Category: Learning, teaching and web services

AI and ethics, welcoming our robot colleagues

I am delighted that this summer we have  2 student interns working in LTW to help us understand how Chat GPT and Open AIs can help us in our work.

We have long welcomed our robot colleagues.

We already use AI in our transcriptions and captioning services to add speech to text versions for students, and extensively in our media production services to improve video files, edit out cluttered backgrounds and add ALT text.  We use AI to add BSL translations to our MOOCs and a number of additional languages to promote the reach and accessibility of our learning materials.  We already use Chat GPT to generate code.

With our interns’ help we are exploring how we can scale our use of AI prompts to write web content and improve our support based on considerable technical knowledge-bases of our tools.

But with all the hype around we have also started our list of things we would NOT do.

  • We won’t use art generated by AI because we don’t know where it has come from. #payartists
  • We won’t publish anything as OER which has been AI generated because AI cannot consent.
  • We won’t use AI in recruiting/selecting staff because old data sets are biased and skewed.
  • We won’t use use AI to analyse data about our people.
  • We won’t use ‘human finishing’ or content editor services which pay less than a living wage.
  • We won’t use it to write accessibility statements, DPIAs or EQIAs.
  • We won’t be seduced by AI tools  being anthropomorphised by the use of of words like hallucinating and imagining, however cute they are.

It is striking that at most of the events I am invited to to hear about AI, the speakers are men. It makes one long for some diversity of views.

Here’s a really good article by Lorna https://lornamcampbell.org/higher-education/generative-ai-ethics-all-the-way-down/ highlighting some of the challneges for those of us who publish collections and content openly on the web.

Update 18th August 2023

I am delighted to have received the finished report from my AI Summer interns, Bartlomiej Pohorecki  and Wietske Holwerda 

They have conducted an analysis of the current state of play regarding the use of generative AI technologies in LTW,  and identified opportunities those technologies make possible, how to use them in an ethical way and how to consider privacy concerns. The analysis uncovered that there are concrete use cases of generative AI that would benefit us, however this technology is new and has limitations. Additionally, there are potential pitfalls that could arise when implementing those solutions and there must be a strong focus on ethics and privacy. There is a push to use generative AI from management, however  LTW employees do not have sufficient understanding of how to use it and some fear that they will be replaced by it. This calls for a coherent approach to communicating what is the purpose of introducing those solutions into the workplace.

Bart and Wietske  propose using the term “hybrid intelligence” which aims at denoting that the correct approach is not replacing people with artificial intelligence, but creating a synergy between staff and the generative AI tools. 

They identified concrete use cases and provided me a Possible Implementations Suitability Matrix (PISM). They have offered me courses of action and possible stances in regard to AI.  They have discussed areas of impact of generative AI technologies on Education Technology  and when they conducted interviews with key stakeholders at LTW they identified  commonly held misconceptions regarding generative AI, and explained why they are incorrect.   Best of all, they went beyond the generic literature to identify areas where LTW is already strong, unusual and values-led and took special care to think about the impact of AI on those areas such as OER, MOOCs, Wikimedia, accessibility and recruitment of women into tech.

My next step is to continue and our extend AI internship roles to work with business analysts and service teams in order to be able to navigate the AI market efficiently and make responsible decisions while innovating. There is a need for continuous effort for coherent strategy development and deployment of AI systems and a close eye on ethics all round.  

discussing the work at Leeds ( way back)

I was in Leeds again this week. It’s always nice to visit and I do get a wee bit nostalgic for places and times passed. I worked at Leeds 2001-8. One of the things we did back then was to develop institutional services for blogging, podcasting and wiki-ing. I called it ‘LeedsFeeds’. We also had LU-Tube.

It got written up by JISC:

“Promoting blogs, wikis and other RSS enabled applications such as podcasting and news feeds has been part of the Staff and Departmental Development Unit’s support for
the ongoing development of staff information literacy skills.

Web 2.0 can be defined as a set of technologies that allow easy content sharing on the web and that enable social software, ie. Software that supports group processes. Social software includes blogs, wikis, content sharing systems (such as Flickr and YouTube), social bookmarking systems (such as del.icio.us), and content syndication systems. While the first systems that can be classed as Web 2.0 or social software appeared more than a decade ago, during the last three years there has been a strong growth in the number of available social software systems, and in their use. With the rise in use, there are a number of concerns relating to creation, ownership and preservation of the content. Some of these are discussed below.” 

Institutional practice Briefing paper on Web 2 (2007) (researchgate.net)

on your marks

Oliver Byrne. The Elements of Euclid, 1847 (c) University of Edinburgh http://images.is.ed.ac.uk/luna/servlet/s/0524y8

According to some recent on- the-ground research this is the list of tools being used by schools at University of Edinburgh for summative assessment and marking (below)

Some Schools have tried to standardise their assessment practices as much as possible, making things more consistent for students, markers and teaching office staff. In these Schools, the Learning Technologist, Teaching Office and Course Organisers work together to agree which tools are used and there is a level of central coordination of this work

Other Schools have a more devolved way of working and each course may differ in which tools and processes are used. In some cases, the Teaching Office and Learning Technologist have more limited information about course by course assessment practices.

The full cost of running so many different systems will be our next bit of research.

 

Learn
Turnitin
PebblePad ATLAS
Peermark
Gradescope
Noteable
STACK
WebPA
OMS
TopHat
MS Forms
Peerwise
Media Hopper Create
Blogs.Ed
Coderunner
Learn2Euclid
MS Teams
Practique
Speedwell
Coursemarks
Github
WeTransfer
Thinglink
Collaborate
Final Year Rotation Feedback Tool
Codegrade
McGraw-Hill MCQs
Piazza
LearnSci
Minitab
Cocalc
QMP
Unidesk form
Sign-up tool
MIRO
Moodle
EMS Placement Feedback
SWAY

the change you can see

I asked my excellent Data and Equality Officer to look at our demographics again. I wanted to know if my attempts to diversify the LTW workforce by sex, ethnicity and age were having an impact. She looked at data since 2015. The group has grown about 50%. From 100 in 2015 to 155 in 2022. Proportions of staff in different groups (age, contract type, disability, ethnicity, sex, and nationality) by academic year were requested from HR. Data are only shared in proportion whole numbers.  The data are in a Power BI Dashboard for monitoring and the dashboard is set up so new data can be added every year.

Headlines:

  • In 2021 – 2022, nearly half (45%) of staff in LTW were under 35 years old. This was largely due to the student intern population, as in this year they made up a quarter (25%) of staff in LTW. Taking into account only the “core” LTW population, nearly a third (30%) of staff were under 35 years old.
  • The proportion of staff on fixed-term contracts has remained consistent (about 12%) since 2020. This is a significant drop compared to previous years where the proportion of staff on fixed-term contracts was, on average, about a third (32%) of staff were on fixed-term contracts.
  • The proportion of staff with disabilities has remained relatively consistent (about 6% on average).  The proportion of staff reporting a disability at University level in 20221 – 2022 was 5%.
  • The proportion of staff from BAME backgrounds has remained relatively consistent at about 8% on average. This is consistent with the proportion of professional services staff from BAME backgrounds in 2021 – 2022 at University level.
  • At 47%, the proportion of female staff within LTW has been the highest it has ever been in 2021 – 2022. This seems to be driven by the student intern population, however. the average proportion for female staff in LTW has been about 40%, and has remained at 39% since 2020 – 2021.
  • The proportion of EU staff has increased slightly since 2020 – 2021. The proportion of international staff has slightly dropped since 2019 – 2020.

digital badgers

As previously teased, I am delighted to say we are launching a 3-year pilot of BadgEd, a new Open Digital Badge service, so that students and staff can earn their stripes and show off their achievements in black and white!

It’s taken me a while to get this in place. I am indebted to Pat Lockley for first introducing me to the idea at Mozfest in 2010.

Open Digital Badges have become a standard way of recognising skills and achievements outside of credit-bearing course work. Within the University of Edinburgh, some departments have already been issuing digital badges for several years, which has highlighted the need for a central service. Our aim is to create consistency, to share best practice among colleagues, to support local issuers, and to provide an opportunity for more colleagues to get involved.  Our graphic design teams have been working hard on figuring out how to make branded setts.

The pilot will:

  • focus on the recognition of extra-curricular skills, achievements, or competencies through the awarding of a digital badge
  • support the growing interest in and recognition of digital badges
  • provide guidance on how to maintain the value of digital badges for both earners (students, staff, external learners) and issuers (Schools and Deaneries issuing a badge)
  • expand on stand alone badges to explore how badge pathways and skills frameworks could enhance the value of the badge to the earner. Find out more about our badger setts : BadgEd (Open Digital Badges) | The University of Edinburgh
#mozfest Barcelona 2010. Pat Lockley explains badges to me.

adding another VLE

Lovely illustrations for our playful engagement website by the LTW

A year ago we identified  a missing component in the University’s Digital Estate.

Each year the University attracts large numbers of Learners (non-matriculated students) to non-credited courses yet there is currently a gap in the University’s learning and teaching platforms to support them. Our review of short course provision in 22/23 estimated that there are upwards of 10,000  learners across hundreds of courses, this is already University business but the digital estate does not accommodate this activity well, as none of the current VLEs are optimised for this type of  external business. Our VLE(s) are designed to deliver credit-bearing taught courses and ensure a consistent and positive user experience. There are currently no service(s) that can deliver a University-wide catalogue of non-credit-bearing taught courses to externally facing users or offer a clear and consistent end-user, learning, teaching, or administrative experience for short courses including continuing professional development (CPD) and executive education.

Since nothing is optimized to their needs, learner experiences are mixed and courses can be difficult to find.

This gap for a short courses platform was included in the Digital Estate Strategy and has now been approved. A board has been convened to oversee the procurement and the procurement is now underway to deliver a short course platform that enhances the learners experience across the lifecycle, allowing them to;

  • access a single university catalogue helping them to browse all non-credit courses with consistent course information.
  • identify the course(s) that meet their requirements including learning outcomes, course dates and delivery method (face to face, online, hybrid).
  • register, pay and learn in a way that encourages them to continue their learning journey with the University of Edinburgh.

In addition to improving the overall learner experience the benefits to the University include;

  • increasing the diversity and widening participation (WP) of our university learning community by enabling staff to create engaging and accessible catalogue and learning content
  • improved management information for decisions and planning for non-matriculated learners, these learners are mostly missing completely from standard reporting impacting QA and WP reporting, and size and shape planning
  • encouraging continued learning with the University either on further short courses or on credited programmes through lead generation, and in turn increasing University income.
  • enabling process and operational efficiencies by replacing end of life systems and enabling the University platform strategy
  • reducing the risks of non-matriculated learners being granted access to systems which have been licenced based on student FTE numbers
  • reducing pressure on students services not designed to be accessed by large numbers of non-matriculated learners.

The new platform for short courses will address a lacuna and allow the University to optimize each platform for type of learning and the needs of the audience. The benefits will be seen in the fact that students will learn on a platform designed and tailored for their degree level courses, staff will learn on a platform designed for workplace development, and external and B2B learners will have a platform designed so their interactions with our University are optimized and so courses can meet University business and teaching objectives.

technology is what we can learn to do

‘I don’t know how to build and power a refrigerator, or program a computer, but I don’t know how to make a fishhook or a pair of shoes, either. I could learn. We all can learn. That’s the neat thing about technologies. They’re what we can learn to do.’ Ursula le Guin (2004)

 

Our Learn VLE has been rolled over and all new courses for the whole next academic year have been created in the new template and are now ready to be populated. This has been done more than a month earlier than normal to give people more time to build their courses. Staff should begin to rebuild their courses as soon as possible.

School and deaneries should be encouraging their staff, both academic and professional services, to engage with the changes as early as possible by:

  • Attending a training session
  • Engaging with guidance resources
  • Rebuilding courses early
  • Asking for help if needed, either through the School/Deanery Learning Technologist, or the IS Helpline.

100 MOOCs more

100 MOOCs logo
Celebrating 10 years and 100 MOOCs

University of Edinburgh has been publishing MOOCs as open educational resources for 10 years. Huge thanks go to all the academic teams who choose this route to share the knowledge they have created with learners all over the world.

_______________________

The Edinburgh online learning portfolio currently includes 80 fully online distance-learning Masters courses drawn from all disciplines, and 90 massive online open short courses (MOOCs) and micro credentials across 3 global platforms. University of Edinburgh reaches 4.5 million learners across every country in the world. Each of the 21 academic schools and deaneries have either a Masters or a MOOC online, and many have both.  The services online students receive are excellent. E-learning students at Edinburgh currently report higher levels of satisfaction and ‘sense of belonging’ than their peers on campus. In 2023 University of Edinburgh is celebrating 10 years of return on investment in MOOCs.

When we began making massive open online courses (MOOCs) at Edinburgh our strategic position was to experiment with new ways of teaching online, to research the kind of learning and courses which could be achieved, and to have fun. We were never in it for the money. Although it was undeniably expensive at the start, the last ten years of this activity have brought considerable return on that investment in terms of what we have learned, the places we have reached and the impact we have had (inside and outwith our own institution).

As Assistant Principal for Online and Open Learning I have taken care to ensure that our online course portfolio is closely aligned with the university mission, values, civic responsibility and aspirations for the future.

Working with three global platform partners ( Coursera, Edx and Futurelearn) has given us unique insight into the business of scaling short courses online and a rich set of data about our materials and our learners. Each of the platforms has its own strengths and weaknesses and the pedagogical tools offered on each have changed rapidly during the ten years. Their business models have changed too and it has been useful to have an institutional platform strategy to help us target the right content on the right platform, for the right audience.  The advice and support available in the platform teams has been useful in understanding what works well. We have been privileged to be so able  to rigorously test our courses, to translate our content into multiple languages and to release significant proportions of it as open educational resources.

Making MOOCs has given us the opportunity to bring a wide range of our university community together. The many research groups, cultural organisations and charities who have developed content with us for the Edinburgh MOOCs have ensured that we have gained a diverse set of voices in discussions about how and why a university can and should make courses freely available online. The MOOCs have offered a rapid channel for knowledge translation and dissemination, public engagement with research, global reach, and a place for discussion and debate with an informed citizenry at times of major geo-political change. In ten years we have found 4.5 million people who choose to learn online from University of Edinburgh, an even though many might say the markets are hot for data skills and cyber-security, our consistently most popular course is one in Philosophy.

The value of these experiments in online learning can also be seen in the capacity building and up-skilling of colleagues. In making and delivering these courses more than 200 academic colleagues, media producers, learning designers and learning technologists cut their teeth and honed their skills for online learning. I am sure that this contributed to our ability to deliver in a crisis and develop resources to help others to do so too. Even during the years of the covid pandemic which closed our campus, our online courses and MOOCs continued to grow and some rapid-response effort from a teams across the university produced a short-course about emergency respiratory healthcare which was studied by 50,000 front-line workers the week it was launched.

Top tips for delivering free short online courses

    • Don’t be afraid to try something new, digital education is an evolving field and you never know where your experiments might lead
    • Get institutional buy-in by aligning your courses with your university’s strategic goals
    • If you have more than one learning platform, develop a platform strategy to ensure that you are using the right platform for the right audience.
    • Work closely with vendor and platform partners to get the most out of your partnership; ensure you can access any data they provide to evidence the reach your platforms deliver.
    • Pay attention to the licensing of all your course content; sharing it appropriately can make it accessible to many more learners globally

See our full list of short online courses Short online courses | The University of Edinburgh

 

 

in defence of distance learning

Online learning in New York

Hybrid innovation is not good for online learning.

‘Hybrid’ teaching seems cool, but actually reduces the amount of flexibility for distance learners. Distance learning was supposed to free us from the tyranny of time and space.

Any time, any place, and pace. Slowly, over many years, flexible to be achieved in balance with their own lives, work and families.

Hybrid is this cool idea that your online learners should be able to join in synchronous sessions with the learners and teachers on campus.

As soon as you include in your fully online programme live sessions which are linked to the activities happening on campus you are requiring the distance learner , wherever they are in the world, to tie themselves to your time.   They may be any place, but no longer any time or any pace.

It is teacher-centred, campus-centred and risks ‘othering’ the online students in a way we have fought to avoid.

I think it is a backward step.

I think some colleagues have become intoxicated by Teams.

International Womens Day 2023

ribbon cutting action shot

IWD2023 is shaping up well for me so far.

We will be be naming a lecture theatre after an inspirational but overlooked woman of science- Charlotte Murchison

The book ‘Dangerous Women’ will be published in the USA

My article has been published in the JPAAP special edition Vol. 11 No. 1 (2023): Special Issue on Breaking the Gender Bias in Academia and Academic Practice https://jpaap.ac.uk/JPAAP/issue/view/34

I am also giving a talk for edtech company Instructure (the people who have sold us our new badging system) about:

“Empowerment through Education: Discussing the importance of education in empowering women and girls.”

so I’d better get some thinking about that.

IWD began in 1908, when 15,000 women marched through New York City demanding shorter working hours, better pay and the right to vote. A year later, the Socialist Party of America declared the first National Woman’s Day.

It is lovely to see so many activities across ISG to celebrate International Women’s Day this year as every year. It has been a real team effort to raise awareness, thank you.

International Women’s Day has become a date to celebrate how far women have come in society, in politics and in economics, while we are in the  middle of a sustained period of industrial action in this university  strikes and protests  and events are organised on campus to raise awareness of continued inequality. Striking ( collective bargaining by Beatrice Webb economist , founder of LSE)

The first theme adopted by the UN (in 1996) was “Celebrating the Past, Planning for the Future”.The UN’s theme for 2023 is “DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality”. This theme aims to recognise and celebrate the contribution women and girls are making to technology and online education.

Some of you may have heard me before going on about the pay gap  ( big) and the pensions gap ( twice as big) . There is also a digital  gap  and the UN estimates that women’s lack of access to the online world will cause a $1.5 trillion loss to gross domestic product of low and middle-income countries by 2025 if action isn’t taken.

Advancements in digital technology offer immense opportunities to address development and humanitarian challenges, and to achieve the 2030 Agenda’s Sustainable Development Goals. Unfortunately, the opportunities of the digital revolution also present a risk of perpetuating existing patterns of gender inequality. Growing inequalities are becoming increasingly evident in the context of digital skills and access to technologies, with women being left behind as the result of this digital gender divide. The need for inclusive and transformative technology and digital education is therefore crucial for a sustainable future.

Digital literacy has become almost as important as traditional literacy.

Over 90% of jobs worldwide already have a digital component* and most jobs will soon require sophisticated digital skills. If we equip girls with digital skills through prioritising education in IT subjects,  girls will thrive in places  where digital skills are prized. This is already true.

We can strive to highlight the ways in which the work we do goes someway to addressing inequality and achieving the UNSDGs. Technology and digital education can increase the awareness of women and girls regarding their rights and civic engagement as well as offering careers for those with a range of digital skills.

In Scotland there is still a significant gap in IT education in schools. The recent report from the British Computing Society “Landscape Review: Computing Qualifications in the UK” found that in all UK nations, computer science subjects are the least popular amongst the sciences and male-female balance in class is often six to one.

  • girls are outnumbered six to one by boys in computer science classes across the UK.
  • women  who do choose computing,  outperform their male counterparts on average.

Participation in computer science in Scotland had been falling steadily over recent years but happily increased in 2021, possibly down to the growing popularity of new digitally focused areas of the curriculum, the higher profile of hybrid working and the good work EDINA have done to embed data science in so many schools. When fewer than 20% of the people working in the tech sector in Scotland are women, we must be vigilant to ensure that the kinds of work we do here in ISG is open to all.

“The Digimap for Schools service enables students to develop fundamental digital and data skills as well as increasing teacher confidence through the provision of valuable resources, lesson plans and ideas. Together with EDINA, we are confident that eligible schools will benefit greatly from free use of Digimap for Schools and the many associated learning resources.”

The Scottish Government has included digital technology as one of the six key sectors in which Scotland has a ‘distinct competitive advantage’. With low numbers of women working and girls studying to be in the sector, this competitive advantage is at risk.

Universities are big employers. University of Edinburgh is one of the largest tech employers in Scotland.

On the upside, in both the HE and IT sectors there are national pressures from policy organisations to increase the numbers of women in senior and STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) roles. Highly qualified women are likely to be in high demand, and employers who offer visible support for inclusion will reap rewards in recruitment. You can find us on Women in Tech jobs board.