Image created using Adobe Generative AI 

Welcome to the June edition of our Academic Enhancement and Professional Development (AEPD) newsletter.

With summer approaching and another academic semester coming to an end we have lots of exciting events to inspire you. 

In this newsletter you will find:

• opportunity for joining a QAA funded project
• updates on Moodle and Inspera
• information on the upcoming AI Development day
• Information on the upcoming Active Learning Guest Speaker event
• Reflections on CEES Assessment summit programme
• An opinion piece by Chris Haycock, Lead Curriculum Development on GenAI. 

If you'd like even more inspiration do not forget our AEPD website, where you can find all our upcoming events. 

Dr Christina Magkoufopoulou and Dr Misrah Mohamed, Academic Developers at AEPD, recently secured £10,000 in funding for a QAA Collaborative Enhancement Project. Coventry University will be the lead institution for the project "Enhancing Assessment Literacy: Balancing staff expectations with students' effort and time". The partner institutions are: Aston University, IU University of Applied Sciences-Germany, University of the West of Scotland and University of West London. 

The project, which will be delivered within the next 24 months, seeks to enhance assessment literacy among both students and staff by openly discussing the concepts of ‘time’ and ‘effort’.

An introductory session for interested colleagues is taking place on 11th of June at 13.30  -14.30. Please complete the below form if you'd like to be part of this exciting project. 

A reminder that for semester three, no assessments, formative or summative, should take place in any of the instances of Moodle across the Group and all must be transferred to Aula and Inspera. This is because all instances of Moodle (Coventry University, CU Group and Coventry University London) will be withdrawn as a ‘live’ service from the end of July 2024. Read-only and download access to historical resources only will be available after the end of July.

If you are using quizzes, formative or summative, and need to move questions from Moodle to Inspera, guidance is available in the teaching Knowledge Base article: Importing Questions into Inspera.

Upcoming workshops

If you have not yet used Inspera, our next Getting Started with Inspera workshop runs on the 12th of June. For additional days, check our AEPD events page

Inspera Support information

Colleagues are also invited to make use of the additional resources listed below:

• Learn more about using the software.
• Digital Assessment – Inspera Support Page
• Inspera Help Centre

For support queries contact the Education Technologists.

On 13th June a programme of development events will be held focused on the use of artificial intelligence tools. These events will provide an opportunity for participants to explore and discuss how we can use AI in our practice.

As part of the day there will be sessions delivered by Thomas Lancaster (Imperial College London) and Robin Crockett (University of Northampton). The full programme of sessions will be published soon. If you are interested in participating in any of the sessions during the day then please email AEPD@coventry.ac.uk to register your interest, we will then forward details when confirmed.

The AEPD supported the College of Engineering, Environment, and Science in launching its new Assessment and Feedback Procedures (AFP) by delivering a three-week program of bespoke online workshops. These interactive sessions featured contributions from various college academics who shared case studies showcasing innovations in assessment, teaching, and learning. The workshops utilised tools such as Mentimeter, Padlet, Teams, Engageli, and Inspera—all platforms we encourage staff to use for fostering active, applied, social, and inclusive teaching sessions.

During these workshops, there were extensive discussions on areas such as embedding Banded Marking in assessments, ethically using AI in assessment, rethinking the use of Core to enhance student progression and attainment, building in efficiencies in marking for large modules and employing templates to design accessible, authentic, and inclusive assessments. These focused sessions allowed for a rich deep dive into subject-specific areas, sparking valuable dialogues within teams. Working with the AFP, teams were empowered with ideas from templates, champions and workshops to build their own creative and innovative assessments for 2024-2025.

If your team would also require the design and delivery of bespoke training events, contact the AEPD team at AEPD@coventry.ac.uk

We are undoubtedly in a liminal period for Higher Education, with the sector facing financial constraints, the advent of generative artificial intelligence and the exponential growth of essay mills. With these changes, our ideas and practices about what Higher Education should be, and our position within the profession all need to be reconsidered as well, to ensure the profession stays relevant. 

With Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) seemingly improving its ability to produce unique work day by day, the job of spotting such work is getting more and more difficult. It has become apparent over the past couple of years that if we think of any standard, common-place assessment currently employed on our courses, we can be sure that GAI is quite capable of rendering at least a mediocre response. Apart from spotting students’ errors in not proof-reading, leaving in obvious cues or not reformatting the background, our ability as academics to push back against GAI is limited, especially with GAI detection tools having too high a failure rate for use in these contentious areas, in both false negatives and false positives. With this in mind, we must use not only the full spectrum of our teaching and learning skills to ensure students are well aware of the expected Higher Education academic conventions in assessment, but also the full range of investigatory practices to ensure students are corrected if they stray from what is expected of them. (Academic conduct investigation training is available for those involved in this area.)

For us to be able to address academic misconduct by our students, we need to adopt a holistic approach to the academic integrity question. Starting with course design, we should be building courses that acknowledge and, where possible, utilise GAI in the teaching content. We should not forget the fundamentals of learning though. We all learn from our mistakes, so we should be putting these learning opportunities back into our courses: we should give students the permission and cognitive space to make mistakes. There should be a consideration of how to reintroduce effective dialogue into courses where it has been lost, giving students the responsibility to be complicit in their learning and our learning design.

We should devise authentic and personal assessments where possible and where permitted by the Professional Statutory and Regulatory Boards (PSRBs). If use of GAI is permitted then we need to have clear guidance as to what, and how GAI can be used. We can try to include in-person assessments wherever feasible; use of specific sets of scenarios, facts and circumstances can also be used to tailor responses to the course materials and content.

As an expert in your specific field, you will know better than anyone else what might be possible and how far you wish to include GAI, but academia must avoid seeing GAI only as a threat: it is also an opportunity to ensure the continued relevance of our courses. We must build well-rounded students equipped with the skills they will need for a successful life, whatever their version of success may be. 

Chris Haycock - Lead Curriculum Development