Ed/Tech must-reads

The Big Four consultants have captured universities from The Saturday Paper

This is perhaps not the most Ed/Techy article to officially kick off with but if you haven’t already seen it, it is an eye-opener. As the extent to which PwC (and presumably the other big accounting/professional services firms Deloitte, Ernst & Young and KPMG) have become enmeshed with the Australian Public Service becomes apparent, their role in Higher Ed also needs examination. I have heard from colleagues in the sector about woefully inept reports generated about institutional edtech systems (behind the backs of local edtech teams) and I have to wonder about the value of other ‘expertise’ being provided.

Barriers and beliefs: a comparative case study of how university educators understand the datafication of higher education systems from The International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education

Stewart, Miklas, Szcyrek and Le (Uni of Windsor, Canada) conduct a comparative case study of HE educators in six countries to explore their understanding of the increasingly complex ways that data is used to inform all aspects of learning and teaching - both processes and the ethical paradigms. They find caution and concern overall, particularly when it comes to the black box nature of many systems but also recognition that, used wisely, some data can be valuable. There is some rich discussion about the ethical nuances of datafication as well.

Brave New World? from International Centre for Academic Integrity

This short blog post is a follow up to a presentation Kane Murdoch (Macquarie Uni) made recently to UC San Diego’s Virtual Symposium on “The Threat & Opportunities of Artificial Intelligence and Contract Cheating: Charting a Teaching and Learning Path Forward”. Murdoch makes the point that while risks from GenAI cheating are getting a lot of attention, contract cheating is still with us and has not become as redundant as might have been expected. He emphasises the value of metadata in combatting this, both file metadata in submissions and also usage logs from the LMS that it was submitted to.

“Am I the unethical one?” A Philosophy Professor & His Cheating Students from Daily Nous

It isn’t every day that I dip into this site of ‘News for & about the Philosophy profession’ but this story caught my eye and I am also quite interested in your perspective. In a nutshell, Garret Merriam, Ass. Prof of philosophy at Sacramento State uni uploaded wrong answers to “study aid” website Quizlet for his upcoming Intro to Ethics exam. He found 40 of his 96 students fed him back his obviously wrong (if you had studied) answers when the exam was done. Putting aside what this might say about the popularity of such sites, was this ethical behaviour? On the one hand, he didn’t force them to the site, on the other, without his “answers”, might the students have engaged more with their own study? I can appreciate the desire to catch cheating students out, seeing it as disrespectful to your time and effort but might his time have been spent more productively in supporting his students? (I realise that this is more likely an ‘it depends’ question but that’s no fun. Feel free to expand in the comments instead)