As growing student use of artificial intelligence (AI) lays seige to traditional assumptions about university teaching and learning, UNE has built an AI platform designed to fight fire with fire.
The platform, Madgwick Studio, is underpinned by a “Learning Experience Engine” that supports students in the acquisition of knowledge while testing their understanding of what they have learned.
The platform provides “a new learning experience that values academic and professional expertise”, says UNE’s Chief AI Officer, Associate Professor Aaron Driver, “while creating new ways for that expertise to reach, support and prepare students to realise their aspirations”.
Use of AI by Australian university students has doubled in the past 12 months. Eighty per cent now report using the technology to assist with their studies.
As embattled university lecturers report worldwide, much of this usage is applied to producing superficially polished output that makes it difficult to assess how much genuine comprehension of a subject a student has acquired.
Assoc. Prof. Driver says that Studio provides a pioneering new interface between lecturers and students. The platform is designed to restore friction to learning where friction is important, while freeing up greater capacity for human-centred engagement.
“AI is frictionless by nature,” says Assoc. Prof. Driver. “It is designed to resolve uncertainty quickly and confidently.”
“That is powerful for productivity, but dangerous for learning. If we remove difficulty from learning, we remove the challenges that ultimately produce capability.”
Madgwick Studio’s learning model works to consolidate foundational knowledge in students, and acts as a tireless, always-on teacher that helps students with the practice of building new knowledge.
Rather than passively act as an ‘answer machine’ for students, Studio asks questions back. It tests reasoning and points out uncertainty in student answers. A student has to satisfy Studio’s AI engine that they have a sufficient grasp of a subject before they can move onto the next stage of learning.
For academics, allowing AI to pick up some routine teaching tasks allows them greater freedom to exercise human-centred academic judgement. With more time available, a lecturer can help a student work through ambiguity and contested ideas, recognise when a student is struggling, or push the boundaries of their discipline with receptive students.
"When education scaled up, something was lost," says Dr Neil Durrant, UNE's Executive Director, Future Students, Engagement and Technology.
"The personal attention, the human exchange between learner and teacher - that became harder to sustain. Not because institutions stopped caring, but because a model developed for less complex learning environments couldn't accomodate new demands."
"What excites me about this technology is it gives us a way back to something fundamental. In some ways it's a step forward; in others, it's a return to the campfire - to how people learn when they're together, wrestling with difficult material, earning what they know."
Studio is also being designed to make learning less homogenous. Drawing on a student’s interests, goals and professional context, the AI can personalise the way each student learns while maintaining consistent course learning objectives and academic standards.
Its capacity to personalise learning means that Studio can potentially be used to help prepare students for their post-study careers, Assoc. Prof. Driver says.
“Before the stakes become real, students can practise their judgement in simulated professional scenarios where they make decisions, defend their reasoning and deal with the consequences.”
UNE’s Vice-Chancellor, Professor Chris Moran, welcomed the development of Madgwick Studio as an important step in UNE’s evolving use of technology to meet student needs.
“When UNE was established in the 1950s, the University’s first unconventional act was to create a model of distance education that threw down traditional barriers to a university education, like geography or work commitments, almost overnight.”
“Now that AI is again changing expectations around university learning, UNE is not standing by and allowing this change to be driven by the technology’s developers. Universities have to enslave the technology in the service of education, not the other way around.”
“Madgwick Studio puts AI in the University’s harness. We are exploiting the technology’s power to evolve the university’s learning experience in ways that better support our students and academics.”
To ensure that the full potential of AI can be exploited now and in the future, the Studio learning engine was developed as a technology-forward evolution of current learning models, while continuing to draw on well-established pedagogies and academic governance.
Under careful academic governance, Studio will progressively become available across the UNE learning environment to those who choose to express their “classroom” academic freedom with this technology.
Studio’s launch is the third product in UNE's Madgwick stable of AI platforms. Last year the University launched Madgwick Student and Madgwick Staff; AI platforms that gave all UNE’s students and staff access to secure, institutionally governed AI capability.
Further details about the thinking behind Studio will be discussed in a new episode of the HEDx podcast being released today, featuring Associate Professor Driver and Dr Neil Durrant.
The platform will be demonstrated live at the HEDx Conference in Sydney on 16-17 June.
