Hi everyone,
Thank you so much to everyone who joined us for our last Focus Friday on October 16th.
Today, I’ll be joined by Dr. Brenna Clarke Gray, Coordinator, Educational Technologies and Assistant Professor, Learning Design and Innovation at Thompson Rivers University, for a conversation about AI inevitability discourse and what it means for higher education. We’ll be questioning the assumption that AI adoption is unavoidable, exploring what meaningful AI literacy looks like, and considering how institutions can make more intentional decisions about where and how these tools are used. We’ll also touch on academic integrity, ownership, ethics, academic freedom, and sustainability, and what we risk overlooking when we treat AI adoption as a foregone conclusion.
Focus Friday is 12:30–1:30 p.m. Eastern, and you can register here:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/LyC4ypiFRCal-fAL3bptoA#/registration
Looking Back
Last Focus Friday, we were joined by Dr. Simon Bates, Vice Provost and Associate Vice President, Teaching and Learning at the University of British Columbia, to talk about Learning Management Systems (LMSs) and their role in higher education. We had a fantastic discussion, ranging from the history and original purposes of LMSs to the factors that led to their current widespread integration. We discussed how an LMS can help faculty by making things more familiar and uniform for students, as well as by providing a structure for faculty to work within. At the same time, LMSs can also cause issues by limiting innovation for faculty members.
We then dove into the expansion of LMS use during COVID, as they moved from being an augment to teaching to becoming a requirement and the main method of delivering much of the teaching during the early days of the pandemic. The rise of AI tool capabilities and cybersecurity concerns have brought LMSs into a new era, where the things that make them so helpful also make them targets for bad actors. We discussed how LMS providers are dealing with these problems, as well as the proposals they have put forward for moving into the future.
There was also a good discussion about whether the LMS becomes a “single point of failure” in the system and how faculty and administrators can work to ensure that it doesn’t. Finally, we discussed whether the LMS is there to help instructors organize their semesters and the work of teaching, or whether it is there to support students’ progression through the process of learning.
You can access the recording on our YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/LRfAXq-QP-s
