In the first of a series of interviews, we asked UTS College learning designer and GenAI working group lead Will Lamb to share some of the ideas in his document,
An Educational Approach to Generative AI, and his thoughts on the impact of AI on teaching and learning.
Will came to the College after 20 years in English language teaching. During that time, he was a teacher, teacher trainer, course and content developer, curriculum writer, department manager and founder/director of his own language school. Will has led the College GenAI working group since early 2024. “As soon as I started to look into it, I was really hooked. It’s a fascinating area,” he says. With expert assistance from his working group, Will has been investigating how to help students use AI effectively. “Research shows that students want guidance in this area. They’re demanding guidance. Professionals can produce work using GenAI to boost productivity because they already have the skills to perform those tasks, and the knowledge to evaluate the output. It’s different for students, who don’t yet have fundamental skills or the expertise to evaluate GenAI output.”
It begins with a supportive environment He says any intervention begins with a supportive environment. “Before they get to any assessment they might be tempted to offload onto GenAI, it’s important to provide a sense of belonging. We need to make students feel comfortable and build their self-efficacy through learning activities and formative feedback. If they feel nurtured and cared for and they believe they can do it – if they’ve had enough feedback to do it – this can reduce the misuse of GenAI.”
A supportive environment helps students use AI appropriately and with confidence. It's important to get this right, Will says, because when used constructively, GenAI is a very effective tool. “There’s an infinite number of ways students can use GenAI effectively, but they revolve around building knowledge and enhancing retention of that knowledge. The most impactful part of our approach is to help students understand that using GenAI to produce work for them will only disadvantage them. They won’t develop the skills they need.”
The issue of academic misconduct is obviously most important. Will leads the GenAI Academic Integrity working group, running workshops for students and staff at UTS College. He says, “We’ve tried to make the role of GenAI in relation to academic misconduct very clear to students. First, they can’t say they didn’t know, but also so it’s clear what’s expected of them.”
Communicating the how and why UTS College has a distinctive approach. “Many other institutions have what they call a ‘traffic light’ system or similar, showing students when they shouldn’t be using GenAI and when it’s okay, but they rarely say why,” Will says. “At the College, we want to educate students on the ‘how’, but most importantly on the ‘why’. Not many are doing that. So, what we’ve done, that’s kind of novel, is to show students
why they shouldn’t use GenAI to do the work for them. Mainly because they’ll miss the opportunity to develop the very skills they’re here to learn. I would say that’s particularly important for pathway college students. They’re building foundational skills with us.”
An integrated approach Of course, this doesn’t mean discouraging students from using GenAI at all. “The next phase is modelling effective usage for students. In the next few months, we’ll start to see little activities popping up in our subjects using Copilot. These will help students build knowledge or enhance its retention. But more than that, it helps model how you can use this tool in the learning process. We can integrate GenAI into our
way of learning. And we hope to get chat-bots into our subjects. They’ll be limited though. Not large language models that can do everything for you, but limited to information about the course; answering questions, helping to understand text and so forth.”
Will finds it hard to identify the most important thing he’s learnt about GenAI so far. “It’s such a big topic,” he says. “Probably the most important thing I’ve learnt is that we don’t know what the role of AI is. It’s still unfolding. For many people it’s quite a binary topic, so they’re either very anti AI or very pro AI. To me, it’s important not to be either, because it’s emerging. My biggest takeaway is to neither demonise nor lionise it. It’s just a reality. It’s here. We have unanswered questions, but we have ways of thinking about these questions that will provide us with answers as time goes on. There’s nothing more pertinent than the issue of GenAI in education.”
Read the full version here: UTS College Educational Approach to Generative AI