Student and/or staff hackathons are critical tools to develop and test effective and ethical approaches to using AI platforms in higher education, according to researchers driving a new AI project.
UQ’s Acting PVC (Teaching and Learning Professor Kelly Matthews, UTS Professor Simon Buckingham Shum, who have been researching student perspectives on the use of generative AI in higher education with colleagues from UQ, Deakin, Monash and UTS, told a conference last week that hackathons provided a valuable opportunity to develop and test new technological solutions.
Because the HE and AI landscapes were both turbulent, hackathons would provide an opportunity to press ahead with iterative prototyping and provide universities with the confidence to invest.
Inviting AI vendors to collaborate in hackathons and co-design solutions provided opportunities for universities to field teams to compete / participate in hackathon events, with substantial potential progress, as long as all code and ideas remain open source.
Underlying the importance of rapidly evolving new approaches to regulating and nurturing effective and ethical uses of AI, students said the current wild west approach to AI usage had changed the nature not just of study, but of being a student.
“I think it’s changing the identity of being a student … Sometimes, in the past, it required effort, repetition, hard-work, you know … now it’s become. I guess one word is efficient, but also like somebody else mentioned, lazier … yes, being a student is not as great as it used to be,” Medicine student ‘Mam’ told the researchers.
The hackathon proposal is a key recommendation from the AI in Higher Education: Student Perspectives project, which involves 18 researchers drawn from across the four participating institutions.
The researchers, who only coalesced into a collective this year, have already conducted 20 focus groups with 79 students at their universities. If, like me, you wonder at the average of just under four students per focus group and hope with fingers crossed that the students were lulled into moments of lucid truth-telling with promises of pizza, gift cards or anonymity; you will be glad to know that the results of these groups have been parlayed into a survey tool which is harvesting robust insights into AI use from more than 8,000 students.
This should be a marquee project for the sector. Four universities voluntarily collaborating to gather insights that regulators could only dream of dredging up, with practical take outs that pretty much all 140,000 staff in the sector (or 139,000 and declining after recent job cuts) will find relevant.
It is the largest survey of its kind in Australia, and assuming at least some of the students are prepared to fess up to at least some of their usage, the collaboration promises some significant and very timely insights.
