Ed/Tech must-reads

Backchannels, Authentic assessment, GenAI, Video Translation and Pressbooks

September 18, 2023

Staircases and bookshelves outside among trees. Books fly in the air like birds. The sky is orange and a large sun is setting in the background

One of the biggest deficiencies of Learning Management Systems is the general absence of a user-friendly, engaging communication platform. They all have forums but these tend to be used begrudgingly and often involve the carrot of connecting marks with posting. Some educators or faculties (usually I.T.) bypass enterprise tools by using third party tools like Slack, MS Teams, Piazza or Ed Discussion with variable success. This article offers some reasonable insights into the steps that students take to create their own spaces, particularly when they find themselves unwilling to ask embarrassing questions in public or feel frustrated by unresponsive lecturers.

With a focus on “Re-orienting authentic assessment for an unknown future”, these open sessions include a keynote from Professor Crina Damşa (University of Oslo) about assessment and collaborative learning, and two panel discussions chock-full of academic notables discussing “How can we strengthen relationships between authenticity, assessment, and future practice?” and “What is the role of the digital in authenticity of assessment?”.

Given the impact of GenAI on learning and teaching, it isn’t surprising that GenAI providers like OpenAI (ChatGPT) are keen to engage with educators on using the tech in the best ways possible. This is a fairly simple overview of some useful applications of the technology (roleplaying, building quizzes, supporting non-English speakers etc) but it includes some helpful prompts from Ethan Mollick and co. It also links to other resources including an FAQ with this rather blunt question about GenAI detection:

“Do AI detectors work?

  • In short, no. While some (including OpenAI) have released tools that purport to detect AI-generated content, none of these have proven to reliably distinguish between AI-generated and human-generated content.

  • Additionally, ChatGPT has no “knowledge” of what content could be AI-generated. It will sometimes make up responses to questions like “did you write this [essay]?” or “could this have been written by AI?” These responses are random and have no basis in fact.”

During the week a friend at another uni asked me if I had any experience with Pressbooks as they were considering adopting it. I had looked at it briefly a couple of years ago and thought it seemed promising but didn’t have everything I wanted. I put a call out to the wider community (Thank you ACODE and TELedvisors Network) and the enthusiasm for this platform was unbridled. So I guess I will be taking another look. In a nutshell, it enables you to create online books with interactive content that can be output to ePubs, integrates with tools like H5P, Hypothesis and Mathjax and is built on Wordpress. (I have no affiliation with this, it just seems cool and well-loved).

Video Translate from HeyGen

I haven’t played with this myself but examples of outputs have been popping up on socials with increasing regularity in the last week and ElevenLabs has been doing some of the most impressive work I have heard with audio to date. This app allows you to upload a video and have the voice cloned and the words translated to one of seven languages. (Spanish, French, Hindi, Italian, German, Polish, Portuguese). Not sure which languages can be translated to English. It also edits the mouth of the speaker to fit the words. It’s not cheap, starting at $48USD per month but the possibilities are intriguing.