This is STILL a moonshot moment for higher education

👉A guest blog post for #HEBlogswap by Santanu Vasant, Head of Educational Development and Digital Education, London Metropolitan University as part of #HEBlogSwap  2023. Check out Santanu’s blog post!

At the height of the pandemic in 2020, I wrote an article for the SEDA Educational Developments Magazine entitled ‘A moonshot moment for higher education’ (Vasant, 2020) about the possibilities in higher education. This blog post is a follow-up, revisiting some of the ideas of the first article, with updated reflections from the 3 years that have passed. 

The phrase ‘moonshot’ refers to former US President John F Kennedy’s speech of 1961 (Nasa / Kennedy’s, 1961) on the ambitions to reach the moon by the end of the 1960s. Three years after the initial lockdown of the pandemic in the UK, I’m arguing more than ever that we need to have strong digital leadership that advocates, supports, and provides direction to the learning we experienced during the pandemic – from the technical to the pedagogical experiences of staff and students. What are the key lessons we have learnt? We need to keep these, bringing them into the physical or hybrid spaces we now inhibit. 

I wrote “in this pandemic, if your senior leadership team thought your academic development unit was on the fringes of your organisation, I hope it does not think this now.” – what’s the case now? Are you still in the important conversations, or as Professor Peter Bryant, Associate Dean at Sydney Business School refers to ‘a snapback’ (Bryant, 2021), where you have been forgotten, as business as usual takes over and the in-person, on-campus mode of teaching is the preferred ‘golden standard’ it was before the pandemic.  

We need to keep the World Economic Forum Workforce Principles for the COVID-19 Pandemic (World Economic Forum, 2020)  in mind, they are not just for the pandemic: 

1. Prioritise planning, well-being, and communication
2. Focus on employee experience, engagement, and motivation
3. Ensure responsible work redesign
4. Balance short-term cost concerns with medium-term resilience and rebound. 

You may have noticed many higher education institutions have kept flexible working for those in higher education, however, this flexibility has not always been extended to students learning, who continue to suffer the cost of living and travel expenses in the UK as WonkHE reported and repeated in their 101 ways to get the cost of living down for students (WonkHE, 2023). Few institutions have continued to prioritise the development of skills and competencies in the area of designing flexible learning for staff to benefit student learning and their busy lives. This is a missed opportunity. 

Instead, the new trend and topic of discussion in higher education for the past year has been Generative Artificial Intelligence, sometimes referred to as GenAI. Generative AI has a disruptive quality to it, it uses text prompts to produce text and images, totally generated by code. This has been much commented on across education, especially as students can use the technology to produce assignments and even academics (spoiler alert!) can produce complete journal articles using the technology, as Cotton et al (2023) proved in their article, ‘Chatting and cheating: Ensuring academic integrity in the era of ChatGPT’

Beyond the hype and hysteria, the most positive aspect of GenAI has been to question, as many technologies have tried to previously, what is the role of higher education and learning now. What GenAI has rightly put in sharp focus is Assessment – its purpose, design, and implementation. Just as the pandemic did for learning, GenAI can be just as disruptive for assessment if we begin to take action now. We need to be smart enough to use this moment, to address unfit-for-purpose assessments that are still evident in courses across higher education. We also need to use the lessons learnt from the pandemic, so there isn’t the same sharp snapback to the previous assessment practices. This is still a ‘moonshot moment’ for higher education.

I propose a considered holistic approach to assessment, which starts way before any teaching is done. Starting at the validation, re-validation & design of modules and courses, where everyone involved in supporting the learning and teaching of a course, including alumni paid and invited back as advisors feed into the process. We shouldn’t forget about other levers such as assessment and feedback policies, workshops for staff and students and of course linking innovation in this area to reward, recognition, and promotion. These are the mechanisms by which we can ensure change isn’t easily snapped back. 

This should be done with slow, purposeful collective reflection of previous students’ feedback and intentional design. In the pandemic, we moved very fast, because we had to, now we can move slower. In essence, an assessment that:

1. uses the past lived experience or culture capital of the student, i.e. not a deficit model,
2. offers a choice in how to demonstrate the knowledge of the topics covered,
3. and finally one that asks students to show their processes and rationale at stages along the way to the final assessment, thereby designing out plagiarism.

This is happening, however, in pockets and despite our higher education institutional systems, not because of them. 

This would make it possible to allow GenAI to be used as part of an assessment. These three aspects listed above would mean that students would find it harder to use GenAI for their assessments and if they did, they would need to show how. Assessments would also be varied, making them interesting for students to undertake and for educators to assess. Surely this is a win-win scenario for everyone, to make education better. 

References

Bryant, P (2021) The Snapback. Available at:  https://peterbryant.smegradio.com/the-snapback/ Accessed: 3rd December 2023. 

Cotton, D.R.E, Cotton, P. A  & Shipway, J.R (2023) Chatting and cheating: Ensuring academic integrity in the era of ChatGPT, Innovations in Education and Teaching International, DOI: 10.1080/14703297.2023.2190148 

Kennedy, J F (1961) Special message to Congress on urgent national needs,. Available at: https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/JFKPOF/034/JFKPOF-034-030 Accessed: 3rd December 2023. 

Vasant, S (2020). A moonshot moment for higher education. Available at: https://www.seda.ac.uk/seda-publishing/educational-developments/past-issues-2000-onwards/educational-developments-issue-21-2/ Accessed: 3rd December 2023. 

WonkHE (2023). There’s still more that universities can do to get the cost of living down for students. Available at: https://wonkhe.com/blogs/theres-still-more-that-universities-can-do-to-get-the-cost-of-living-down-for-students-2/ Accessed: 3rd December 2023. 

World Economic Forum (2020). Workforce Principles for the COVID-19 Pandemic Stakeholder Capitalism in a Time of Crisis. Available at: http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_NES_COVID_19_Pandemic_Workforce_Principles_2020.pdf Accessed: 3rd December 2023.