantaged students are the most likely to be offered 'AI' as an alternative. Also I don't think the social construction of meaning is exclusively oral, as i hope my examples of 'writing together' show. Technologies for writing together seem to me among the most game-changing and interesting of the last decade. WDYT?
My context is high school computing (I teach IB computer science and MYP design / software engineering). I think that if I can no longer accurately adjudicate student / LLM output I need to use group discussions, oral interviews and collaborative writing to engender and evaluate student thinking.
...and this I think is the thing: without hard work, learning doesn't really happen. I need to re-jigger my teaching and assessment practices so they are resistant to LLM interference.
I was really struck by this sentence in your essay: "In the UK, the idea of oral tests as a way of minimising the generative AI advantage has been derided as a step ‘back to the middle ages’, but it might just as well be seen as a step out into a broader culture of university learning as developing both written and oral communication skills.". I think LLM's are pushing teaching and learning into a more wholistic / social / collaborative space.
I like this direction of travel, and I feel like the move to more social learning may be an unexpected ripple from LLM's. :-)
This is such an important article - thank you Helen. The strategies recommended for assessment reform in my country are firmly set at the course wide, or programmatic level. This offers opportunities to rethink how/why/what we assess. And the focus is also on the process of learning. As I step in to collaborate with my colleagues in a large humanities course, I will be bringing the ideas in this article with me.
So with tools like LLM's, teaching and learning become necessarily social and gravitate towards social (oral) construction of meaning?
Thanks Bill. I'm not sure anything 'necessarily' happens, I'm just talking up that direction of travel. Fully aware it is more likely to happen at well resourced universities, and that the least advantaged students are the most likely to be offered 'AI' as an alternative. Also I don't think the social construction of meaning is exclusively oral, as i hope my examples of 'writing together' show. Technologies for writing together seem to me among the most game-changing and interesting of the last decade. WDYT?
My context is high school computing (I teach IB computer science and MYP design / software engineering). I think that if I can no longer accurately adjudicate student / LLM output I need to use group discussions, oral interviews and collaborative writing to engender and evaluate student thinking.
...and this I think is the thing: without hard work, learning doesn't really happen. I need to re-jigger my teaching and assessment practices so they are resistant to LLM interference.
I was really struck by this sentence in your essay: "In the UK, the idea of oral tests as a way of minimising the generative AI advantage has been derided as a step ‘back to the middle ages’, but it might just as well be seen as a step out into a broader culture of university learning as developing both written and oral communication skills.". I think LLM's are pushing teaching and learning into a more wholistic / social / collaborative space.
I like this direction of travel, and I feel like the move to more social learning may be an unexpected ripple from LLM's. :-)