Icarus No - C Simpson

Sydney academic used AI to write SMH opinion piece urging students to avoid using tech to ‘cut corners’ from The Guardian

I gave this opinion piece some love last week in this newsletter - for those who came in late it was a rejoinder to an earlier piece throwing around wild claims that Australian universities are deliberately ignoring the impact of GenAI on teaching for fun and profit. I was happy to be able to champion something pushing back on this foolishness, particularly given that I had been unable to do it justice myself. I described Ellis’ work as “a text book exercise… in making an informed counter argument”. I did also note that some things went unsaid but at the time I thought that was the result of cooler heads prevailing. In the end, it turns out that the author had fed 40,000 words of her writing to CoPilot and asked it to respond to questions which shaped the opinion piece (after polishing).

I’ve been thinking about why we increasingly have such visceral reactions to GenAI based products. Particularly when they are undeclared. Using it in response to a piece about the problematic use of GenAI in education obviously wasn’t a great start. I think it boils down to two main factors. The first is the Uncanny Valley effect, where things which are not quite human feel off. The second is that it feels kind of offensive when we are handed something to spend our time reading that the author didn’t see the value in spending similar time to create. (I get that this is a fraught debate).

Higher education is in a tricky position, wrestling with the impact of a potentially world-changing technology which we need to equip students for while also seeing in real time the harm that it can do to their education and the questions that it raises about whether they have learned anything. I know Cath Ellis, a little, and have great respect for her contributions to education - and particularly how we are going to deal with GenAI. This probably needed some more thought.

Enacting distributed leadership for educational transformation: a seven-year study of academic development in higher education from International Journal for Academic Development

Full transparency, this paper relates to a learning technology/pedagogical approach that I am in the process of organising some research into through my CRADLE fellowship. Hopefully I will be able to continue it, given our exciting new organisational restructure. Tubino, Doherty and Cain describe seven years of work in an IT school to implement a dramatically new approach to the assessment of programming students. Kicking off in a single unit at the start of the period, the approach was embedded in teaching in 96 units by the end. They discuss the complex processes involved in collaborations between academic developers, school leaders and academics to ensure the sustainability of these innovations. Trying new things in learning and teaching in higher education is an incredibly complex enterprise the first time it is attempted and keeping it going is another level of challenge. Respectful and collaborative work and sensible governance, as documented in this article, make a big difference.

Mark Selkrig 'All a Bit Strange: Views of Academic Life and the Modern Work Paradox' from PG Gallery (Melbourne, Aus)

Capricious Loyalty - M Selkrig

From time to time I like to pop out into the world for some culture. A friend recently recommended this show, which is on until Saturday 13th June at PG Gallery in Fitzroy (Australia) (Right at the tram stop). Mark Selkrig has produced a set of intricate woodblock prints covering a range of aspects of academic life, from the committee circus to the funding forage, alongside jargon jousting and the publication pinata. Capricious Loyalty (above) particularly caught my eye.

Pink Fungus - C Simpson

Don’t tell young people to walk away from university. For many, it’s the only way from Sydney Morning Herald

Maybe I just wasn’t paying enough attention before but it really seems that lately academics (and others) have been out there in the media going at it hard against universities and higher education in general. And far be it from me to say that things couldn’t be better in the sector, from endemic wage theft of sessionals to the caste divide between academic and professional staff. Nonetheless, recently the corporate media has seemed to be out for blood, handing over column inches to anyone with a grievance and 800 words to spare. Leading to gish gallops like this one last week, bandying about wild claims of institutional corruption via the deliberate ignoring of the impact of AI on education for fun and profit. As someone at the coalface of the response to these challenges, I was offended not only by the implication that I am apparently doing nothing on a daily basis but also by the lack of a structured argument or any supporting evidence. I tried to write a calm and cogent response but the ragebait had done its job.

Happily, cooler and wiser heads have prevailed in this response from Cath Ellis (Western Sydney Uni). I get the feeling that this is some form of gentle parenting, as there is a lot which is not said as she methodically works through unpacking and correcting some of the previous nonsense. This is a text book exercise both in making an informed counter argument and also in not taking the bait. Bravo Cath.

The Time My Students Used AI in Their Final Reflections – and I Liked It! from Maha Bali

I will always make time for the insights of Maha Bali (American University in Cairo) on education, even when they confound my expectations. She highlights her approach to having her students use GenAI tools responsibly, from an informed perspective, and the imaginative work they produced (or co-produced). She also notes the value of the offline reflective activities that she led with the class in broadening their views about learning. Always nice to have an informed perspective.

LEARNING STYLES ARE A MYTH Use learning channels instead! from Instagram

There would be few people now in this space who are not aware that the idea of ‘learning styles’ - where students might be visual, auditory, or kinaesthetic learners - has been largely debunked. This highly enthusiastic American educator, Jared Van, shares some interesting ideas - certainly new to me - about ‘learning channels’. These echo learning styles in their use of sensory inputs but pair them with a learner response (e.g. see-say, hear-write) to describe a wider set of learning experiences. I’m not sure if this is more relevant in his chosen field of special/children’s education but it raises some interesting ideas. I couldn’t find a lot in recent research literature - maybe it has been debunked as well - but this 2005 paper provides a decent overview.

Call for proposal: 2026 Eportfolio Forum (Dual Delivery) - Close 26 June 2026 from ePortfolios Australia

If you work in the ePortfolios space and have something to share, these are your people. I haven’t been to one of these for a little while but given the pivot in focus to process of learning over products of learning, the ePortfolio may be back.

Appealing - C Simpson

Guide for markers of open assessments from Teaching@Sydney

While most of us in teaching and learning are still waiting for some certainty when it comes to assessment in this new AIge, aspects of it seem to be firming up. One of these is the idea that, given that we can no longer assure all learning other than by using a very limited and not fantastic set of tasks, some assessment tasks now need to be taken more as assessment for learning than as assessment of learning. This is the approach sometimes described as two-lane or empowering-developing-assuring, where some assessments are locked down while other ‘open’ assessments are undertaken with the assumption that AI may be used. This post from the Teaching@Sydney team of Adam Bridgeman, Danny Liu and Eszter Kalman puts some meat on the bone (or tofu in the vegeburger) in terms of practical guidance for assessing the latter. They suggest looking for evidence of evaluative thinking and effective use of the tools and share some sample rubric criteria which might be used in a range of different assessment types.

Webinar: Assuring learning in the Age of AI Thurs 28th May 12pm AEST from TELedvisors Network

Just a quick reminder that this webinar is happening this week and we have added Darci Taylor (Deakin) and Jacqueline Trebilco (Monash) to the program to discuss their experiences in this exciting and challenging new field, alongside Lenka Ucnik (TEQSA)

Webinar: A world without plagiarism detectors Thurs 11th June 12pm AEST from Deakin Inclusive Education

The first thing I did when I read about this was clarify that they mean ‘text-matching’ software (a la Turnitin) rather than AI detection (a la bad Turnitin). Then I was struck by the unexpected truth that these are largely not used in Canada. This webinar will feature Sarah Eaton (Uni of Calgary/Deakin) in conversation with Phill Dawson (Deakin CRADLE) about the impact that this difference between HE sectors in Canada and Australia has.

Google Search as you know it is over from TechCrunch

While it is unclear precisely how far down the AI rabbithole Google plans to take their shift from their standard quarter-century old search tool to a bot/agent based approach, by all accounts we will know this week. The general consensus is that they plan to remove the need to actually visit the sites feeding search results, in place of simply summarising them. Unsurprisingly the site owners relying on traffic to stay afloat are far from whelmed. This article provides a solid overview of the proposed changes. For me, its enough and I have been trialling the French search engine Qwant+. I’m pretty sure that it is AI driven but so far I have been impressed with the accuracy and relevance of the results.

Fun with funnels All - C Simpson

Supporting assessment redesign in the age of AI: a critical practice-based framework for equitable change from Teaching in Higher Education Critical Perspectives

I’m at a conference today (Monday) exploring all things H5P and D2L (the currently unhacked LMS) so forgive my brevity. On reading the title and abstract of this paper, I thought, ‘beauty, this is exactly what I’m looking for’. We are all dealing with the $64,000 question of how do we design assessment to assure learning and as an added bonus, this very detailed 24 page article draws heavily on the theory of practice architectures, which is one that I know reasonably well. Laidlaw describes in critical detail the processes that she and her team in the faculty of science and health at Charles Sturt Uni to understand what is needed for assurance in assessment in the age of GenAI and develop meaningful and sustainable solutions. I can’t fault the thinking or the processes, though I had hoped to actually read about some solutions. Even ones which might not necessarily be right for my own context. Very much worth a read regardless

I Was a University AI Czar. I'm Not Equipped to Teach in the Age of AI from Counter Friction

For a US perspective, this Substack post offers a wider view of what happens when someone, anyone is found to take on the role of coordinating an institutions AI response. Geller describes working with AI enthusiasts, AI resisters and the Exhausted majority in his journey to make his southern US ‘future ready’. He acknowledges the particular challenges with online learning, pays respect to elsewhere demonised ‘pedagogy experts’ for their contributions and moseys into philosophical territory at the end. Another good read with sadly fewer answers than I might have hoped.

Webinar: Assuring learning in the Age of AI Thurs 28th May 12pm AEST from ASCILITE TELedvisors Network

For our part, we are bringing together some of those previously mentioned ‘pedagogy experts’ (and ed technology experts) to share their current work on finding actionable solutions for assuring learning. We may not have all the answers but there will be insights from on the ground practitioners into work in progress and Lenka Ucnik to provide a regulator’s perspective (TEQSA).

French professor accused of ‘gigantic hoax’ after inventing Nobel-style prize from The Guardian

And to round out the week, something fun that caught my eye about go-getter ways to set yourself up for promotion. And he would have gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for those meddling Romanian journalists.

Fun with funnel #3 - C Simpson

The Canvas hack story is being told wrong from Brian Peddle (LinkedIn)

Easily the biggest and arguably the only story about ed & tech in the last week has been the hack of the Canvas LMS undertaken by “Shinyhunters”. This started as a data breach and progressed to ransomware. Given the scale of Instructure Canvas’ presence in both K-12 and tertiary education, this had a massive impact and there is little that I can tell you which hasn’t already been covered widely. Across the sector institutions have scrambled to find temporary fixes, lots of crit ed tech people online have basked in an opportunity to criticise universities for not directly seeking them out for their opinion on which LMS they should have bought and students have enjoyed an array of assessment extensions. I realise that I’m probably being flippant and I have no doubt that this caused a great deal of unnecessary stress and undoubtedly the repercussions will echo for months to come BUT it did get a little weary-making reading the same old uninformed lines about how the people who choose educational technologies know nothing about teaching and it should be left entirely up to teachers. As someone who has been there, no. For one thing, institutional systems are incredibly complex and need to satisfy a wide array of needs which include but are in no way limited to teaching and learning. For another, the depth of consultation and evaluation which occurs (in the majority of cases at least) is ridiculously painstaking and involves many people with rich pedagogical knowledge.

One interesting take came from “Experienced Business Executive” Brian Peddle, who felt that in all the coverage, they missed the point that messages between students and teachers shouldn’t have been living on the LMS in the first place. While there is potential for identity theft in other data dragged from the system, these messages often contain some of the most sensitive information and, Peddle argues, should have been left in more secure email systems. From an IT security perspective, perhaps. But given the reluctance of ‘the young people’ to use email these days and the benefits of keep all of the online aspects of individual online units in a single source of truth, I can see why they were where they are. Stay tuned for repercussions I guess.

 Webinar: Assuring learning in the age of AI Thurs 28th May 12pm AEST from TELedvisors Network

This webinar is still taking shape but given the breadth of experiences of educators and third space practitioners in tertiary education in finding meaningful ways to assure learning, this should be a rich session with lots of opportunities for sharing and learning. We have confirmed Lenka Ucnik from Tertiary Education and Quality Standards Agency (Australia) to provide an overview of what the regulator expects.

Webinar: Online degrees in the age of gen AI: what credible assurance requires Thurs 4th June 2pm AEST from TEQSA

After we booked in our webinar, we came across this one a week later and it would seem churlish not to mention it. I would say the major differences are that this seems to focus more on online assessment and ours will feature more third space practitioners having a chance to share.

On AI glasses and wearable AI in assessment from Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education

Maybe then, having solved the current challenges with assurance of learning, you might care to consider the next cab on the rank. Corbin, Sharpe & Dawson (all Deakin) make a compelling case for why we should never again trust students wearing glasses in an assessment setting. No, clearly they do not but they do raise some genuine issues with the rise of AI glasses and wearable AI and the impact that these will have, both positive and negative, on learning and teaching. (I have mentioned to several colleagues lately how nice it would be to travel back in time to when the most dramatic and exciting thing in ed & tech was the rise of the Second Life virtual world). The authors explore AI wearables comprehensively and the potential consequences of measures which might be taken to mitigate their impact on assessment. Well worth a read.

[I keep having to bump a delightful story about research undertaken in a zen little game that I play from time to time where I clean dirty things with a pressure washer - PowerWash Simulator. Maybe you should just read it]

Fun with Funnels #2 - C Simpson

How do teachers design and do feedback? Development and validation of the teacher feedback literacy scale from Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education

These days it can be so easy to get sucked in to some facet of AI in education or spicy sagas from former employers that it can be entirely refreshing to come across an article which brings everything back to teaching. Istencioglu, Yang, Dawson and Boud (Deakin CRADLE and the Education University of Hong Kong) report on their work to devise a self-reporting tool enabling educators to evaluate the richness of their feedback practice. It addresses factors relating to design for student action on feedback, designing and implementing peer feedback, designing and sequencing feedback processes, developing student feedback literacy and managing feedback priorities. This looks to be a valuable tool for supporting educator growth in a still relatively undervalued aspect of teaching and learning

University Professors Disturbed to Find Their Lectures Chopped Up and Turned Into AI Slop from 404 Media / Inside Higher Ed / Code acts in education.

Unsurprisingly, this story has been everywhere in the last week. Arizona State University (a university with a massive online presence) has, unbeknownst to its educators, launched a new product (ASU Atomic) which uses AI to harvest existing course materials to sell to subscribers as (uncredentialled) micro-units. In practice, this seems to involve the AI clipping segments of lecture videos and generating complementary text and quiz questions. Questions about who owns the rights to IP created in a workplace are not new (though they are newer to higher ed) but the larger concern is the way that many of these micro-units appear to be getting key concepts wrong, which makes the educators look foolish because their face is all over it. The 404 media article is sadly paywalled but I couldn’t resist their tabloid headline and they do good work. Coverage from Inside Higher Ed suggests that ASU leadership has been a little surprised at the visceral reaction to the platform (really?) and they appear to be backpedalling on it a little. The nuts and bolts of how it actually works are a little cloudy but I have to wonder how involved their LMS provide Canvas has been in its development. Ben Williamson in his often interesting blog Code acts ponders what this represents in terms of universities “assetising” learning resources and how this impacts academic freedom.

Combined survey findings 2019–2025 from Teaching Cultures Survey

The teaching cultures survey is a longitudinal study being undertaken by a consortium of 17 research intensive universities. These are mostly spread across Europe but include institutions in Asia, North and South America, and Australia. Tensions between research and teaching in the way we divine the ‘soul’ of higher education have been around for a long time but there does seem to be a swing towards valuing learning and teaching more highly in recent years. More than 12000 participants contributed to the most recent survey, giving it some heft, discussing their perspectives on how they and their institutions view and value learning and teaching. Overall it paints a positive picture but disappointingly there is no acknowledgement whatsoever of the place or contribution of teaching and learning centres or third space practitioners when it comes to teaching and learning quality. All aspects of teaching and learning are apparently shaped by the actions of departmental heads and individual educators working things out on their own. Even where these centres and practitioners are everso obliquely references - in terms of the evaluation of teaching quality - only the evaluation itself is considered. I might have to write someone a letter.

Fun with funnels #1

I had a lovely visit to Flinders Uni last week, guest speaking about sustainable innovation in higher ed and also about collaboration between academics and third space practitioners. Many thanks to the organisers, Michelle Picard, Melanie Worrall, Wendy Taleo, and Carly Peterson for your generous hospitality. A couple of notable articles this week echo some key themes that emerged in some robust (but civil) discourse.

Reframing Third Space Roles in UK Higher Education from European Review

Patron saint of higher ed professional staff and third space practitioners, Celia Whitchurch continues her impressive body of work with this article drawing on the views on senior institutional managers and 3S staff about ways that HE is changing. She notes a shift toward more collaborative working practices (rather than service-based ones) and an increased appreciation that evermore complicated institutional systems and processes require deeper and more holistic understanding of the component parts. Certainly nice to see some confirmation of some key ideas that people in my workshop found hard to believe.

An attack on teaching and learning centers from Bryan Alexander(‘s blog)

To by crystal clear, as the heading format could be misleading, Bryan Alexander is discussing the attack, not doing the attacking. He discusses a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (Why Pedagogy ‘Experts’ Are Wrong)(paywalled). Alexander breaks down the self-serving flaws in the Chronicle author’s argument (Paul Schofield, a philosophy prof - of course - at a small private liberal arts uni) in forensic detail. The weird cartoonish presentation of CTLs as some all-powerful, inescapable black hole which dominates pedagogical discourse, childish complaints about learning from colleagues in other disciplines, a basic smorgasbord of entitled rage. Disappointingly this is not the first time that I have seen such silly takes, even among people loosely in my own circles who should know far better. [I do realise that this newsletter is ostensibly about broader things in the ed & tech space than the people who work to facilitate learning and teaching and I’ve had plans to start a dedicated space for this - stay tuned.]

Entangled Education: Technology and pedagogy in universities as a mash up from Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Networked Learning 

Maybe it is just the circles that I move in or the state of higher ed in Australia but reading this paper really made me feel that we are a bit ahead of the curve in this sector here. Threstrup, Robinson (Aarhus Uni) and Shumar (Drexel uni) do a solid job examining the ways that the pedagogical and the technological aspects of contemporary learning and teaching are now so deeply interconnected that it is difficult to discuss one without the other. They also put forward some interesting future directions for new forms of student interaction but many of the issues in the current state of the actual that they raise feel like things that were dealt with some years ago. Definitely worth a read, if for nothing other than giving me the first clear definition of “post-digital” that I have read in the literature. (Making the point that clearly digital hasn’t gone away but the fact that it is everywhere means that we can probably stop focusing on it so heavily - in the same way that we no longer really talk about eCommerce).

Webinar Thurs April 30 2026 12pm AEST – Who Shapes AI in Education? Capability, Confidence, and Women Leading the Way from ASCILITE TELedvisors Network

Quick reminder of this very cool looking webinar that we are running this week.

Go see a Star War - C.Simpson

Webinar Thurs April 30 2026 12pm AEST – Who Shapes AI in Education? Capability, Confidence, and Women Leading the Way from ASCILITE TELedvisors Network

Our monthly webinar for April provides insights into GenAI and education with a focus on empowering women and underrepresented voices from Juliana Peloche (Edith Cowan Uni) and Nikki Meller (CREDuED). This session explores how educators can influence not just how AI is used, but who gets to lead in an AI-enabled future, ensuring it is not only effective, but equitable and representative.

When teachers become builders: Vibe coding and the future of educational technology from Needed Now in Learning and Teaching

As someone who has worked in several different central educational technology teams, this article from James Bedford (Alphacrucis University College) horrified me a little bit. Alarm bells kept ringing about security, privacy, and what I (perhaps unfairly, perhaps not) see as the inherent flakiness of vibe coded tools. Bedford assures readers that no student data is stored and claims that no information trains the models. He at least acknowledges that collaboration will be needed with institutional teams and systems for “a sprawling ecosystem of educator-built applications” to be added to university teaching and learning systems. That this will require changes to institutional security and privacy protocols - is handwaved as them needing “to catch up”. Discussion of ongoing maintenance, technical support and training is virtually absent entirely. There has long been a history of shadow technology - some of it very good - in higher education but for the most part, this was at least built by people with some understanding of what they were coding. Or IT systems. Or university processes and procedures and policies. Nonetheless, this article is worth a read for what it tells us about the rapidly expanding and wildly confident world of vibe coding

Fixing teachers’ problems? exploring teachers’ repair and maintenance work around generative AI technologies from Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education

The NeededNow piece pairs nicely with this new journal article from critical ed tech scholars Ljungqvist, Sonesson and Selwyn (Lund University/Monash University). It examines the so-called hidden labour undertaken by academics and students as they use GenAI tools in learning and teaching - in this instance in terms of fixing instructional quality and practice gaps, ensuring that learners stay engaged, and attending to social relations. They interview 28 Swedish secondary school teachers with decent experience in using GenAI in their classes. They conclude that amidst all the excitement about what GenAI promises, the workload to achieve this largely undersold.

Read like Stanford teaches from Instagram

I have a love-hate affair with Instagram and other purveyors of short-form videos. To the extent where I will install and uninstall the apps multiple times a week. But there can be some real gems, including this video from heavymeta_4 which outlines the value of pairing readings to foster greater cognition and comparison in processing, accommodating and interpreting the competing ideas from multiple sources. Maybe this is nothing new but it spoke to me.

Trying my hand at collage

Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted? from The New Yorker

As with many of us, I suspect, the first time that I really paid attention to Generative AI was when OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released at the end of 2022. I had played with some very primitive image generation tools in the lead up to this, but for the most part, coming out of the COVID era switch to online, it wasn’t really on my radar. Those were the days. This lengthy article from Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz provides a pretty forensic breakdown of what OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was doing in the decade or so leading up to this release and also provides a rather compelling character evaluation of someone that Elon Musk came to find a bit much. It’s a fascinating and horrifying journey from some classic tech bros taking a quasi-moral position of ‘we need to set up a non-profit to protect the world from the power of this technology’ to what seems to be a step or two before reaching full Bond villain mode. The power of big tech and its Gollumesque influence on Silicon Valley types has been well known for decades but this really feels like something altogether new. For all the stories and promises of new productivity and cancer cures, I’m increasingly left wondering if it is worth it.

The question of efficiency: teaching and technology in higher education from Higher Education Research & Development

Now watch me pirouette flawlessly back from techno-Marxist to ed tech bro. (I contain multitudes). I do actually quite like this commentary piece from Gravett, Bearman, Dawson and Jensen, which raises some fair questions about the extent to which ed tech is purposed by institutions with achieving efficiencies and what harms this might be doing to learning and teaching. I agree that education done well needs to take time and should be given space, even when this doesn’t always align with institutional financial imperatives. BUT, I do take issue with the inference that this is the primary focus of using educational technologies because it ignores the many real benefits that using technology in teaching and learning have brought us. Creating opportunities for people to study from places or at times that didn’t previously work with their lives and physical campuses, giving more control over how someone watches (and rewinds and rewatches) a lecture, facilitating simulations, enabling connections, and supporting creation and meaning-making. These are also reasons that educational technologies are used and while the drumbeat of higher ed discourse of late is all about corporatisation and managerialism, helpful ed tech increasingly gets thrown under the bus.

Join us at Open Education Week 2026 from UTS Education Express (Mon April 20th to Fri April 24th)

The University of Technology, Sydney has been hosting Open Education events for several years now and they just seem to be getting bigger and better. Read this blog post for full details but among the events there is a debate about whether GenAI is fundamentally incompatible with Open Educational Practices featuring Sarah Steen and Lauren Halcomb-Smith (Deakin) against Claire Ovaska and Nikki Andersen (USQ). Also a quiz event about copyright and licensing trivia - what more could you need?

The Dude abides on my desk

Canvas unrolls AI teaching agent from InsideHigherEd

Canvas is far from the only LMS joining the stampede to incorporate GenAI tools in their platforms but the language that they have used in their announcement (alongside every borderline psychopathic utterance we have heard from AI tech bros in recent years about eliminating labour costs) does not sit well. The main concern is their focus on automating “low-value tasks” like rubric generation, content alignment and discussion reviews, which handwavingly “frees educators to focus more on mentoring, feedback and meaningful learning experiences”. This article jumps around a bit, from the implications of the short-lived Einstein app to ‘dead-classroom’ theory but it does capture some of the big picture issues relatively well. The fact that Instructure is happy to downplay the vital importance of thought course design says a lot about their understanding of learning and teaching.

One Credential, Many Journeys: Persona-Aligned Assessment for Postgraduate Microcredentials in Emerging Technologies from ACE ‘26: Proceedings of the 28th Australasian Computing Education Conference

Conference season has kicked off early for the nerds at the Association for Computing Machinery and they have already (very effiiciently) published the proceedings of their ACE’26 event. Authors Tubino and Zaidi (Deakin uni) describe their use of a persona based approach in IT microcredentials to provide learners with authentic learning pathways which are highly relevant to the professional development in emerging areas of practice. The courses blend core mandatory tasks with role-specific optional ones which collectively provide a set of skills and knowledge necessary to grow as a practitioner. This ticks a lot of boxes in terms of adult learning principles and I have a feeling that we will be seeing more of this in higher level courses before long. Well worth a read.

The Five Biggest Pitfalls of Collaborative Grouping (And How to Avoid Them) from Spencer Education

In Australia we recently had the shadow minister for higher education (Julian Leeser) put out a seemingly random call for universities to scrap group assignments. After a number of people explained why they are used and their value in developing key work/life skills, this faded away. But he wasn’t wrong about one thing - they are not beloved by students because they are often poorly designed and managed and/or students are not explicitly equipped with the skills needed to succeed. In this in-depth post, John Spencer (sans Blues Explosion) explores five common points of failure in group assessments (including one student doing all the work/dominating ideation) and offers sensible strategies for educators and students to address these. Worth bookmarking.

Webinar: Is it time to move beyond grades? Weds April 15th 2pm AEDT from Deakin CRADLE

Juuso Nieminen notes that decades of criticism of the use of grades has achieved little change and calls for more thought into “reassembling the work they have traditionally done in higher education”. I’m not entirely sure what this will look like but I am keen to find out.

Recording now available: Third Space Identity - Learning Designers and beyond from ASCILITE TELedvisors network

Ingrid D’Souza (Monash) and I undertook doctoral research at around the same time into the nature of third space practitioner roles in learning and teaching in higher ed but somehow we never really chatted about it. So it was great to finally hear what she found and to note the many overlaps with and interesting diversions from my own work. The challenges of inconsistent titles and loosely defined roles were key commonalities. This is an issue when it means that educators don’t understand the roles sufficiently because it weakens trust and can mean that expertise goes unheard. If you missed the webinar, it is well worth a watch.

Time to touch some grass

The use and usefulness of GenAI in higher education: Student experience and perspectives from Computers and Education Open

This mega-study about the AI use and attitudes of 8000 students across 4 Australian universities (Deakin, Monash, Uni Queensland, Uni of Technology, Sydney) by 19 big name researchers contains a lot of numbers. Perhaps the most interesting of all of these are two - around 80% of participants reported using GenAI but around 70% felt that it could be inaccurate or make things up. 47% of all participants however used it for “finding information or conducting research”. The researchers noted that students recognised the limitations of GenAI but had enough belief in their abilities that they would be able to account for that. (Not sure if this is the Dunning Kruger effect or the new AI inspired reverse-Dunning Kruger effect). The report covers a lot of ground, as one might hope given the number of people involved, including frequency of use, common tasks, cheating, motivators and discouraging factors. One challenge that we constantly face in research is the turnaround time for studies like this - this survey was put out to students in Oct 2024. I look forward to seeing how people feel about GenAI now in a few years. Nonetheless, it is a comprehensive overview of where students are with this technology and well worth a read.

Webinar - Third Space identity and beyond. Thurs 26th March 12 noon AEDT from ASCILITE TELedvisors Network

One more quick reminder that I will be kicking off our webinar series for the year with my old colleague Ingrid D’Souza from Monash, talking about findings from our respective research exploring who third space practitioners like learning designers (and more) are and proposing a new model for describing them/us. It should be pretty great.

New Assessment Framework measures learning from Future Campus

It’s funny, in some ways, that many people (including third spacers) on the teaching and learning side in tertiary education have been saying for years and years and years that we need to do better with assessment to ensure that students are actually learning. Now that GenAI has upended assessment, the rest of the sector has caught up. This post describes a recent brief report from the Australian OPM (online program manager) OES (online education services). (You need to give OES your deets if you want the original report). OPMs are pretty widespread in tertiary education these days and while I don’t always love the corporate vibe, my experiences interacting with them has been that many people there care about good learning and teaching. They cop some flak in the current ‘HE is managerialist’ discourse but they also often get better student satisfaction scores than conventional unis, so used judiciously probably aren’t that problematic. Well that was a small diversion. The core ideas in this report aren’t necessarily anything new - strengthen assessment validity, programmatic design, and process over product, but they seem to track with current good practice (as far as we have been able to work out anyway).

Also either Meta is pulling the plug on its VR metaverse and Meta Quest 3 fans don't know how to respond (March 19) or Meta isn’t closing down its VR metaverse after all — it’ll stay live in a limited capacity for ‘the foreseeable future’ (March 21) from Techradar

Either way, my sympathies to the authors of Virtual selves and embodied learning: enacting simulated lived experience in the metaverse as critical pedagogy in higher education, (March 17) which is a decent read.

The pretty Walter Burley Griffin designed Capitol Theatre ceiling, Melbourne Australia

Submission to the Higher Education Standards Panel from Phill Dawson and Thomas Corbin

Some people watch the Oscars for glitz and glamour but I look for it in submissions to government enquiries about higher education standards in Australia. (These issues are global though). Phillip Dawson (CRADLE - Deakin Uni) shared a brief response that he co-authored focusing specifically on this question Do the standards currently provide adequate guidance to manage risks related to emerging technologies? They make an interesting point firstly that we need to stop the narrative that nobody expected GenAI and there was no time to respond. I’m a little on the fence on this one, tbh, as while there absolutely were researchers ringing alarm bells for a few years beforehand, the release of ChatGPT (the dinosaur killing asteroid) in 2022 came at the tail end of the big pivot online necessitated by COVID and people (educators, leaders, ed techs) were generally just too exhausted to be looking for the next crisis.

They go on to propose that the next crisis - or is it still part of the current one - in AI glasses (creeper peepers) is already on the radar and currently little is being done to address it. In response, they argue that institutions (or the sector) needs to mandate and action meaningful horizon scanning to better understand and accommodate the next change. No real disagreements on that one, though I would say that I think that central ed tech teams probably do do this more than many people are aware - within the limitations of institutional support and priorities. Locking it in as a legislated requirement would probably mean these activities are given more emphasis. It’s a very interesting (and brief) read and something deserving further discussion.

Show employers what they are looking for – certifying the assurance of learning from Needed Now in Learning and Teaching

As someone currently deep in the weeds of working on questions of assurance of learning in a Bachelor of Business course, this post scratched a particular itch. The points being made are equally applicable to any disciplinary area though, as the author Michael Tomlinson (Vic Inst of Technology) just uses the B.Bus as an example of a model of a course which focuses more explicitly on course learning outcomes. As we find ourselves grappling with what assurance of learning we can actually provide, explicitly articulating the skills and knowledge developed by students does seem like a key piece of the puzzle. Tomlinson notes that these skills are not to be found anywhere in a student’s testamur or transcript and this leaves employers to either guess, trust institutional reputation or deepdive into student handbooks for more information. Is there a way to explicitly provide this information in Higher Ed? It is the operational model of the vocational education and training system here, so I’m sure it’s not that hard if the demand is present.

MOOC Institute Interview from Stephen Downes

Stephen Downes (alongside George Siemens) is a technology enhanced learning trailblazer, with his (their) 2008 course Connectivism and Connective Knowledge inspiring the coining of the term MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). I read his newsletter daily and this interview with Saffron Mccullough of the MOOC institution is a great introduction to his life, work and ideas.

I’ve never seen inflatable dancers at a gig before and now I want to know why. (Pulp, Melbourne)

Grammarly is offering “expert review” from LinkedIn

This is a short post from Vanessa Heggie (Uni of Birmingham) echoing others that I’ve read elsewhere in the last week or so. She notes that Grammarly, which has gone in heavily on AI functionality of late, is now offering “expert review” bots trained on the work of individual academic specialists, living and dead, without their consent, to provide feedback on your work using their voice. Unsurprisingly the commenters on the post are horrified. The ethical side of this is not addressed in the FAQ on the Grammarly site but I have no doubt they would lean heavily on ‘these works are in the public arena’ and whatever other vibe heavy corporate justifications they find appropriate. It seems as though we are being rushed towards some kind of post-morality version of the world which we don’t yet have the language to fully articulate the wrongness of because it is so much, all at once.

Webinar Unknowable futures: Preparing graduates for an AI-evolving world (of work) Wed 18th March 2pm AEDT from Deakin CRADLE

While we grapple with the ethics of GenAI, it isn’t going away any time soon, so the question of how we ensure that our learners have their best shot in this grave new world is something which has occupied many people working in education. This seminar from the Centre for Research in Assessment and Digital LEarning at Deakin Uni will examine some of the work that people such as Danni Hamilton, Lauren Hanson and Phill Dawson have been undertaking in concert with discipline academics and industry to answer some of these questions.

(For what it’s worth, I would have promoted this even if I hadn’t recently picked up a small fellowship to do some research with the CRADLE team at Deakin - which I am quietly chuffed about.)

Webinar Third Space identity: Learning Designers and beyond Thurs 26 March @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm AEDT from ASCILITE TELedvisors Network

We are back for our 10th year of webinars and are kicking things off with a double-header of doctoral research findings about what it is like to be someone working in the third space between academic and professional practice in higher education. My former colleague from my Monash days, Ingrid D’Souza will regale all with tales of the education/learning designer life and identity in Victorian universities. I will follow up with my own model for meaningfully distinguishing between learning designers, educational technologists and academic developers. Even if you don’t work in this space, third space practitioners make a vital yet poorly understood contribution to learning and teaching and this session should add some useful insights into the help and advice they (we) offer.

The New Blackboard Emerges from Bankruptcy from OnEdTech

News of the slow death and resurrection of Blackboard (formerly Anthology, formerly Blackboard) has no doubt occupied some space in the minds of anyone who is still using the Blackboard LMS. This article provides what appears to be a pretty comprehensive accounting of the toing-and-froing that has been happening in the last year or so, with their various (non L&T) parts being sold to other businesses and new owners marching in. To be perfectly frank, someone with a better financial brain than mine might make more sense of it but the overall headline seems to be that the deals are done and they now have $70m of new money to play with. No specific plan for what to spend it on (publicly) yet but it appears that it will still be with us for the next little while.

So last week I made a little bit of a mistake. I thought to myself, well this chapter on academic freedom deserves a little more attention, with its many nooks and crannies. Did you know that there is not just a German word for academic freedom - Wissenschaftsfreiheit - but there is also a German word for the freedom to teach as one wants - Lehrfreiheit? These are things that I learned reading the chapter that I made me suggest coming back to this week. After all, what might possibly happen in a week? I was so taken with this positive, thoughtful new approach that I also suggested doing if for a second article about “assetising academic content”.

Silly man.

In the meantime we saw the rapid rise and crashing descent of a frightening new full service cheating app and a minor party politician in Australia stirred up the discourse by announcing that universities should just scrap group assignments. Maybe one day I will come back to the academic freedom question (but in a nutshell, no I don’t think approaches to teaching should be a vibe-based individualistic free-for-all) but who knows what this week holds for us.

Einstein & The Rise of Nuisance Tech from Marc Watkins

As I mentioned, the hot topic last week was an AI app called Einstein which claimed to be able to navigate your uni course in Canvas (once you had given it your login), read the content, do your quizzes, watch lectures, respond to discussions and read, write and submit your assignments. The creator, Advait Paliwell, a 22 year old college drop out claimed that he aimed to “free humans from the burden of academic labor”. Unsurprisingly, people had some thoughts to share about this. Some of the more interesting takes that I encountered came from Inside Higher Ed, 404 Media, and my former Uni Sydney colleague and supervisor Danny Liu. Overall there was lots of chatter about students cheating themselves, the obligations ed tech vendors have to prevent such things, the death of higher education, yada yada yada. In the end, the site came down after a couple of days following a cease and desist from either the estate of Einstein or from Instructure, the company behind Canvas. Further examination showed that it was essentially just a prettily packaged instance of OpenClaw, a newish agentic service and there was significant doubt about its abilities to deliver on the promises. Paliwell backed off his claims quickly, positioning it more as a provocation raising questions about the purpose of higher education. Fun was had by all. One takeaway from me was that - while the technology no doubt already exists to release another ‘Einstein’- we are definitely still not prepared.

Should unis ditch group assignments? from The Conversation

The second big story last week - at least in Australian higher ed - I first noticed in a very tactful LinkedIn post from a senior uni leader who had been attending the Universities Australia conference where opposition minister for education Julian Leeser decided to urge universities to stop using group assignments. (I’m led to believe that he had a fourth point to make about the standards of student dress at universities but this was cut for time). Leeser is a lawyer with no experience working in education but he very much seemed to think he was on to a winner with this, posting it all over his social media accounts. Happily a few people were able to explain, in - again, unnecessarily polite terms - what the value of group assignments is and how the things that students complain the most about are generally mitigated. Jason Lodge (UQ) must have been parked at his laptop for the speed with which he got this helpful take out and Deakin Uni’s Phill Dawson wasn’t far behind. (There is also some useful discussion at the end of both of these posts)

A nice spot to wait for the after-work trams to be less busy

What is academic freedom – and can we talk about it? from Future Campus

I was going to share my thoughts on this overview post addressing a book chapter by Zentveld and Myers (Federation University) titled “Academic Freedom: You can discuss any flavour you like, as long as it is vanilla” but then I decided to go to the source and I now have too many thoughts to organise cogently in time I have before publication. In itself this isn’t a terrible introduction but the issues go far far deeper. More next time I guess.

What we learned from 400+ Interactive Oral Assessments in STEM from Teaching @ Sydney

This post speaks very directly to me, as I am part of a team currently working out what resources are needed to support this hot “new” assessment practice in our institution (Deakin Uni). I suspect I will draw a chunk of inspiration from it because it - like a lot of the content from this team at Uni Sydney - is concise, thoughtful and highly practical. Interactive Oral Assessments (IOAs) have exploded in popularity since the GenAI Death Star entered Planet Academia’s orbit. Unlike prepared oral presentations, these are a bit like mini viva voces, with students’ asked to showcase their knowledge of the unit, often in response to scenarios and extension questions. Angela Sun and Helen McGuire from the microbiology/immunology area of USyd discuss the ways they made these work with a large cohort of their students. Of particular value is the explanation of the steps that they took to scaffolding this assessment for their students - vital given that this is generally a pretty foreign approach to assessment for many.

Assetizing academic content and the emergence of the ‘assetizen’: education platforms, publisher databases, and AI model training from Higher Education

Part of me loves the irony of the authors creating this article as a new asset for Springer while also railing against this practice. Also in Springer publishing it at all. Beyond that though, it is, again, something that I think I need to spend a little more time sitting with. I often have an initial visceral reaction when I read an interesting article that leads me to argue with the authors as I read and try to make sense of the point they are making. When it is a good argument I am happy to let go my initial reaction and take on board these new ideas. I have no idea if this will happen or not with this but, as with the academic freedom article, let’s read it together and compare notes next week. (My visceral reaction is to question whether they position academics as helpless pawns moved about the board by a God-like hand or if there is some recognition of individual agency)

Impact of Advance HE Fellowships on professional identity as an educator: an Australian study from Higher Education Research & Development

I’ve had a complicated relationship with the Advance HE Fellowships scheme. Generally I like it as a way to reflect on your educational practice and values and it does seems like a reasonably well accepted credential in the sector. I have also wondered whether it contributes to professional growth as an educator or if it stunts growth by giving a recipient a little pat on the head that tells them ‘you’re fine just the way you are’. It has spread widely in the Australian public higher education system, at a time when more cost and time-intensive professional development offerings (usually some kind of Graduate Certificate in Higher Education Teaching) have tended to be pared back.

This paper by some former Monash colleagues of mine (I remember them working on it several years back) answers some of these questions - but as with a lot of research, there is still a bit of an ‘it depends’ sting in the tail. Sarkar et al interviewed 22 academics and surveyed 218 from 23 Oz unis about how they felt it contributed to their educator identity. Overall it gave them a greater sense of competence - though this was also linked to further engagement in educator development activities and employment in institutions with a good learning and teaching culture. Engaging with this scheme is probably as much a sign of a positive educator mindset as anything but if it can nudge that needle along a little further, that’s still no small thing. (For the record, I have worked through three levels of fellowships and done my share of reviewing applications).

Universal Design for Learning 3.0 in Tertiary Education from ADCET

On the subject of professional development - I’ve shared links to resources and events from the Australian Disability Clearinghouse on Education and Training before and was very happy to see that they have added a new free online course to their collection. (Technically it is an update to version 3.0). Their blurb says why you should look into this far better than I can.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a learning design approach that recognises there is no ‘average’ learner. All learners are individual and come with a wide variety of prior experiences, abilities, preferences and needs. Rather than designing courses for an ‘average’ learner and making individual adjustments retroactively, the UDL approach encourages course design to consider the broadest possible range of diversity of learners. UDL reduces the need for individual adjustments and enhances the experience of all learners.

Demystifying learning outcomes: What they are and how to write them from The Educational Designer

For all the times that terms like Learning Outcomes get thrown around in learning and teaching (we have unit learning outcomes, course learning outcomes and graduate learning outcomes in my institution currently) it is surprising how much the design of them is treated as assumed knowledge. (See also, most of learning and teaching practice tbh). This straight forward blog post from educational designer Dana Bui provides an invaluable introduction to why we have learning outcomes and how to make them meaningful. She provides clear practical instructions and useful examples throughout.

ANZAC Station on a sunny Saturday

I’ve been trying to practice better mental hygiene by simply ignoring the myriad dumb takes about higher ed from hack journalists and past selll-by senior academics but a couple of them managed to break through my protective shell this week by virtue of the number of responses that I read to them. I speak specifically about a rage-bait article about the problem of GenAI in Australian Higher Education, published in Rupert Murdoch’s imaginatively named national broadsheet The Australian. Also noting it was written by a fluffy weekend features writer who does not write about education normally. This sparked a rash of profoundly ignorant response takes from people who also have no experience in or understanding of contemporary higher education yet somehow feel eminently qualified to provide detailed advice about how to address said issues

I do not encourage you to read these. They add nothing to the discourse and simply further pollute the already fatberg poo-balls befouled water in which we swim.

Instead, read this.

Who loves HE? from Future Campus

Tim Winkler does a perfectly fine job running his Australian higher education newsletter/blog Future Campus - the spiritual antecedent of the newsletter where I started writing these things, the Campus Morning Mail. In this opinion piece, he takes a big step forward, putting the Oz article into the wider context of the reputational crisis that HE is undergoing at the moment and offering a nuanced and thoughtful evaluation of how this has come to pass and some steps that the sector might consider to start undoing some of the damage. One that particular spoke to me was providing new avenues for disgruntled (and always highly articulate when their privilege is under threat) academics who love to spout off in the media about how HE done them wrong.

The Muppets take Academia from BlueSky

For a gentle restorative - chitchat on BlueSky (the good Twitter) is starting to resemble the glory days of actual Twitter and this thread is Exhibit number 1. Adam Rothman mused that “I'd watch a muppet show movie where the muppets infiltrate an academic conference” and the flurry of replies that followed was a thing of joy. Revisions of the theme song, wayward commenters in the Q&A, and of course Beaker and Bunsen Honeydew. A moment of zen.

Heads we win, tails you lose: AI detectors in education from Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management

By this stage, I doubt there are many must-readers who feel strongly that AI detectors are a good thing (though I do appreciate the simplicity that they would bring if they worked) but I thought I’d share this article anyway because it is comprehensive and recent. A cavalcade of academic integrity notables from 7 educational institutions on the east coast of Australia come together to methodically explain how so-called AI detectors work, problematic elements of them (unverifiable probabilistic estimates, mutually exclusive linguistic markers), evidence used in GenAI academic integrity investigations, and issues with security and fairness and false positives. One small quibble I have is whether this should be classified as a research article, given that it has no methods and doesn’t collect data. I guess it is a decent lit review, even if that is not overtly stated.

A Facebook comment caused a student to fail her subject. Now she’s in Supreme Court from The Age

I must say, I wouldn’t run a university these days if you paid me. A lot. In a nutshell, a nursing student asked a question on Facebook about an exam question after taking an exam - a few days before passing a supplemental exam after failing the first time with a 78%. The student says that her institution, the Australian Catholic University, has failed her, withdrawn credit for a 4 week placement and made her no longer eligible for the government’s HELP-HECS loan scheme. The ACU claims that students were made aware not to discuss exam questions as they can be reused and that by doing so, she may have given other students an unfair advantage. The student denies knowledge of this and is suing to have the university declare that she didn’t cheat. It’s a tricky one - students not reading rules is pretty commonplace and isn’t a strong defence for a breach, but the policy and its application overall do seem on the harsh side. This is the same university that was in the news last year for using AI detectors to accuse 6000 students of academic misconduct.

Building open world ‘games’ in Google’s Genie 3 from Ethan Mollick

Generally I’ve grown a little weary/wary of many of the art-creation aspects of GenAI but I can’t deny that the capacity of Google’s Genie 3 open world generator to build navigable 3D spaces is impressive. Ethan Mollick shares some of his experiments with paintings by de Chirico, Munch, and Turner in these Bluesky ‘skeets’.

What actually influences academic practice in teaching and learning? from LinkedIn

Phil Dawson (Deakin CRADLE) sparks a lively discussion about which factors (beyond having time/workload) actually inspire academics to change their practices (or at least try new ones) in learning and teaching. This is a question that sits with third space types (learning designers, academic developers, ed techs) such as myself constantly, as academia seems to be one of the rare workplaces where it is not uncommon for people to tell the boss ‘yeah, nah, I’m not doing that’ with few if any repercussions. There are opinions from people across the spectrum, from 3S workers to academics to institutional leaders. They include - colleagues are doing it, students like it, evidence of effectiveness, training - in essence, there was no one answer. Which tracks both with my own experiences and a handy paper that I regularly come back to from - Brew et al. (2017)- Responding to university policies and initiatives: the role of reflexivity in the mid-career academic.

This draws on Archer’s 4 modes of reflexivity (2007) and posits that for some, it comes from their concern about their colleagues, some just choose to ignore it, some do it when told it is the right thing to do, and others just curl up in a ball and do nothing because it’s all a bit much. (Admitted I am probably greatly oversimplifying things)

Do Meta-Analyses Really Show ChatGPT Improves Learning? A Reality Check from YouTube

At first glance, this to-the-point (10:55) video from ed tech author (The Digital Delusion) Jared Cooney Horvath does an impressive job of mythbusting 3 separate meta-analyses which suggest that ChatGPT boosts learning, with an overall effect size of +0.54. (In brief, effects go from -1 to +1, a positive effect is good, zero is neutral, negative is bad - as one might expect). He draws on a finding by Uni of Melbourne (Oz) education researcher John Hattie that basically all (95%+) educational research shows a positive effect and from that decides that this means that only scores of +0.42 should be considered meaningful. Now if you choose to run with his logic, the next parts of the video make sense - where he analyses the studies in the meta-analyses, removes some for poor methodology and finds that they fall below this +0.42 mark. As someone who hasn’t done meta-analyses though, I’m left with the question of whether this is a legit new benchmark or whether he is ‘juking the stats’ (thank you The Wire) to make his point. If you’re a more informed researcher, I’d love to know what you think.

Winners of the 2026 Internet Archive Public Domain Film Remix Contest from Internet Archive

For something completely different - at the start of every year, new creative works (new as in 95 years old) enter the public domain and we are free to do with them as we wish. Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie (but not later Mickey) and George Gershwin’s magical Rhapsody in Blue entered this space in recent years and now the Internet Archive is doing a neat thing where they have a competition to highlight newly emerged works. The winner is a digital animation/collage of the 1930 film King of Jazz over the top of a kind of recognisable in parts electro pop version of Rhapsody. It’s kind of cool and at 2.04 mins, a necessary escape from the modern world. (The 2nd and 3rd place winners are also neat)