Ed & Tech must-reads 7th July 2026

Bots completing learning activities in tech designed for students? Not good from Anna Mills (LinkedIn)

Amongst the many discussions about the AI menace in learning and teaching, the incursion of GenAI agents directly into units and courses in the LMS has tended to take a back seat. The ability of students to hand over their login to a bot and say ‘ok please go through and take my quizzes and make my discussion posts for the week’ is a real concern which has largely been placed in the too-hard basket. Anna Mills, who has been at the forefront of discussion of the practical impacts of GenAI in tertiary education flags an article discussing a plugin for Moodle called Cursive which may address this but as of the time of writing this link is missing. Hopefully it will be updated soon.

Update: Success, Anna added the link which does flesh out some of the key detail. Chiefly that the plugin detects bots by noting how their behaviour in the LMS differs from that of humans. It gets a little marketingy but it’s worth a look - https://moodle.com/news/field-notes-when-ai-agents-show-up-to-class/

Our lack of teaching training is the professoriate’s secret scandal from Times Higher Education

This lengthy and slightly meandering piece by Arjun Appadurai eventually finds its destination and makes some salient overall points about the way that education and teaching is valued in higher education - but don’t read it if you are in a hurry. Appadurai describes his experiences of being thrown into teaching across multiple universities in a 45 year career with no preparation or training. He eventually notes that teaching and learning centres exists but doesn’t feel that their offerings are adequate - without explaining what would be needed instead - and then addresses the rarely spoken truism that the discipline of education is rarely respected in higher education. (Which, clearly is a problem in a sector with education in the name). The piece makes it point well and will stir some thinking about bigger questions but it never quite reaches the destination that it seems destined for - if you want to teach, you should have a proper teaching qualification. (Perhaps because this is a massive can of worms and not a view that will get many academics invited to dinner parties)

Not All Professional Learning Is Created Equal: What Makes a Graduate Certificate in Learning & Teaching Actually Work? from HERDSA Connect

This post from a former colleague of mine, Katya Pechenkina (Swinburne Uni), describes key elements of her recent paper on the topic which adds some practical meat to the bones of the unanswered question (in the last section) about what is needed in this teacher training. In her investigation of what makes teaching qualifications effective in higher education, she notes that capstones need to be made standard and the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) should be mandated. She also recommends being mindful of AI (yes it isn’t just students taking the easy path) and modelling collaborative practices in teaching (it takes a village yada yada). Overall she paints a relatively optimistic picture of the future in this space and this is well worth a read.

Australian universities and the cycle of crises from Col’s Weblog (different Col)

I had a funny moment when I popped over to this blog, seeing my name on the list of ‘Sites I follow’ - but that’s not why I am sharing this post. Colin Beer consistently writes thoughtful and in depth pieces about the big picture questions of higher education - Australian higher ed specifically but these concerns seem pretty universal. As someone who has recently survived a contentious restructure proposal, the focus in this post on why unis seem to cycle through repeated periods of chaos seemed timely. Beer leans on theory about systems and complexity to try to make sense of why HE so often finds history repeating itself - “external” financial problem leads to cuts leads to weakening of quality creating fragility for the next “external” financial problem and on we dance. While he doesn’t have specific fixes for these highly disruptive cycles, he points to the need for a comprehensive rethinking of how we do things in the sector and why to remove this built in fragility and prepare for future shocks.