Ed & Tech must-reads 050526

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.