Who’s doing the learning? What students want educators to understand about AI
Students are already deciding where AI belongs in their education. Yet when institutions discuss what responsible use should look like, the people living with those decisions are still too often missing from the conversation.
On Aug 24–25, CanvasCon ANZ 2026 brought Instructure customers from across Australia and New Zealand together in Sydney to share ideas, compare experiences, and talk about what’s changing in education. It was also an opportunity to hear directly from the learners those changes affect.
Amber W. from Pymble Ladies’ College, Minh Pham from the University of Sydney, and Mariana Leon from Australian Learning Group are at very different points in their education. But across school, university, and vocational study, many of the same questions kept surfacing: when does AI support learning, and when does it start doing too much of the work for you? Moderated by Dr Tracy Weeks, Senior Education Policy & Strategy Director at Instructure, the panel explored those decisions from the learner’s point of view.
I am very excited today to be able to welcome up an amazing group of local students and I'm gonna have them come on up and introduce themselves. Okay, we've got a couple chairs that have that are gonna come up but Amber, Minh, and Mariana, come on up. We'll get you a chair, get you cozy. Thank you. Hi, Amber. How are you? I'm good.
Thank you. Why don't you tell everybody about yourself? Hi, everyone. I'm Amber, and I'm a year twelve HSE student at Pimble Ladies College here in Sydney. Very good. Min? Thank you.
Hello, everybody. I'm Min. I'm originally from Newcastle, but I moved to Sydney on account of the better coffee. I'm a second year biochemistry student down at the University of Sydney, and I'm happy to share my experiences with you guys here today. Mariana.
Hi, everyone. My name is Mariana. I'm originally from Brazil, and I'm an international student at Australian Learning Group. I'm studying childcare. Alright.
Very good. We're gonna keep this conversational. So I'd like to start with a question from all three of you. Mariana, I'll let you start this time. Where is AI already showing up in your day to day learning or work? Alright.
I would say that AI pretty much has a personal assistant for me. As I am an international student, I need to juggle a lot of things at the same time. I'm working, I'm studying, and I also have my personal demands. So sometimes it's really tricky to organize and understand my priorities. I use AI to help me to plan my schedule, to understand my priorities, the tasks that I need to do on that like week, the deadlines that I have to achieve, and the risks that I would face in case of not delivering one of the things that I need to do.
So yeah, it's really helpful. I don't rely my personal ideas and my critical thinking on why I because I think this is very it's a important skill to maintain. But I really used to help me, to guide me to find new references especially because I'm new here, I've been here for only three years. So it's kind of like hard to know who are like the important authors or like people that I should know, the educators and like the critical thinkers that I should like get in touch with understand about like Australian culture and also about like the theories that may be like import be important for my career development. So yeah, I use as a guide and as a support tool.
And I also use quite often for my studies as well. I don't ask AI to give me the answers because I don't think that's the right thing to do. Because as I said before, critical thinking is really important to me and I think it's my biggest strength. I've been reading since I was little so that helped me to develop a lot of skills, reflection, and analyzing, creating my own opinions and it helped me to become who I am. And I feel that if I use AI to like answer the questions for me, I'm kind of like cheating on me.
I would be cheating on my own self, you So let's say how I use it, let's for my studies, let's say that I have like a three hundred document, like the pages document to read. And I need to look for like a specific information, right? I don't have only that. Like I don't have only that. I don't need to do only that. You know, I have a lot of other things to do.
So sometimes it's just hard. I need to like, I need some help. And then I'll ask AI to help me to find that specific information. And then I will read through it, like from that on. So yeah, it's like Great.
I see it much more as a support tool to help me to reduce my cognitive overload. Very good. Thank you. Minh. Yeah.
So I guess the most obvious and pressing matter for myself as a student is that I use AI for my assessments. Well, at least I used to anyway. And partially, I think that stems from the self guided nature of university and the very tempting nature of AI. But I think once you start to recognize these passions, like me, you will change your AI usage to into a more similar stream like Mariana and use it more as a study helper. And what I mean by that is using agentic AI as like a Socratic tutor.
So things like the University of Sydney's very own AI Cogniti, which is a Socratic agent that's designed to help students. And what I mean by that is you can upload your study materials, your lecture notes, your own personal notes, you know, keeping in mind with intellectual property ethics, of course, and have it feedback to you in a positive loop of learning materials, practice questions, practice papers, questions to help you enhance your learning. And that is very, very effective as opposed to just asking AI to just do the thing for you. Right? I know that's not the only use case for AI. I have a friend.
He's a fifth year philosophy student, and what he likes to do is grab three or four different AI models and give them all distinct personalities and make an almost sort of AI roundtable so he can have his philosophical debates with them, which I do find quite interesting. And so, yeah, primarily as a student, I do use AI as a study helper. I love that. That's great. Amber, how about you? I think nowadays within the classroom, a lot of the time, sometimes as additional resources or summary tools, like the AI is used in the classroom.
And for while they're, like, clear guidelines usually on official assessment tasks within school, what happens is for each student, I'd say that the average student is exploring ways they can use AI like the others said about to as like a support tool. It's like how when doing math, you may have like a calculator. Like AI can be used kind of as an advanced kind of calculator to help with the learning process. But again, I also think when using these tool AI tools, it's important to not let it immediately give you the answer like the other says so that you can practice your critical thinking. I love that.
And I'm old enough that when I started teaching high school math, we were having debates about whether or not we should allow students in the higher level math to even be using calculators in the classroom because we knew it was gonna just ruin all of their math skills and we weren't gonna have a a calculator in our pockets. Well, we do now. Right? So and we figured out how we could go about, you know, doing different things in math if we weren't worried about an arithmetic error along the way. Right? So we did figure it out. That was the new technology a minute ago.
So, Amber, I'm gonna stay with you right now. Alright. Your your year level is actively thinking about how AI might affect future careers. How does that shape the way you approach AI in in school? I think, yeah, definitely now, like, ending high school, my whole cohort, now we're thinking about, you know, what careers we might go into. And I guess the new consideration is that now AI is a huge factor in what career we might choose.
So on one hand, there may be a lot of new career opportunities in tech and in the management and, like, development of AI. But at the same time, of course, there's also concerns, you know, what kind of jobs may start to be replaced by AI. And I think we kind of in our learning now at school, how we approach it is I think the the students that are, like, most effectively approach it, like, we try and we try and use AI as a tool to increase efficiency and but in a way which doesn't compromise, like, our own understanding. And I think it's a useful support in that when we use AI to, for example, get an answer or something like that, we also need to use our own understanding to kind of confirm what we know and to evaluate when when it would be effective to simply rely on the AI and when we might need to seek external help, for example, from a teacher. That's great.
You know, when we look at at ways that that students can also use it for, like, creative and collaborative work for themselves rather than just handing it to AI. You know, why do you why do you think that more students would would want to use would want to keep the creative and collaborative work on their own? Yeah. I think one of the concerns a lot of students have is to do with when it comes to, like, creative and collaborative tasks because I think these are really important skills when we go into our future careers that I think need a lot of practice and development during our school years. So I think, for example, with a lot of, like, event planning and a lot of creative opportunities like this, students, for example, who do visual arts in HSC, like, they would appreciate some opportunities that may now start to be increasingly given to AI. So I think while AI is really effective, sometimes for I think some of my peers, what they say is that for STEM subjects such as chemistry and math, it can help with understanding how we get to, like, certain solutions.
For example, the final answer might be a number, but then the AI can be used to help understand how we get to this point. But in a lot of humanities subjects, I think a lot like, individual interpretation and understanding is something that sometimes may be compromised when we rely on AI. Yeah. Great point. Alright.
Men. This question sits a little bit differently once you're actually at university and we start thinking about careers. And, you know, you're already in your field with with biochem. You know, AI is moving pretty fast in in this particular area. Right? So, you know, if AI could make entry level roles in your field more difficult to come by, how does that shape what you're thinking about, you know, for your own next few years? Yeah.
So as a student, I think most of my peers and myself, this matter is very much front of mind because the main point of you doing a university degree, I suppose, is to go out there and get a job. And I myself, as a very amateurish biochemist, the contrary to popular belief, most of what we do is not lab work. I'd say that for every hour of lab work, there's maybe three to four times that of grinding away from the on the computer, and that involves maybe using specialized software, bioinformatics, data processing, data science, all that very annoying stuff, I would say, but these are also very essential graduate skills and very essential skills to the industry as well. But despite this, they're also skills that are not very hard to replicate with AI. I think the impact of AI doesn't stop there, though.
Where these skills would previously have been taught in classes as graduate skills, students' increased reliance on AI, I find, have lend have led them to not develop these skills to sufficient mastery. And that's not to throw my peers under the bus. I know that's personally affected me as well. And that kinda leads us into this double pit of despair where these jobs are beginning to fade into obscurity. But even if these jobs did exist, students would not have been well equipped for them anyway.
However, I don't want to be all doom and gloom, and there is a silver lining to this a certain degree. And it's an analogy I like to use where AI is a jack of all trades, but it's a master of none. Us students, we are a jack of some trades. Well, more of the jack of no trades, but, you know, we're trying to be nice here. But what we are is a master of one, and what that one is is that we are physically tangible in my context anyway, and we are able to do experiments.
We have that prac based benefit on our side, and this has very much affected how I've chosen to build my graduate portfolio and have chosen how build my skills. And what I mean by that is I have elected to do a lot more prac based subjects and taken on a lot more prac based opportunities when I had the alternative of computer based opportunities. And this is not a singular perspective. I've talked to my peers. They shared this idea as well, and I've also talked to many unit coordinators who frequently tell me that over the past couple of years within unit of study surveys, there has been a lot more of a shift towards students suggesting more lab based activities or at the very least, if that's a logistical issue, a higher emphasis on lab based components of the course.
There there is a clear example of this that did happen to me last semester. I was very fortunate to undergo a research project with the school of chemistry, electrochemistry. I am not an electrochemist. It was an experiment about how, at its very most basic, how magnetic fields affect chemical reactions. And I actively remember the moment where I chose this over a computer based bioinformatics project, which is more towards my specialty, purely on account of the fact that the other one was prac based.
It sounds very doom and gloom right now, but I promise you, it does get better. And I think this ties into my next point quite well that I read an article the other day that said AI is changing the field of science in ways unseen since the industrial revolution, which is an incredible stretch. But I think it quite accurately reflects the current sentiment and I suppose the hype around AI right now within the field of science, where all these scientific discoveries are now being powered by AI and being handed out like candy to the point that multidisciplinary science is now required to make these discoveries as successful as possible. Via the impact of AI, scientists are now collaborating a lot more with each other in order to supercharge their discoveries, I suppose, and lead science into the future. And that kinda relates to my experience.
I chose an electrical chemistry research project as opposed to biochemistry. I've also recently been taking on more non science things like history and philosophy, all on account of the fact that science, now that AI is present, is not necessarily just about science anymore. So, yeah, I think to sum up this entire spiel, science AI for the individual, somewhat cooked, but the individual can always expand their skill set. But science for humanity as a whole, I think we're gonna be alright. Very good.
You know, another story that that you've shared too is that you used AI a fair bit early in your degree, and it affected your results. Right? So can you share a little bit more about that experience? I wish I could say that it affected it positively. It most certainly did not. Within my first semester at university, I was in a bit of a time crunch, and as a result, I did use AI to make some of my notes, not realizing that making the notes itself was the important bit as opposed to, you know, having them there. I realized this when I walked into the final exam, which is not a good place to realize this fact.
And I think the main takeaway from that story is that it taught me that AI is akin to something like steroids anabolic steroids, I suppose, and I'll I'll promise I'll elaborate on that, where it's you can take it, if you don't do anything with it, it's not gonna be any good for you. But if you take it and you actively utilize it, you do all the training, you do all the heavy lifting, it's gonna give you back returns a hundredfold. Please don't take anabolic steroids, guys. But, yeah, that's, that's how it's affected me. Thank you, Minh.
And that that reminds me that goes back to your first kind of comment, Mariana, where you were talking about that sort of cognitive load and such. But, you know, when we're thinking about a hands on field like childcare, the implications of AI aren't about research or careers in the abstract. I mean, there's a lot of work in your sector that happens outside actual time with the children, and much of that ends up being unpaid. So where do you see AI changing that, and where would you be cautious? So I see a big potential for AI in childcare because of the documentation overload educators currently have. Being an educator involves observing, analyzing, documenting, and planning, as well as being on the floor creating a safe space for those children, building strong relationships, meaningful experiences.
So it's really hard to juggle both things at the same time. I see that AI could come up bringing how can I say bringing a data kind of storage where we could document all the child, like all information about each child and we could track in a better way because we would have the information ready to go? It wouldn't replace our professional judgment. It would be just a way where instead of like going through the papers, going through the paperwork, we would have the information like synthesized and integrated in only one space. And that would also enhance the communication between the team because we wouldn't have to spend that much time doing meetings and talking about it and discussing. Of course, we couldn't replace that as well, but it would be just a way to track the developmental progress in a more effective kind of via.
But I think we also need to be really cautious about it because since we are talking about children We need to consider some things. We need to consider their backgrounds, their personalities, their culture, their relationships, and also their emotions. We are not talking about a data sheet. You know, like we are not talking about like a database kind of thing. We are talking about sensitive information.
So how would we make sure that this information, it's going to the right hands? Who has access to this information? What happens in case of a data breach? You know, because we need to ensure that these children are being protected and their families as well. So this is one of the things that I think I believe that we should be careful about. And another thing is educators relying, over relying on AI. If an educator starts to believe everything AI says, where does the professional judgment go? You know? We need to bring that human side to it. We need to create a report.
We need to talk to the families and we are trained for that. So we cannot replace our critical thinking again Right. For AI. We should use again as a support tool and not as a thing that we gonna get all the information from it and believe in everything it says. Yeah.
So I think the reflection is more about how AI could support educators without replacing the professional judgment. And what if AI could support educators in taking the pressure off their shoulders a little bit and they could spending more time doing what really matters, which is spending time with children? Right. Right. And, you know, you talked about, you know, wanting to be able to form your own views rather than just being handed an answer. So how do you stay on the right side of that when, AI is just really easy to reach for and especially, you know, sort of in your scenario where you're envisioning having some of those things documented already? How do you stay on the right side of that? Well, I'm not an an AI hater.
I love AI, and I use for a lot of things as well. And sometimes I do quick search on Google, and I will trust what the AI overview shows up, as everyone does because we are just busy and we just have so many things to do all the time. It's hard to go into details every single time. But when it comes to my professional or personal development, I prefer to go through the real information, to look for specialists, to read. I love reading, so I will read the information.
I just need to push myself. I keep pushing myself not to rely on it all the time because it's really easy to do that. It is. You know? So, yeah, I would say that I just push myself not to like rely on it all the time. That's a good idea.
And I I tell you what, I've loved hearing all of your thoughts here, but we're getting close to to the end of our time together. But before we wrap up, I do wanna ask each of you to just share one more thing. We've got all of these educators and leaders in the room. If you could give them one piece of advice on how they bring AI into the classroom, what would it be? I think the main the most important thing is for, like, teachers and students to kind of just be on the same page about AI and to be really transparent about the use of AI. I think, for example, if you're in a classroom and you receive some notes, but then upon reading it, you start to, like, suspect that it hasn't been written by your teacher or another expert, and potentially it's been AI generated.
It kind of can undermine, like, the trust students can have in their teachers. But I think when teachers are transparent about the use of AI and also about, like, why it's being used and kind of, like, having this discussion about how it can increase efficiency, but also acknowledging and addressing the limitations with AI, for example, like bias or, like, when it can be unreliable and specifically in what areas it can be more effective than others, then I think then students and teachers are able to use AI in a way where everyone's kind of on the same page and can trust, like, what each other are doing essentially. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah.
So of a similar vein, I don't necessarily well, not at all, really. I'm not against the I'm not against educators using AI. I know it's very commonly demonized, but especially in my context as a university student, I know very much that logistically, you have, say, one unit coordinated to a thousand students. The use of AI, I do support it. But I think there needs to be a fair balance there, though, to take into account where if the student is using AI, as I know a lot of students do, and the educator is also using AI, what is the real value being transmitted there? Who is doing the learning? Who's doing the teaching? So on and so forth.
Right? But speaking from a more semantic point of view, I would encourage educate educators to not be afraid to use AI. Even if you don't know how to use it, just go out there and gain some experience using it because that's the only way that it's ever gonna develop. And my mother, she is a tertiary English lecturer, and she made a very astute observation when AI came into play. I know her career changed a lot when AI came into existence, and she told me that for a lot of her colleagues with the advent of AI, some of them have been so far removed from the posts as educators and have assumed the role of police in controlling the quality of their students' work to a certain degree that they have forgotten the reason to which they were there in the first place, which is to teach. And I think the main takeaway from this is to encourage educators to please embrace AI.
I don't think now is the time to be fighting it. It is very much a losing battle. I know that I'm not gonna give it up. I know that my peers here on the stage are definitely not gonna give it up either. So, yeah, just please embrace it.
And I know this sounds very idealistic, somewhat on the account that six of my family members are teachers, which is a massive you know, no pressure to me. But, yeah, I think the mission of teaching goes far beyond arguments of whether a student use AI or not in their work. I think good teaching should transcend assessment, and this problem shouldn't even be an issue at all. And I think us being here today is living proof of that, that we're here to collaborate and discuss these ideas around AI is proof that one day we'll be able to look back on deliberations like these when AI has become a firmly established part in education. So, yeah, please just embrace it.
I promise it's gonna be a good time. Mariana? Yeah. I agree with Dan, and I would add that educators could embrace the process of learning together because AI AI is coming to stay. We I don't think we are, like, we are going back from it. So this is gonna cause a big impact in our future careers.
And if we don't start learning now, like where do we gonna get? What are the outcomes that we're gonna get from it? Know? Embracing the process of learning together and also how could we use in a safe way, in a way that it helps us to navigate through the information instead of just trusting in everything we read, you know. So my trainer, she's really good at Australian Learning Group. She doesn't she knows every single student. She knows how we write our questions. She knows about our English level, and she knows exactly when someone uses AI to answer one of the assessment questions.
And then she comes to us and say, hey, I know you can do better. Do you need help to use AI? What prompted did you use? How are you actually bringing it into your, like, assignment? Do you need help? Are you too busy? Because sometimes we are. I'm not going to lie. I used AI in the past a couple of times because I was too busy and I couldn't focus, which is not ideal, but sometimes it happens. This is the real world and we need to, like, accept the fact.
But I think having that kind of support helps us help us to not not to feel guilty in using AI and also kind of like guide us, lead us to go on the right path instead of just like hiding it or feeling that we are doing something wrong because we are and we are not doing anything wrong. AI comes to stay and we need to get used to it. We need to learn. We need to experience. We need to find the best way to do it personally and also in our workplace.
Yeah. Alright. So what I heard was we need to have transparency in order to build trust. We need to play in order to kind of get rid of the fear of what it could do, and then we need to collaborate both instructors and students so that we can help each other learn how to use it in ethical and responsible ways. So I don't know about you all, but or I should say y'all.
I have to really think about it. But I I think that we've gotten a lot of very wise responses from our students, and I personally am very excited for Australia and its future with you all coming up through it. So can we give them all a round of applause? Thank you.
Thank you. Why don't you tell everybody about yourself? Hi, everyone. I'm Amber, and I'm a year twelve HSE student at Pimble Ladies College here in Sydney. Very good. Min? Thank you.
Hello, everybody. I'm Min. I'm originally from Newcastle, but I moved to Sydney on account of the better coffee. I'm a second year biochemistry student down at the University of Sydney, and I'm happy to share my experiences with you guys here today. Mariana.
Hi, everyone. My name is Mariana. I'm originally from Brazil, and I'm an international student at Australian Learning Group. I'm studying childcare. Alright.
Very good. We're gonna keep this conversational. So I'd like to start with a question from all three of you. Mariana, I'll let you start this time. Where is AI already showing up in your day to day learning or work? Alright.
I would say that AI pretty much has a personal assistant for me. As I am an international student, I need to juggle a lot of things at the same time. I'm working, I'm studying, and I also have my personal demands. So sometimes it's really tricky to organize and understand my priorities. I use AI to help me to plan my schedule, to understand my priorities, the tasks that I need to do on that like week, the deadlines that I have to achieve, and the risks that I would face in case of not delivering one of the things that I need to do.
So yeah, it's really helpful. I don't rely my personal ideas and my critical thinking on why I because I think this is very it's a important skill to maintain. But I really used to help me, to guide me to find new references especially because I'm new here, I've been here for only three years. So it's kind of like hard to know who are like the important authors or like people that I should know, the educators and like the critical thinkers that I should like get in touch with understand about like Australian culture and also about like the theories that may be like import be important for my career development. So yeah, I use as a guide and as a support tool.
And I also use quite often for my studies as well. I don't ask AI to give me the answers because I don't think that's the right thing to do. Because as I said before, critical thinking is really important to me and I think it's my biggest strength. I've been reading since I was little so that helped me to develop a lot of skills, reflection, and analyzing, creating my own opinions and it helped me to become who I am. And I feel that if I use AI to like answer the questions for me, I'm kind of like cheating on me.
I would be cheating on my own self, you So let's say how I use it, let's for my studies, let's say that I have like a three hundred document, like the pages document to read. And I need to look for like a specific information, right? I don't have only that. Like I don't have only that. I don't need to do only that. You know, I have a lot of other things to do.
So sometimes it's just hard. I need to like, I need some help. And then I'll ask AI to help me to find that specific information. And then I will read through it, like from that on. So yeah, it's like Great.
I see it much more as a support tool to help me to reduce my cognitive overload. Very good. Thank you. Minh. Yeah.
So I guess the most obvious and pressing matter for myself as a student is that I use AI for my assessments. Well, at least I used to anyway. And partially, I think that stems from the self guided nature of university and the very tempting nature of AI. But I think once you start to recognize these passions, like me, you will change your AI usage to into a more similar stream like Mariana and use it more as a study helper. And what I mean by that is using agentic AI as like a Socratic tutor.
So things like the University of Sydney's very own AI Cogniti, which is a Socratic agent that's designed to help students. And what I mean by that is you can upload your study materials, your lecture notes, your own personal notes, you know, keeping in mind with intellectual property ethics, of course, and have it feedback to you in a positive loop of learning materials, practice questions, practice papers, questions to help you enhance your learning. And that is very, very effective as opposed to just asking AI to just do the thing for you. Right? I know that's not the only use case for AI. I have a friend.
He's a fifth year philosophy student, and what he likes to do is grab three or four different AI models and give them all distinct personalities and make an almost sort of AI roundtable so he can have his philosophical debates with them, which I do find quite interesting. And so, yeah, primarily as a student, I do use AI as a study helper. I love that. That's great. Amber, how about you? I think nowadays within the classroom, a lot of the time, sometimes as additional resources or summary tools, like the AI is used in the classroom.
And for while they're, like, clear guidelines usually on official assessment tasks within school, what happens is for each student, I'd say that the average student is exploring ways they can use AI like the others said about to as like a support tool. It's like how when doing math, you may have like a calculator. Like AI can be used kind of as an advanced kind of calculator to help with the learning process. But again, I also think when using these tool AI tools, it's important to not let it immediately give you the answer like the other says so that you can practice your critical thinking. I love that.
And I'm old enough that when I started teaching high school math, we were having debates about whether or not we should allow students in the higher level math to even be using calculators in the classroom because we knew it was gonna just ruin all of their math skills and we weren't gonna have a a calculator in our pockets. Well, we do now. Right? So and we figured out how we could go about, you know, doing different things in math if we weren't worried about an arithmetic error along the way. Right? So we did figure it out. That was the new technology a minute ago.
So, Amber, I'm gonna stay with you right now. Alright. Your your year level is actively thinking about how AI might affect future careers. How does that shape the way you approach AI in in school? I think, yeah, definitely now, like, ending high school, my whole cohort, now we're thinking about, you know, what careers we might go into. And I guess the new consideration is that now AI is a huge factor in what career we might choose.
So on one hand, there may be a lot of new career opportunities in tech and in the management and, like, development of AI. But at the same time, of course, there's also concerns, you know, what kind of jobs may start to be replaced by AI. And I think we kind of in our learning now at school, how we approach it is I think the the students that are, like, most effectively approach it, like, we try and we try and use AI as a tool to increase efficiency and but in a way which doesn't compromise, like, our own understanding. And I think it's a useful support in that when we use AI to, for example, get an answer or something like that, we also need to use our own understanding to kind of confirm what we know and to evaluate when when it would be effective to simply rely on the AI and when we might need to seek external help, for example, from a teacher. That's great.
You know, when we look at at ways that that students can also use it for, like, creative and collaborative work for themselves rather than just handing it to AI. You know, why do you why do you think that more students would would want to use would want to keep the creative and collaborative work on their own? Yeah. I think one of the concerns a lot of students have is to do with when it comes to, like, creative and collaborative tasks because I think these are really important skills when we go into our future careers that I think need a lot of practice and development during our school years. So I think, for example, with a lot of, like, event planning and a lot of creative opportunities like this, students, for example, who do visual arts in HSC, like, they would appreciate some opportunities that may now start to be increasingly given to AI. So I think while AI is really effective, sometimes for I think some of my peers, what they say is that for STEM subjects such as chemistry and math, it can help with understanding how we get to, like, certain solutions.
For example, the final answer might be a number, but then the AI can be used to help understand how we get to this point. But in a lot of humanities subjects, I think a lot like, individual interpretation and understanding is something that sometimes may be compromised when we rely on AI. Yeah. Great point. Alright.
Men. This question sits a little bit differently once you're actually at university and we start thinking about careers. And, you know, you're already in your field with with biochem. You know, AI is moving pretty fast in in this particular area. Right? So, you know, if AI could make entry level roles in your field more difficult to come by, how does that shape what you're thinking about, you know, for your own next few years? Yeah.
So as a student, I think most of my peers and myself, this matter is very much front of mind because the main point of you doing a university degree, I suppose, is to go out there and get a job. And I myself, as a very amateurish biochemist, the contrary to popular belief, most of what we do is not lab work. I'd say that for every hour of lab work, there's maybe three to four times that of grinding away from the on the computer, and that involves maybe using specialized software, bioinformatics, data processing, data science, all that very annoying stuff, I would say, but these are also very essential graduate skills and very essential skills to the industry as well. But despite this, they're also skills that are not very hard to replicate with AI. I think the impact of AI doesn't stop there, though.
Where these skills would previously have been taught in classes as graduate skills, students' increased reliance on AI, I find, have lend have led them to not develop these skills to sufficient mastery. And that's not to throw my peers under the bus. I know that's personally affected me as well. And that kinda leads us into this double pit of despair where these jobs are beginning to fade into obscurity. But even if these jobs did exist, students would not have been well equipped for them anyway.
However, I don't want to be all doom and gloom, and there is a silver lining to this a certain degree. And it's an analogy I like to use where AI is a jack of all trades, but it's a master of none. Us students, we are a jack of some trades. Well, more of the jack of no trades, but, you know, we're trying to be nice here. But what we are is a master of one, and what that one is is that we are physically tangible in my context anyway, and we are able to do experiments.
We have that prac based benefit on our side, and this has very much affected how I've chosen to build my graduate portfolio and have chosen how build my skills. And what I mean by that is I have elected to do a lot more prac based subjects and taken on a lot more prac based opportunities when I had the alternative of computer based opportunities. And this is not a singular perspective. I've talked to my peers. They shared this idea as well, and I've also talked to many unit coordinators who frequently tell me that over the past couple of years within unit of study surveys, there has been a lot more of a shift towards students suggesting more lab based activities or at the very least, if that's a logistical issue, a higher emphasis on lab based components of the course.
There there is a clear example of this that did happen to me last semester. I was very fortunate to undergo a research project with the school of chemistry, electrochemistry. I am not an electrochemist. It was an experiment about how, at its very most basic, how magnetic fields affect chemical reactions. And I actively remember the moment where I chose this over a computer based bioinformatics project, which is more towards my specialty, purely on account of the fact that the other one was prac based.
It sounds very doom and gloom right now, but I promise you, it does get better. And I think this ties into my next point quite well that I read an article the other day that said AI is changing the field of science in ways unseen since the industrial revolution, which is an incredible stretch. But I think it quite accurately reflects the current sentiment and I suppose the hype around AI right now within the field of science, where all these scientific discoveries are now being powered by AI and being handed out like candy to the point that multidisciplinary science is now required to make these discoveries as successful as possible. Via the impact of AI, scientists are now collaborating a lot more with each other in order to supercharge their discoveries, I suppose, and lead science into the future. And that kinda relates to my experience.
I chose an electrical chemistry research project as opposed to biochemistry. I've also recently been taking on more non science things like history and philosophy, all on account of the fact that science, now that AI is present, is not necessarily just about science anymore. So, yeah, I think to sum up this entire spiel, science AI for the individual, somewhat cooked, but the individual can always expand their skill set. But science for humanity as a whole, I think we're gonna be alright. Very good.
You know, another story that that you've shared too is that you used AI a fair bit early in your degree, and it affected your results. Right? So can you share a little bit more about that experience? I wish I could say that it affected it positively. It most certainly did not. Within my first semester at university, I was in a bit of a time crunch, and as a result, I did use AI to make some of my notes, not realizing that making the notes itself was the important bit as opposed to, you know, having them there. I realized this when I walked into the final exam, which is not a good place to realize this fact.
And I think the main takeaway from that story is that it taught me that AI is akin to something like steroids anabolic steroids, I suppose, and I'll I'll promise I'll elaborate on that, where it's you can take it, if you don't do anything with it, it's not gonna be any good for you. But if you take it and you actively utilize it, you do all the training, you do all the heavy lifting, it's gonna give you back returns a hundredfold. Please don't take anabolic steroids, guys. But, yeah, that's, that's how it's affected me. Thank you, Minh.
And that that reminds me that goes back to your first kind of comment, Mariana, where you were talking about that sort of cognitive load and such. But, you know, when we're thinking about a hands on field like childcare, the implications of AI aren't about research or careers in the abstract. I mean, there's a lot of work in your sector that happens outside actual time with the children, and much of that ends up being unpaid. So where do you see AI changing that, and where would you be cautious? So I see a big potential for AI in childcare because of the documentation overload educators currently have. Being an educator involves observing, analyzing, documenting, and planning, as well as being on the floor creating a safe space for those children, building strong relationships, meaningful experiences.
So it's really hard to juggle both things at the same time. I see that AI could come up bringing how can I say bringing a data kind of storage where we could document all the child, like all information about each child and we could track in a better way because we would have the information ready to go? It wouldn't replace our professional judgment. It would be just a way where instead of like going through the papers, going through the paperwork, we would have the information like synthesized and integrated in only one space. And that would also enhance the communication between the team because we wouldn't have to spend that much time doing meetings and talking about it and discussing. Of course, we couldn't replace that as well, but it would be just a way to track the developmental progress in a more effective kind of via.
But I think we also need to be really cautious about it because since we are talking about children We need to consider some things. We need to consider their backgrounds, their personalities, their culture, their relationships, and also their emotions. We are not talking about a data sheet. You know, like we are not talking about like a database kind of thing. We are talking about sensitive information.
So how would we make sure that this information, it's going to the right hands? Who has access to this information? What happens in case of a data breach? You know, because we need to ensure that these children are being protected and their families as well. So this is one of the things that I think I believe that we should be careful about. And another thing is educators relying, over relying on AI. If an educator starts to believe everything AI says, where does the professional judgment go? You know? We need to bring that human side to it. We need to create a report.
We need to talk to the families and we are trained for that. So we cannot replace our critical thinking again Right. For AI. We should use again as a support tool and not as a thing that we gonna get all the information from it and believe in everything it says. Yeah.
So I think the reflection is more about how AI could support educators without replacing the professional judgment. And what if AI could support educators in taking the pressure off their shoulders a little bit and they could spending more time doing what really matters, which is spending time with children? Right. Right. And, you know, you talked about, you know, wanting to be able to form your own views rather than just being handed an answer. So how do you stay on the right side of that when, AI is just really easy to reach for and especially, you know, sort of in your scenario where you're envisioning having some of those things documented already? How do you stay on the right side of that? Well, I'm not an an AI hater.
I love AI, and I use for a lot of things as well. And sometimes I do quick search on Google, and I will trust what the AI overview shows up, as everyone does because we are just busy and we just have so many things to do all the time. It's hard to go into details every single time. But when it comes to my professional or personal development, I prefer to go through the real information, to look for specialists, to read. I love reading, so I will read the information.
I just need to push myself. I keep pushing myself not to rely on it all the time because it's really easy to do that. It is. You know? So, yeah, I would say that I just push myself not to like rely on it all the time. That's a good idea.
And I I tell you what, I've loved hearing all of your thoughts here, but we're getting close to to the end of our time together. But before we wrap up, I do wanna ask each of you to just share one more thing. We've got all of these educators and leaders in the room. If you could give them one piece of advice on how they bring AI into the classroom, what would it be? I think the main the most important thing is for, like, teachers and students to kind of just be on the same page about AI and to be really transparent about the use of AI. I think, for example, if you're in a classroom and you receive some notes, but then upon reading it, you start to, like, suspect that it hasn't been written by your teacher or another expert, and potentially it's been AI generated.
It kind of can undermine, like, the trust students can have in their teachers. But I think when teachers are transparent about the use of AI and also about, like, why it's being used and kind of, like, having this discussion about how it can increase efficiency, but also acknowledging and addressing the limitations with AI, for example, like bias or, like, when it can be unreliable and specifically in what areas it can be more effective than others, then I think then students and teachers are able to use AI in a way where everyone's kind of on the same page and can trust, like, what each other are doing essentially. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah.
So of a similar vein, I don't necessarily well, not at all, really. I'm not against the I'm not against educators using AI. I know it's very commonly demonized, but especially in my context as a university student, I know very much that logistically, you have, say, one unit coordinated to a thousand students. The use of AI, I do support it. But I think there needs to be a fair balance there, though, to take into account where if the student is using AI, as I know a lot of students do, and the educator is also using AI, what is the real value being transmitted there? Who is doing the learning? Who's doing the teaching? So on and so forth.
Right? But speaking from a more semantic point of view, I would encourage educate educators to not be afraid to use AI. Even if you don't know how to use it, just go out there and gain some experience using it because that's the only way that it's ever gonna develop. And my mother, she is a tertiary English lecturer, and she made a very astute observation when AI came into play. I know her career changed a lot when AI came into existence, and she told me that for a lot of her colleagues with the advent of AI, some of them have been so far removed from the posts as educators and have assumed the role of police in controlling the quality of their students' work to a certain degree that they have forgotten the reason to which they were there in the first place, which is to teach. And I think the main takeaway from this is to encourage educators to please embrace AI.
I don't think now is the time to be fighting it. It is very much a losing battle. I know that I'm not gonna give it up. I know that my peers here on the stage are definitely not gonna give it up either. So, yeah, just please embrace it.
And I know this sounds very idealistic, somewhat on the account that six of my family members are teachers, which is a massive you know, no pressure to me. But, yeah, I think the mission of teaching goes far beyond arguments of whether a student use AI or not in their work. I think good teaching should transcend assessment, and this problem shouldn't even be an issue at all. And I think us being here today is living proof of that, that we're here to collaborate and discuss these ideas around AI is proof that one day we'll be able to look back on deliberations like these when AI has become a firmly established part in education. So, yeah, please just embrace it.
I promise it's gonna be a good time. Mariana? Yeah. I agree with Dan, and I would add that educators could embrace the process of learning together because AI AI is coming to stay. We I don't think we are, like, we are going back from it. So this is gonna cause a big impact in our future careers.
And if we don't start learning now, like where do we gonna get? What are the outcomes that we're gonna get from it? Know? Embracing the process of learning together and also how could we use in a safe way, in a way that it helps us to navigate through the information instead of just trusting in everything we read, you know. So my trainer, she's really good at Australian Learning Group. She doesn't she knows every single student. She knows how we write our questions. She knows about our English level, and she knows exactly when someone uses AI to answer one of the assessment questions.
And then she comes to us and say, hey, I know you can do better. Do you need help to use AI? What prompted did you use? How are you actually bringing it into your, like, assignment? Do you need help? Are you too busy? Because sometimes we are. I'm not going to lie. I used AI in the past a couple of times because I was too busy and I couldn't focus, which is not ideal, but sometimes it happens. This is the real world and we need to, like, accept the fact.
But I think having that kind of support helps us help us to not not to feel guilty in using AI and also kind of like guide us, lead us to go on the right path instead of just like hiding it or feeling that we are doing something wrong because we are and we are not doing anything wrong. AI comes to stay and we need to get used to it. We need to learn. We need to experience. We need to find the best way to do it personally and also in our workplace.
Yeah. Alright. So what I heard was we need to have transparency in order to build trust. We need to play in order to kind of get rid of the fear of what it could do, and then we need to collaborate both instructors and students so that we can help each other learn how to use it in ethical and responsible ways. So I don't know about you all, but or I should say y'all.
I have to really think about it. But I I think that we've gotten a lot of very wise responses from our students, and I personally am very excited for Australia and its future with you all coming up through it. So can we give them all a round of applause? Thank you.
What makes the conversation so interesting is how differently each student arrived at a similar concern: using AI well still requires you to know what you’re giving up when you hand something over to it.
Minh came to that conclusion after using AI to create notes early in university, only to realise that making the notes had been part of the learning. Mariana described the same tension more personally, saying that asking AI to do the thinking for her could feel like “cheating on my own self.” Amber extended the question beyond student use altogether. If educators use AI without being transparent about it, she argued, students can start questioning the trust they place in the material they’re given.
Policies and guardrails can shape how AI is used, but students are also developing their own habits and boundaries through experience. Listening to them gives institutions a better understanding of what responsible AI use actually looks like from the learner’s side of the classroom.
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