Ed tech must reads: column #59

First published in Campus Morning Mail 8th Nov 2022

Suggestions on dealing with AI-generated papers that don't get flagged by plagiarism-checking software from Twitter

Umar Ruhi (@Informatician) raises the question that won’t go away in this Twitter discussion about how he might investigate a student submission that doesn’t feel quite right. The explosion of high quality AI text generation tools this year is having a major impact on the integrity of assessment and without a clear technological solution in sight, rethinking the design of assignments is the only logical step.

How do we do effective feedback?: A practical example from Teaching Matters blog

Feedback is routinely identified as an area for improvement in discussions of good learning and teaching practice in Higher Ed. Providing and using meaningful, actionable feedback is time-intensive and requires a certain measure of feedback literacy on the part of both educators and students. This post from Jane Hislop and (my soon-to-be colleague) Tim Fawns from Uni of Edinburgh outlines a way to build peer feedback into rich assessment activities that draws on students’ inclinations to compare their progress with their peers.

Student support spotlight cards in Education Insights from Microsoft Teams for education

Many big tech firms have been steadily establishing beachheads in the education space in recent years and Microsoft’s appears to centre around their Teams communication and collaboration platform. This post on their support site outlines their upcoming learning analytics functionality, which mostly just tracks changes in student interaction with the system and generates a report for educators to follow up on.

Lessons from Treadmills and Owls: The Most Important Feature in Educational Technology Products from Improving Learning

This short post from David Wiley explores the idea that education technologies can add all the rich data tracking and analysis tools in the world but these don’t matter that much if nobody is using them. He argues that the thing that makes the greatest difference is the behavioural nudge, outlining the way that popular language learning app Duolingo strategically reminds learners to continue to engage with the platform. (And it has worked for me, 668 days into a French learning streak).

Leadership and Management needs of Australasian Higher Education – Webinar 1/12 4pm AEDT

Advance HE (formerly the Higher Education Academy) is a UK based organisation behind the increasingly popular HEA fellowship accreditation scheme for Higher Ed. They also support research into the sector and this promising looking webinar at the start of December covering a July 2022 study by Dr Jo Chaffer looks worthwhile. (ACODE also has a decent set of interviews with Oz HE leaders on their site if this grabs your interest)