Authors: Matt Edwards, Michael Parry, Robyn-Lee Murphy, Tim Packwood

About the conference

The Education Excellence Conference is an annual conference hosted at the University of Birmingham that aims to discussed topics relevant to the enhancement of teaching, learning and assessment. It is attended by education experts from both the UK and abroad. With this year’s theme focused on the impact that Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI), is having on higher education, now and in the future. The IT innovation and the Careers Network were invited to demonstrate some of the professional services driven approach’s to GAI.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI), including technologies like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, is revolutionising content creation across various mediums, such as text, code, images, and audio. This rapid advancement is making generative AI tools more accessible, significantly affecting educational practices in teaching, learning, assessment, and support.

These technologies not only help academic staff in creating and evaluating course materials but also offer new ways to engage students in critical thinking and problem-solving. However, effective utilisation requires both educators, professional services and students to understand how these tools function within their specific fields and their role in developing essential skills and services to support their impactful use moving forward.

Members of the IT Innovation team and Careers Network spent time with academics interested in AI in teaching and learning.

Five sub-themes will be explored during the conference:

GAI-Resilient assessment.
Generative AI for enhanced learning gain.
Enhancing graduate attributes in an AI-enabled world.
Developing staff capability in generative AI use.
Sharing good practice in the use of generative AI within teaching, learning, assessment and support.

IT and Careers Network collaboration

The Innovation Team, in collaboration with the Careers Network, is developing a proof-of-concept system to see if AI can lend a helping hand in assessing non-credit-bearing student reflection essays. Leveraging Azure OpenAI, we use carefully designed prompts to evaluate whether submissions meet specific marking criteria.

The reflective assessment forms part of the Careers Network led optional co-curricular employability programme, The Birmingham Award – which offers students the opportunity to gain recognition for their participation in extra-curricular activities and provides support in the articulation of skills and attributes developed. Careers Network have collaborated with the Innovation Team to explore whether the proof-of-concept AI tool could help with the scaling up of the award by supporting staff to mark the increasing number of reflective essays more efficiently, and for participating students to gain a response on their assessment more quickly.

Based on the work to date the professional services team were invited to present at the conference and demonstrate the positive impact the work is having on the Birmingham Award. As well as framing how, professional services is a key collaborator in developing and supporting GAI services at the university.

IT Services and the Careers Network shared their ideas and work on generative AI essay marking.

Broader work and exploration of GenAI

Since its inception in spring 2024 the IT innovation team has been working with a variety of stakeholders to explore opportunities for the use of AI across the university. With a specific focus on teaching, learning and related activities. The team working with academics have developed several pilots and proof of concepts to demonstrate the positive impact this technology can make at the university.

The session included a lot of questions and positive interactions with the academic community.

Using AI to improve the reporting of National student survey (NSS) responses – https://itinnovation.bham.ac.uk/using-ai-to-improve-the-reporting-of-national-student-survey-nss-responses/

Supporting university growth: Making the case for a university virtual assistance – https://itinnovation.bham.ac.uk/demonstrating-the-potential-benefit-of-a-virtual-assistance-at-the-university/

Assessment, AI and prompt engineering – Augmenting the marking of reflective essays – https://itinnovation.bham.ac.uk/augmenting-the-marking-of-free-form-essays-a-prompt-engineering-challenge/

The future

The IT Innovation team and Careers Network are continuing to develop the proof-of-concept, with continued alignment to the award’s marking criteria. Some of the next steps include:

Continued academic collaboration through The Birmingham Award Board of Studies
Staff and student user testing
Building an appropriate Evaluation of the technology, process, and user experience