There has been a slew of recent journal articles, blogs, podcasts etc. on the challenges posed by Generative AI in higher education and, particularly, the threat GenAI poses to assessment integrity and security along with possible approaches to mitigate the threat.
The picture that emerges is one in which none (perhaps bar one: the viva?) of the traditional forms of assessment are secure – were they ever? It seems clear that not only does a new assessment paradigm need to emerge but also a new paradigm for learning and teaching. As Gramsci wrote in the 1930s: ‘The old is dying and the new is yet to born: in the interregnum, all kinds of morbid symptoms appear’.
The challenge we face in regard to somehow ensuring or at least maximising assessment integrity and security in the face of GenAI is that, essentially, assessment – in the age of mass higher education – has become an economic and logistical issue, not a pedagogical one. An industrialised process of mass production that relies on the production-line workers (lecturers) doing much of the quality control i.e. assessment and marking, in their spare time in order to meet the production deadlines
What has largely disappeared from the way we assess students is the idea of assessment, inherent in its Latin root ’assidere’ (to sit together or sit beside), as a dialogic process. What hasn’t disappeared, though somewhat diminished, is the dominance of the teacher-centred, curriculum-focused paradigm rather than a student-centred, learning-focused paradigm.
In a recent and worth reading GenAI and assessment-focused journal article by Guy J. Curtis*, he wrote: ‘Students can reasonably expect to have their learning assessed on what they have been taught.’ He’s right but, just as important, students should also expect to be assessed on, or at least have an intensive discussion about, what they have learned. This may well (and should) extend beyond disciplinary specificity as they head towards an increasingly complex and uncertain future in which, whether we like it or not, AI will play an integral role.
So, while we struggle to find ways to make assessment secure without resorting to unacceptable and detrimental levels of surveillance, we might usefully attempt to answer the question: how might we best assess students in ways that reveal what they actually know, what they have learned and what they can do? The pedagogical answer may well be by sitting beside them and questioning them rigorously and systemically. But that begs another question: is higher education willing and able to shift to a new assessment paradigm?
I am an independent higher education consultant and co-founder of the educational consultancy Ciel Associates specialising in organisational and transformational change and enhancing learning, teaching and assessment. I have over thirty years experience in a wide range of higher education providers both as a consultant and, before that, in a number of management, leadership and strategic roles. My work is informed by my belief in the transformational power of education and a commitment to enabling institutions to create meaningful and sustainable change. Contact me at Ciel Associates .
Academics, eh? We may be great teachers. We may be great researchers. We may even be great managers and administrators. But that does not make us great educational designers….and I write this as someone who trained and worked as a designer before I stumbled into teaching design and some other subjects in higher education. Once inside academia I was immediately struck by the fact that a great number of things just didn’t seem to work very well. I was surrounded by talented, skilful, intelligent, committed and passionate colleagues who appeared to spend an inordinate amount of time and energy just getting things to work for them and their students.
It didn’t take me long to work out that one of the primary causes of all this inefficiency and waste and the bang-head-on-desk frustration that resulted, was frequently and simply a tangle of poor design. The plethora of complex systems, labyrinthine processes and perplexing protocols that extend to every corner of our educational endeavours all too often have been created by individuals and groups who – with the best will in the world – are not well acquainted, if at all, with the basic principles of good design.
An awareness and appreciation of concepts such as ‘good design enhances the users’ experience’, or ‘good design is logical e.g. form follows function’, or ‘good design is minimal design e.g. as little as possible and only as much as absolutely necessary’, or ‘good design is consistent right down to the fine details’ was and is often entirely lacking.
There is also an aesthetic quality to good design, but I’ve yet to hear or read that word, or anything similar, when it comes to discussing the crucially important task of designing the educational experiences of students.
If we are to be architects of educational experiences, then we must accept that not only do we need to embrace the principles and practices of good design, but – crucially – we either need to become skilled educational architects and designers ourselves or ensure that at least some of us have or develop those skills so that we can help our colleagues and institutions not only detangle the knots that bind us but also, and more importantly, to create and support the wonderful educational experiences that our students truly deserve.
I am an independent higher education consultant and co-founder of the educational consultancy Ciel Associates specialising in organisational and transformational change and enhancing learning, teaching and assessment. I have over thirty years experience in a wide range of higher education providers both as a consultant and, before that, in a number of management, leadership and strategic roles. My work is informed by my belief in the transformational power of education and a commitment to enabling institutions to create meaningful and sustainable change. Contact me at Ciel Associates .
I aim to play the piano most days, if I am near one. I work from home a great deal of the time, and I do a lot of writing. The work often involves some complex problems – large and small – that need to be addressed. When I am stuck, simply fed-up and frustrated or just need a break, I’ll go to the room with the piano and play for 10, 20, maybe 30 minutes. When I sit at the piano, I might choose to run through one or two of the classical pieces I’ve learned to play reasonably well over the years. Or I might choose a jazz or popular standard that I’ve picked up by ear, which involves a bit of improvisation in that sense of working relatively loosely within a recognised framework. I never play the same tune in exactly same way: but then, who does?
Usually I just place my hands on or over the keys, and I wait to see what happens. I have no idea of what is going to happen before it takes place. Something stirs. Something starts. A note or a chord is played. And off I go. Or off ‘it’ goes, because I feel I’m not in conscious control of my fingers. I am, of course, but it doesn’t feel that way.
David Sudnow, in his now classic work Ways of the Hand (1978) which is a remarkable insider’s account of learning to improvise jazz piano that was based mostly on his own introspection, describes having the most vivid impression of his hands making music by themselves. Sometimes, for me, it feels a bit awkward, as I travel down some musical cul-de-sac or find myself in a particular and sometimes too-familiar groove. Other times it just flows, I’m ‘in the zone’, and I know, especially when it really flows, that it clears and refreshes not only my mind but also my spirit.
In relation to ‘flow’ and Czikszentmihalyi’s influential work on that topic, we know that performances that combine flow states with a degree of risk taking might hold the key to achieving optimal levels of musical communication in improvisation. Being in the flow or ‘groove’ sometimes enables experienced improvisers to move beyond or extend their previous cognitive limits.
Sudnow uncovered many principles about learning, and particularly, what we might call embodied learning. His analysis and observations resonate powerfully with the work and research around creativity in learning and teaching, and what might be referred to as learning or teaching at the ‘edge of chaos’.
“You just get this one idea, which might, at first, seem a bit daft. But something just holds you back from thinking it is completely daft. It was the artist Paul Klee who talked about painting being about taking a line for a walk. And that was the thing about it. What it was like….it was like taking an idea for a walk. You know, the more you just did it….it might just work.” (Interview)
It had been a long day. I had spent it interviewing several academics – from new lecturers to emeritus professors, across a range of disciplines – about their conceptions and experiences of creativity in relation to learning and teaching. Even though I was recording it all, it was still hard work maintaining focus and enthusiasm for each of the 45 minute sessions, and ensuring – as one is obliged to do in phenomenographic research – that I had obtained deep and rich responses to my questions.
I always started with the same question: Could you tell me about an occasion that was a creative experience for you in terms of learning and teaching higher education?
All too often that question would be greeted by silence, and what I came to call the ‘rabbit in the headlight’ look: as if why on earth would I think that there might possibly be a connection between creativity and teaching?
But I’d learned, from my training and work in drama, not to be afraid of silence and to avoid the temptation to ‘jump in’ in order to avoid embarrassment. As a drama therapist once told me: “silence IS golden: it usually means they’re thinking”; and sure enough, after a short while, a story would emerge, and I would gently probe the whats, hows and whys of that particular experience.
The last interview of the day was with a vastly experienced educational developer, with a PhD in linguistics, who had taught in China. After the usual hesitant start, he began to tell me how he had developed a successful student-centred, experiential and problem-based learning experience which was the antithesis of the teacher-centred, conformist, ‘micro-teaching’ that was the normal and expected practice. It was he who described the experience with the Paul Klee ‘taking a line for a walk’ quote above.
Thinking back to those interviews, a number of ‘moments’ stand out:
The eminent, soon-to-retire historian bemoaning the conformity and lack of risk-taking in his younger colleagues, and finally – as his last ‘hurrah’ – running a ‘visual history’ course on 18th century England as seen through a number of key objects that he had always wanted to run but never had the nerve… until now when he was leaving. (This was way before Neil McGregor’s renowned BBC series on the objects of the British Museum).
The management school professor in a 5* research rated department who, much to the annoyance of his colleagues, had won a prestigious national prize for his innovative teaching methods. Apparently they couldn’t understand why he was wasting his time on enhancing his learning and teaching expertise when he ought to be enhancing his (and the department’s) research reputation and ranking.
There was the young, early career lecturer, genuinely committed to teaching, tears rolling down her face as she recounted the frustrations of having her creative ideas about teaching rudely quashed by her senior male colleagues: “I feel restricted, I feel frightened….the constant ‘don’t bother about the teaching, just focus on your research’….it makes me so angry, but I don’t dare say anything”.
And there was the language lecturer whose creative ‘Damascene’ moment occurred serendipitously as a result of being very late for a class she was meant to be teaching in parallel with other identical classes. When she finally turned up at the end of the session she found that the group, who normally “sat like puddings” while she presented the set material in the set textbooks, were still there and that “the atmosphere in the room was buzzing…they were talking to each other, they had a problem to solve. So we spent the last couple of minutes talking about how we were going to keep that going now”.
There were many such moments in all the interviews, and after personally transcribing all the interviews (extraordinarily tiring, but so valuable in being able to get ‘inside the source material’), I began to search for patterns of thoughts and behaviour. Slowly but surely, after a long and rigorous iterative process, the many and varied experiences of creativity in higher education began to coalesce around five main conceptual categories. I attempted to capture them in the following map:
1. Creativity can be a CONSTRAINT-focused experience, where the constraints and specific limitations tend to encourage rather than discourage it. Creativity occurs despite and/or because of the constraints;
2. Creativity can be a PROCESS-focused experience; that may lead to an explicit or tangible outcome…or may not;
3. Creativity can be a PRODUCT-focused experience where the whole point is to produce something;
4. Creativity can be a TRANSFORMATION-focused experience where the experience frequently transforms those involved in it;
5. Creativity can be a FULFILMENT-focused experience where there is a strong element of personal fulfilment derived from the process/production of a creative work.
As well as the development and identification of these five categories (later to be reduced to three – but that’s another story), a number of significant outcomes and observations sprang from the research. It was clear that university teachers experienced creativity in learning and teaching in complex and rich ways, and certainly the ones I interviewed – once they got going – exhibited great enthusiasm for, and an interest in, creativity.
I was struck, particularly, in response to my exploring the reasons why an individual pursued a particular creative course, by the number of times someone said ‘I stumbled across something’ or something similar. The example of the very late lecturer (above) is a typical example. The frequency and consistency with which the opportunity to exploit the consequences of ‘stumbling upon something’ played a critical part in the various self-narratives of creativity in learning and teaching is clearly important, and it has obvious significance for those interested and engaged in learning and teaching. Firstly it is important to realise that there are several distinct but linked elements in this. One is the ‘stumbling’, and another is the ability or opportunity to exploit it. However, as one of the university teachers interviewed said, people stumble across things all the time but rarely act: “So it’s not just stumbling upon it, it’s finding that the thing has a use”.
Then, beyond finding that whatever it is might have some use, one needs the confidence to be able to engage in an action that exploits – in the best sense of the word – that situation. The notion of confidence constitutes a significant and expanding thematic element through all the five categories. In many of the interviews – and it is one reason why actual face-to-face interviews are so important – as the individual began to explain and explore their own creativity (some said it was really the first time they’d ever really thought about it) – I both heard and observed the growing sense of confidence both vocally and physically: they became animated, they smiled and they laughed.
Confidence clearly plays a critical role in enabling university teaches to engage creatively in their pedagogic practice. However, in the research into conceptions of learning and teaching, little attention seems to be paid to the subject of confidence and other affective aspects of the teacher’s role and identity. A number of researchers comment on this apparent gap in the research literature, and explain it by saying that dealing with the emotional and attitudinal aspects of learning and teaching is rather antithetical to the prevailing analytic/ critical academic discourse.
During the course of those interviews there was a strong sense of people transformed. It is also clear that the centrality of creativity-as-transformation in relation to learning and teaching, and the importance of creativity in relation to personal and/or professional fulfilment, poses a series of challenges. There is much more to the experience of creativity in learning and teaching than simply ‘being creative’. Furthermore, a focus on academics’ experience of creativity separated from their larger experience of being a teacher may encourage over simplification of the phenomenon of creativity, particularly in relation to their underlying intentions when engaged in creative activity.
The transformational power of creativity poses a clear challenge to organisational systems and institutional frameworks that rely, often necessarily, on compliance and constraint, and it also poses a challenge to approaches to learning, teaching and assessment that promote or pander to strategic or surface approaches to learning. Academics need to be perceived and involved as agents in their own and their students’ creativity, rather than as objects of or, more pertinently, deliverers of a particular ‘creativity agenda’.. For higher education institutions (and the government) creativity is seen as the means to an essentially more productive and profitable future. But for university teachers, creativity is essentially about the transformation of their students…and themselves.
(‘Creativity’ image created by Paul Kleiman with the assistance of AI)
When a higher education provider calls in a consultant, it’s usually because they want and need some thing or things to change. Usually, at least some people in the institution know precisely what the problem is and what needs to change. But bringing in a consultant can provide validation and confirmation of what needs to done by digging deep into the problems, asking some awkward questions, and providing the hard evidence to support the change event.
Change, of course, can be challenging, awkward and divisive, and there’s the old cliche about people liking the idea of change as long as they don’t have to change themselves. But change isn’t just about people. For genuine, effective, sustainable change to happen, three things need to be addressed simultaneously: People, Systems and Environment. Changing one or even two of those will lead to whatever change is envisaged either not working as well it could or not at all.
An example:
A university’s STEM departments were scattered around the campus. The university commissioned a prize-winning architect to design a new ‘stand out’ building that would house all the various departments. There would be a beautiful atrium in the centre of the building with a café and colleagues from different departments would gather there and all sorts of wonderful ideas (and possible patents) would emerge from the exchange of ideas.
What actually happened was that while the university clearly changed the environment, nothing was done to address the people and systems involved. Within a very short time the building was re-compartmentalised into separate departments who kept their own coffee machines. The atrium remained a beautiful, empty, silent space.
The PSE framework informs much of our consultancy work. It enables us to explore the potential and practicalities of change through those three ‘lenses’, always asking and seeking ‘What will make this better?’
About me:
I am an independent higher education consultant and co-founder of the educational consultancy Ciel Associates specialising in organisational and transformational change and enhancing learning, teaching and assessment.. My work is informed by my belief in the transformational power of education and a commitment to helping institutions achieve meaningful and sustainable change. Contact me at Ciel Associates .
Stumbling with Confidence 