Good afternoon everyone. Apologies for the intrusion, but I just wanted to give an update on a project we started a couple of weeks ago.
You might remember me promoting a roundtable discussion on Artificial Intelligence/Large Language Models (AI/LLMs) in higher education a few weeks back. It was pretty successful: 177 people from all across the country joined in to discuss their thoughts on how AI/LLMs might change the post-secondary landscape and – more practically – what a pan-Canadian inter-institutional group could add to the discourse and improve institutional policy. There was widespread agreement that such a group could add value in terms of spreading ideas around good practice and ensuring that institutions were not always reinventing the wheel when it came to policy.
Following this meeting, a call for volunteers went out to create a working group to guide the future activities on the Roundtable and continue the effort of creating opportunities to discuss on institutional responses to AI/LLMs. This group met for the first time last week and over the summer we will pursue efforts to produce a Terms of Reference for the Roundtable to put it on a long-term footing, and to start an “Observatory on AI/LLMs in Canadian Post-secondary Education” which will be hosted by Higher Education Strategy Associates and will act as a Canadian clearing-house for Post-secondary Institutions’ Initiatives with respect to AI/LLMs.
Also, following a debrief of the initial roundtable and a follow-up survey of participants, the group concluded that the four areas of most significant of pan Canadian interest were:
- Academic Integrity; that is, how enforcement of academic integrity rules will change in the face of AI/LLMs
- Pedagogy and Curriculum; that is, how instructors are changing instruction and assessment to encourage, accommodate or side-step AI/LLMs and how institutions are moving to help them understand and implement good practice in each of these.
- Governance and Policy; that is, whether and how institutions are setting policy with respect AI/LLMs in a co-ordinated and holistic way, not just in terms of academic integrity and pedagogy but more broadly with respect to issues such as privacy, intellectual property and the like.
- Inclusion: that is, exploring how AI can be used to the benefit of underserved groups (in particular but not limited to students with disabilities).
Over the next few months, therefore, our group will be hosting open table discussions on these four topics in rotation. The first session will be happening next week! Join us on June 27th from 12:00-1:00 pm (Eastern, Toronto-hosted) for a discussion on best practices, opportunities and concerns about academic integrity and AI/LLMs in post-secondary institutions. This session will be facilitated by Amanda McKenzie, Director of the Office of Academic Integrity at University of Waterloo. If you are interested in this topic, you can register for this event here: https://tinyurl.com/HESARoundtableAI.
Thanks for your attention. Hope to see you next week: if not, have a great summer.
Ciao,
Alex
