Gasta!

Gasta!

The rise of AI is transforming the way we access, process, and engage with information. While these innovations offer significant potential, they also come with the risks of misinformation and biases. As AI becomes more integrated into education, this talk highlights the need to equip students with the skills to critically evaluate and analyse the information they receive, beyond simply using AI tools. It calls for a shift in teaching practices that can develop both their critical thinking and digital literacy. By rethinking assignments and redesigning evaluation methods, educators can develop a generation of learners who are not only technologically proficient but also reflective, insightful, and adaptable, ensuring that students are prepared to succeed in an era of rapid technological change and information overload.

How technology and media hijack our attention and why we need to stop it

Antinomy is a situation in which two statements or beliefs that are both reasonable seem to contradict. In five minutes, we’ll try to explore how generative AI is both an assistance and a threat to student learning with online quizzes.

Close your eyes and imagine the world in which your students will work. They might be nurses, engineers, teachers, business people or some other profession. Imagine them going about their daily task and their line manager asking them to complete a task, on their own, in a room with only a pen and paper and no access to any external resources. Hard to imagine, right? So why do some people think this is a good way of assessing students? While there may be a veneer of protecting academic integrity, is this a sufficient reason for assessing students with an invigilated, time-limited, closed-book exam context?

While not the answer to all your assessment problems, Interactive Oral (IO) assessments might be a suitable alternative approach for you. IO assessments are genuine, free-flowing and unscripted interactions between a student and a marker based on a real-life scenario. They give students an opportunity to showcase their knowledge and engage them in an authentic way that prepares them for professional life. IOs are academically robust, strong in terms of academic integrity, good at assessing students' transversal skills and good for student engagement. They can be used across a range of disciplines at all stages of the learning journey. There is an upfront load involved in designing and developing resources for IO assessments, but the benefits to academics and students make them well worth the effort. Could they claim the accolade of being GASTA - a Great Authentic Strong Transversal Assessment?

This Gasta presentation will be 4m 59s beginning and ending by shining the light of poet Mary Oliver's most famous question on each of our intentions for our 'wild and precious life' - online. Contents in between will depend on what happens between now and upload deadline.