Common Awards staff work tirelessly to resource the thinking and practice of staff and students in the partnership through regular webinars and conferences; and along with other TEIs, SEI thanks them warmly for this provision.
Several SEI staff attended one such webinar last week, on the topic of Artificial Intelligence and Common Awards. The advent of programmes like ChatGPT, capable of generating coherent and convincing-sounding text in response to an input prompt, raises many questions for those engaged in Higher Education.
ChatGPT works like a scaled-up form of predictive text, calculating one word at a time. Thus if an essay question was entered as a prompt, this Large Language Model (LLM) would be able to produce something ‘passable’ – both in terms of quality and identification by plagiarism detection software – with minimal effort or understanding of the topic.
While acknowledging the biases and inequalities which beset the use of generative AI output, not to mention the many attendant ethical and sustainability implications, those attending the webinar noted that it is important for staff and students alike to learn how to use the tools appropriately and critically so as to be properly digitally equipped. Tutors need to embrace the possibilities, educate others how to use the tools with integrity, and discover how they can enhance their own academic practice.
“We are in the midst of a Cognitive Revolution”, said one participant, “a paradigm shift akin to when ‘machine-made’ replaced ‘hand-made.’” As in the late 18th – early 19th centuries, the expectation is that these tools will improve dramatically over the next few years. TEI staff were thus urged to engage in open discussion with their students now about tools of this nature, as well as investigating the potential of Large Language Models to enhance pedagogical practice.
As to Conferences, the annual gathering for Common Awards staff takes place on July 3 – 5 at High Leigh Conference Centre, its theme being ‘Theological Education and the Environmental Crisis’. It will explore the roles that theological education can play in enabling churches and wider society to address the multiple overlapping issues that form the environmental crisis. In exploring the scale of the challenges, the ways in which the crisis might shape TEIs’ curricula, and the ways in which theological education and the churches might help foster deeper responses, Conference participants will be addressed by Norman Wirzba, Ruth Valerio, Martin Hodson and Anupama Ranawana ….
… and also by our own Patricia Ellison who will be sharing some of the Greening the Curriculum research process and outcomes with Common Awards staff. Pat has been one of the four-strong research team guiding the project since last September, and the lead researcher on the use of SenseMaker®, piloting the system in the autumn term in her own diocese of Moray, Ross and Caithness, and working closely with the SenseMaker® consultant. We wish Pat well as she prepares to share the findings with Common Awards staff.
Photos courtesy of Rolf van Root on Unsplash and Pat Ellison
