When AI Enters the Classroom - Sustainable innovation, regulatory expectations, and the student experience

Fantastic. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the webinar today. We'll get started just shortly, giving everyone a moment to log on on. I'm sure people are running from other things. You know how busy everyone is at this point in the semester.

If you are already online now, feel free to pop in the chat where you're joining us from. It's always nice to see, you know, who's managed to to attend live today. But, of course, the recording will be available, so no problem either way. I'm in Canberra, Australia. Fantastic.

Taiwan, Philippines, Melbourne, Auckland. Fabulous. Woah. We've got a range. That is so great to see.

Fantastic. Okay. Well, without any further ado, we're already at the a hundred and fifteen mark. We might get started. Any late joiners, I'm sure they'll be able to tag along.

So, yes, hello, everyone. Welcome to our webinar today, when AI enters the classroom. My name is Abigail Nelson. I'm a senior customer success manager at Instructure, and I'm joining you today from Canberra, Australia, as I just mentioned. Really honored today to, be moderating this discussion, which is a partnership between Instructure and Independent Higher Education Australia or IHEA.

Independent Higher Education Australia is a peak body that represents the majority of Australia's registered and accredited independent higher education providers. Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge country today and acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land which we are meeting on today. We pay our respects to elders, both past and present, and recognize the enduring connection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to country. A little bit of housekeeping as, we get started today. We have reserved about ten minutes for q and a at the end of the session.

So if you had any questions, please do pop those into the q and a function within the call today. You might pop them in the chat. They might get lost. We've got quite a lot of people joining, which we're very grateful for today. So, yeah, just pop your questions into the q and a function so I can pass those on to the panelists who I'll introduce you to shortly.

Setting the scene for the webinar today. Please bear me bear with me here. This is a big topic, but, we hope, you'll enjoy it, and, the conversation to come should be definitely interesting. So we meet today in light of two major challenges that higher education providers are facing. Firstly, sustainable innovation.

How do providers often facing resource constrained environments invest in technology and work face workforce capability without compromising the student experience? And, of course, regulatory expectations. We've moved past the if and the when of AI, and today, the debate is going to be on the how. With AI placing strain on ideas and methods of institutional integrity, how do we move beyond the theory and demonstrate the concrete and actionable plans required to move forward together? These are vast questions. I'm curious to see if we'll be able to answer them all today, but I'm very grateful to have two of the industry's, most respected voices here to help us navigate them, and I'll introduce them to you now. Firstly, professor Martin Bean.

Martin is a global education leader, and he just waved. He's a global education leader and futurist dedicated to how we learn, work, and thrive in a world of constant change. With a career spanning higher education and emerging technology, he focuses on creating flexible, lifelong learning ecosystems. Martin is the coauthor of Toolkit for Turbulence, which is a manual for leaders that are navigating exactly the kind of disruption we are discussing today. And as a side note, Martin was my big, big boss as vice chancellor during my tenure at RMIT, so I am just feel like this is a great opportunity.

Thank you, Martin. Secondly, but not secondly, if you know what I mean, I'd like to introduce you to professor James Adonopoulos. James is the academic dean at Kaplan Business School. James leads a faculty of nearly five hundred people across six cities overseeing diverse disciplines from IT to accounting. Under his leadership, KBS became a self accrediting authority and was named business school of the year at the Global Pioneer Awards.

For seven years, he has served as the national board director of the iHERE or Independent Higher Education Australia body and is the initiate initiator and ongoing convener of the Teaching and Learning Network and generative AI community of practice, joined by two excellent folk. Martin and James, thank you so much for being here today. Today, we'll be discussing this large topic through three lenses, learning and teaching, institutional service architecture, and belonging and human capability. And so if you don't mind, we might jump into the questions now. Let's do it.

So as I mentioned earlier, higher education providers are navigating two significant pressures at the same time, financial sustainability in a tighter operating environment and increasing amounts of regulatory scrutiny around generative AI. Martin, I'll start with you if that's okay. As you've led universities through major technological and structural shifts, We'd love to know from your perspective, how should institutional leaders think about generative AI in the context of these broader pressures, financial sustainability, and, of course, the growing regulatory expectations. I'll leave that to Thank you, Abby, and hello, everybody. It's lovely to see you.

It's incredible. We've got people from all over the the region, and I've noticed some of the names. There are a lot of my friends on the webinar today and colleagues, and a big hello to all of you. And, James, hi to you. Looking forward to having a good conversation and debate with you as well.

And let's let's get going. Abby, I think it's really interesting because in many ways, these juxtapositions sort of sustainability, regulatory compliance, and artificial intelligence, they're really the same pressure, but they're coming from different angles. So financial sustainability and regularly regulatory expectations, I think it's a mistake to view them as competing forces. They're really the same strategic imperative, but viewed from different angles. And so the first thing I'd like to share with colleagues today is is my advice to you is we've gotta stop treating them as separate conversations, particularly when we look at the pace of adoption and impact of generative AI.

And and when we we move there, you know, you talk about financial pressures. AI does what constrained budgets demand, Abby. They can help us reduce administrative friction. More importantly, from my perspective, they allow us to personalize support for students at scale. But there's a really interesting strategic nuance that institutions need to adopt to achieve those those outcomes.

And that is every institution I work with around the world when they deploy generative AI, if they do it from the perspective of simply reducing cost, they're going to fail, and they are failing. The great promise of deploying generative AI and AI more generally in higher education is to redeploy the humans to do the work that only humans can do that is of greater value. And quite honestly, if you read any of our student feedback, it's what our students crave. And so when we think about pulling those threads together, my advice is to not think about compliance as a checklist. The leaders who are successfully deploying AI to increase and improve graduate outcomes and student outcomes and reduce cost are the ones who have dived in and they're already redesigning assessment.

They're already rethinking feedback at scale that is rich and personalized, and they're rethinking their learning architecture, both from an instructional design perspective, but also a pedagogy perspective. And that's really the answer to your question. That's where both integrity and competitive advantage sit. It's about putting the student at the middle, thinking about AI like we always have as another set of incredibly rich, powerful tools to wrap around our student, our learning, our teaching, and our humans to unlock value at the lowest unit cost we can because I know everybody in the session today is struggling with a lack of resource to achieve the outcomes they wanna achieve and our regulators want us to achieve. So there's my opening set of remarks for you, Abby, and I'll hand it back to you.

Oh, I love that. Thank you, Martin. And we always trust that you, yeah, give us something to think about from the very get go. That's what I always love. James, maybe on that, just to look into your experience and your, your background, through your work with independent providers, and the IHEA community, you have seen institutions responding to AI on the grand ground.

What are regulators, including TEQSA as Australia's independent national regulator, now expecting to see from providers when it comes to generative AI? And where are institutions perhaps finding challenges on the ground? Yeah. There are probably there are probably three things, three factors that are quite pertinent, and I should argue relatively urgent that are that are that are worth that are worth sharing. The first is that Australia's higher education regulator, TECFSA, has has unambiguously informed both in writing and through a series of workshops, every single provider in this country that the the educative approach that they've adopted since the launch of ChatGPT three, three and a half years ago, that educative approach has now morphed into quite a strict regulatory approach that puts a lot of pressure on providers to make sure that they're able to demonstrate with reference to evidence, specifically how they're preserving the the integrity of the awards that they're conferring to students. So that's the that's the first piece. Right? The the academic the academic integrity piece.

But it's really risky in terms of Gen AI to just view it through the prism of academic integrity, and here's where the second the second regulatory factor comes in. And this this overlaps with what Martin was just saying, and that is if integrity is just the starting point, then what is the endpoint? And the endpoint has to be some kind of either evolution or transformation, but the way that education has been done thus far now has to shift. And anyone who's, even a mild observer of this of this technology would know that we've never seen anything like this in our lifetime. Like a technology that is advancing at such a rapid pace that what was possible just last month, what was impossible just last month is suddenly possible. And Anthropics experiences is one example of that.

So it's critical for providers to also be reflecting on what can they do to adapt or to evolve the way that they do education. And that leads to the third point, and it's capability. So oftentimes, we think of capability in the context of students, which is which is critical. Pretty much every single survey or poll conducted of employers reveals that the one skill set that graduates are not having when they complete their their their tertiary education studies is generative AI capability. So there's there's something in that in terms of what education providers should be embedding into their programs irrespective if those programs yeah.

Irrespective of whether those programs are associated with IT or analytics or whatever it might be. Gen AI is an essential skill set that has to be embedded and taught in every in every program. But capability is not just students. Capability is also staff. So how are we developing the skill set of staff, both faculty and nonfaculty, to be able to educate students well and to be able to do their own job better? Thank you, James.

Martin, I'm not sure if you had anything to add there. No. No. I just, I I really think the way that that sort of James has sort of gone a little bit deeper on the mindset of the regulator and their perspectives and and how we work with that is is just spot on. I I I just think it goes back to something that I said that we just wanna be really wary of looking at them as competing forces and really look strategically about how we need to move forward.

Yeah. Amazing. I love the idea of it being a challenge, but also an opportunity, James, to your point, around preparing students for the future. Thank you. That was great.

We might turn now into sort of a little bit of a different thread and talk about academic and operational core to an institution. Generative AI is prompting providers to rethink not only how learning and assessment are designed, but also the broader systems and processes that shape the student journey. James, I might pass to you here if that's okay. From your perspective in working closely with academic teams in the independent sector, how are institutions beginning to rethink assessment and feedback now that AI is part of the learning environment? And what are you seeing as the most effective per this practice? Martin, you spoke to these changes before. But, James, maybe some more insight from you in that independent world.

Yeah. So a a couple of points worth noting. The first is there has been an unnoticeable. So I can I can I can speak to a shift toward invigilated or secure secure assessments? And I guess that's warranted. Right? Because as noted earlier, TEQSA is focusing on on how providers are actively preserving the integrity of their awards, and they'll be requesting with pretty much every submission for course accreditation or reaccreditation, each provider's detailed action plan, right, that that demonstrates how they're preserving the integrity of their awards.

But the the the the key point to consider in that regard though is just because just because a particular assessment is performed in an english related environment doesn't mean that it should be devoid of Gen AI integration. It's entirely acceptable for students to be performing an assessment in front of their lecturer or their facilitator and still use Gen AI. So knowing that the the primary purpose of higher education has become, like it or not, employability. It's critical that even assessments don't just don't just allow the use of Gen AI, but actually mandate it. And whether their use of the platform happens to be in big data or not is a different question for the institution, but that's that's for that's for them to decide.

And then the just the second point I'm making in this regard is is linked to what Martin was saying earlier in regard to cost pressures. And independent providers feel cost pressures more acutely than anyone else. But the beauty of the beauty of GenAI is its accessibility. There are so many platforms available out there that are completely free. Right? Completely free.

And so it is it is possible to embrace this both operationally within an institution, but also educationally as a form of educating students and preparing them for the workforce of the future where every single industry will be will be affected by this, if they haven't already. Yep. Abby, just to jump in on something that James said too. As people have naturally, as James said, flocked to invigilated assessments in the short term as a reaction to AI, I am increasingly having education technology companies come to me now though to completely reinvent assessment in an AI world where actually at scale individuals can participate in live Socratic debates to be able to prove knowledge, understanding, competence, and application where the AI itself trained on the body of knowledge that they were taught actually provides the invigilation and the assessment. So while we need to respond in the short term, which is very appropriate, I just thought it was worthwhile bringing to everybody's attention that we're only at the very beginning of the disruptive nature of generative AI to the way we teach and assess.

So just just to sort of add that to James, we've gotta have that horizon one thinking right now, but it's worth keeping an eye on horizon two and horizon three because it's not that far away. Yeah. Can I can I add something else to what you just noted, Martin? And that is, something something something that has always perplexed me about media reporting of rates of academic misconduct, especially, within large sandstone universities in Australia, has been that big media stories have been that one particular university has caught five hundred students engaging in misconduct or another one has caught three hundred students engaging in misconduct. And but that volume of of of AI related misconduct is scandalous. Every time I read one of those stories, I think to myself, if you're only catching three hundred or five hundred people and you have fifty thousand or sixty thousand or seventy thousand students enrolled in your institution, the story is not that you've caught so many.

The story should be that you've caught so few. Because as we saw in an expose a couple months ago on the front page of the of The Australian, the vast majority of students are already utilizing GenAI. So if you're still of the mindset that you can restrict people's use and that you'll detect even a significant minority who are using it, you're mistaken. Interesting, James. I think this is a great segue, Martin, if it's okay for us to put some other uses of AI technology within the education sector.

So you have always advocated for designing institutions and the way they work around student experience. And that doesn't always mean assessment. It means so many things. Universities do so many things as we know. Where do you see the biggest opportunities for AI in the systems that support our students.

So, yes, learning technologies assessment, but also maybe admissions or student support. I wonder if there's something you could add there. Yeah. No. I think thanks, Abby.

Look. There are a few things that occurred to me around this question and maybe some provocations for the audience here today. The the first is we've gotta stop thinking about episodic education and really start thinking about moving to continuous capability. You know, the model of apply, enroll, study, graduate was designed for a world where learning happened once. In many ways, my world, you know, I graduated in the early eighties.

That was my that was my world. But that world's gone. The redesign we're doing is all about building a platform for lifelong capability. And the most progressive higher education providers that I work with, they embrace that some years ago. Well before generative AI, well before the disruption of the pandemic, and other global upheaval in in labor markets.

So that's the first. How do we build a platform for lifelong capability as the definition of who we are? The second area is to really just stop and think about friction as an equity failure. Complex applications, delayed responses, unclear pathways, these don't just disadvantage students. They disproportionately disadvantage the students who need institutions the most. And so AI's ability to do both of those things, create a platform for lifelong learning capability, but also take the friction out of what the student experience is like to promote equity and opportunity are the first two.

The the next two that I just wanna quickly touch on is, first of all, personalization. The great promise of generative AI in education at scale. Responsive, personal, and useful from the very first interaction is the way that I think people should be thinking about its application. I'd probably add one other word there which is responsible. So responsible, responsive, personal from the get go is the way we should be thinking about it.

Because AI makes this possible in a way and at a scale that we've just never had the ability to do before. And it's it's not just an admissions possibility. It's really a possibility to rethink everything that we do. We all know our students crave personalized, rich, immersive experiences where they noticed, they feel cared for, and that the learning is engaging and interesting. And to do all of that, to sort of have that always on support mentality across the three legs of success for a student, learning and teaching, the student experience, and belonging really requires us as the people that design and run institutions.

And James, I would say this is just as important for a small private provider as it is a large public university. We've gotta change our mindset. We've designed support around institutional convenience for way way too long. We need to really get away from thinking about office hours and fixed services and reactive models and really allow a different mindset. And that mindset needs to be not that AI replaces human connection because that's a failure in design.

It's gotta be about AI helping extend that human connection. And if we come at it with that mindset to unlock the humans to connect in ways that they just simply haven't had the time or the resources to do before, then everything else will take care of itself. But if we come at it purely from the perspective of AI replacing the human connection, I really worry about our future, and I worry about what the learning experience and outcomes will be for our students, Abby. Yeah. Thank you.

Martin, I love I love your framing of episodic versus continuous or or lifelong learning. I haven't heard it framed in that in that context before. But by by way of reference, before even before chap Chippity was even was even launched, one of the initiatives we launched at my institution, Kaplan Business School, was a lifetime of learning guarantee for all of our higher education graduates, which which which stemmed from our acknowledgment that that it's that that the the the the pace of advancements in industry are such that we're foolish if we think that what we're teaching students throughout the three year degree or the two year degree will be enough to sustain them for the rest of their life. And so our life and the learning guarantee promises that every that every graduate for the rest of their life can continue to attend the live online classes of any of the subjects from which from which, they've graduated, thereby enabling them to remain employable because their knowledge and skills have remained have remained current, and they can continue to attend those classes free. That was our that was our way of reinforcing for them and their future employers that their language that their knowledge hasn't remained stagnant.

That's even more urgent now post post Chatuchipatik. Yeah. I I agree. Not only is it the right thing to do, James, it's the smart thing. If we think about addressing our students and our graduates across their lifetime, it opens up opportunities from us for us to sort of develop programs and and other things that adds to our economic viability, not just to do the right thing by our our students and graduates.

So there's a real win win there. And and again, that's that mindset shift. So Kaplan and you, James, have have had that mindset shift. You no longer debate that within your institution. You accept it and you realize you've gotta flex to that because you can't actually do that by operating in outdated ways.

So well done to you, and well done to Kaplan. I think that's great. James, perhaps there, if you wouldn't mind, would you mind giving us a little bit more detail on on that idea of changing mindset and and working in a, you know, a state of, I guess, crisis management turbulence to Martin, if you wanted to add something there. And how do you move forward in turning it into an opportunity? It's probably something that you've done absolutely fantastic at Kaplan, but I think the audience would be curious to hear a little bit more if you wouldn't mind sharing. Yeah.

A a couple of things. And the the the first comes down to leadership. Right? Like, it's it's critical for leaders to be unambiguous advocates of of this of this technology. Like, I'm I'm tempted to call it what it's actually categorized, which is an emerging technology, but it's arguably not emerging anymore. Like, it's so embedded in in in how many organizations and industries are are working.

But I think leadership here is critical. So my my my doctoral my doctoral research was entirely on crisis leadership where I wanted to understand what were the factors during an organizational crisis that led staff to feel disengaged. And the number one factor that emerged in the research by far, so nothing else even came remotely close, was, let's say, fair leadership. So passive leadership or nonleadership. And I think there's something in that really when it comes to Gen AI.

Really, there's something in that in regard to any any factor like like like Martin was saying earlier, but particularly in regard to Gen AI. So if if you're still skeptical about this technology and you're in a leadership position, I think that's really risky. Right? Because in education in particular, most of your students are already using it, and you risk being seen as an outdated an outdated educator and an outdated employer if you're not embracing it to a certain extent. It doesn't mean that you neglect the risks or that you neglect the threats, but they absolutely exist. So from an assessment from an assessment perspective, one of the greatest is if your if your assessments are still measuring output, that's perilous because the output can be generated in zero point one seconds now.

So what what assessments need to be measuring is the process, the the thinking, the reflection, the defense, the the iterative submission, the justification, the explanation, all that all that kind of stuff is what assessments should be should be reflecting. But I know in in our case, when when Chatchippity first came out, the sector was characterized by hyperventilation. But definitely definitely not not with us. Like, within within a day or two of of OpenAI's release, we had distributed a position statement making clear our position is one of embrace as opposed to resistance. Yeah.

Wow. Martin, I'm not sure if you wanted to add there. No. I look. I I just James is spot on.

It's it starts with leadership. You know, the book that I published recently that you referenced, Abby, Toolkit for Turbulence, is all about how leaders in the face of disruption need to have an adaptive mindset, exactly what James just described. And the pathway of having an adaptive mindset is is really clear. It's when the disruption arrives, you spend a couple of minutes bemoaning it and getting upset about it and worrying about what happens. But you quickly get over that and you start looking at, right, what opportunities does this disruption create for us to do things in ways that we were never able to before? And then once you've done that, you've looked at the possibilities, you've adapted, you then build new tools, ways of working, operating models, and you do that with a courageous, adaptive, opportunity driven mindset.

And then once you've done that, you get it out there faster than anybody else. And the institutions that are doing really well with generative AI are following those steps. They quickly got over fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and looked for opportunities. They re scaffolded their ways of working, their pedagogy, their instruct Oh, is Martin gone for you two, James? Yeah. Okay.

No problem at all. Can I can I can I can I jump in there just to add? Designs. Oh, sorry, Martin. We lost you for a minute, but you're back. Oh, I'm so sorry.

I don't know what happened there. But, James, I know you wanna jump in, but I'll just finish it off. Please. Please. So the institutions doing really well are the ones that embraced it and looked at the upside being cognizant of the downside.

They built new tools, ways of working, instructional design pedagogy, and then they got out there quicker than the other institutions to bring it out there, and gained that advantage. And to James' point, that is the leadership mindset that, we're all going to need to have because this is, as James said, just moving so quickly. There isn't any time to do it in old fashioned ways. Over to you, James. Yeah.

The the the only thing I wanted to add, Martin, in support in support of your your comments is in regard to the predominant rhetoric that seems to that seems to permeate across the media landscape in particular whenever there's a new iteration of a particular Gen AI platform, and that is how many jobs are going to be lost as a result of this. And in a in a way, you can see this playing out even in the education sector with many institutions no longer just experimenting with AI as a means through which assessments can be can be graded by by an automated platform, but where the platform itself can also can also generate the kind of personalized and substantive feedback that could never be produced by a human. You know? And and the reason the reason why every reputable institution facilitates great calibration sessions is because of the massive variance in marking that happens when one human versus another human mark the exact same assessment, and one gives it a distinction, and one gives it a pass. Like, whereas an AI platform can narrow those those differentials. So so on the one hand, you can look at an education related advancement like assessment grading and feedback provision and say, wow.

That's going to that's going to result in a loss of faculty jobs. Right? Because now there's there's no longer a need for them to mark. I think that's an unfortunate way to look at it versus if we free our educators from the from the one the one exercise many of them loathe And we can instead replace that activity with something that is more human centered, where we can where where we can augment their provision of education in a more meaningful and personalized way, that I think could be a really rich transfer transformation for the sector. Yeah. I totally agree.

That's completely in line with with what smart institutions are doing, James. Free the through free the educate the professional worker, wherever it is up, from the low value tasks that they don't enjoy and don't add a lot of value to free them up to really do what they love and what our students, staff, and our communities need them to be doing. That is absolutely spot on. In listening to you both, the what really stand out to me is where you've been saying, you know, institutions need to be courageous. They need to have leaders, which is really interesting that I think that's what we want for our students as well going into the future.

So almost, you know, practice what you preach, and let's get moving. I love it. On that note of students, this is my my favorite part because I I love talking about students. That's why I do what I do. We'll just step into sort of a student experience lens now, if that's okay.

As I said, stepping back from systems and policy and focusing now on our learners, we know that AI is changing how work is done in every profession, almost every. Higher education also needs to think carefully about what kinds of graduates it's preparing for. So beyond knowledge and technical skills, institutions do also play a role in helping students develop a sense of belonging, confidence, maybe courageousness, if that's a word, and human capabilities that will help them remain valuable in this new AI enabled world. So I guess this is a question to you both, but, let me just read it out first, and we'll see who would who would like to sort of begin the discussion. I'll start with a statement.

Belonging is at the heart of the student experience. As AI becomes more embedded in our institutions, how do we ensure students still feel seen, supported, and truly part of a community? Perhaps, James, I'm just thinking about framework, the I hear a whole institution framework, which centers around human centeredness, number one, in in the guidelines there. Would you like to take the question to start? Yeah. Sure. And I I I can answer this from both an independent slash private slash non nonprofit perhaps perspective as well as a as as a from my employer's perspective as a as a as a proudly for profit institution.

And I think I think what what many independent providers have in common is an overrepresentation of international students. And if there's one cohort of students who desperately need a sense of belonging, surely it's those who are international because they're in a foreign country where they don't know the language anywhere near as well, where they don't know the customs anywhere near as well. But almost certainly, they they, upon arrival, have zero friends, zero family, zero support structure. Their finances are almost always stretched, especially if they're at a non g o eight university. So and yet with all of those pressures to travel to a foreign country and study a degree as complex as IT or analytics or business or accounting, I don't know how they do it.

I don't know how they do it, but I know what they need. And what they need is that human connection that that fortifies their their sense of belonging. And I reckon this is where Gen AI can help. Now I I know in your opening comments, Abigail, you you used the word compromised, right, in terms of embracing gen AI to Gen AI Gen AI in a way that doesn't compromise the student experience. But I don't think it should be about compromising the student experience at all.

This this tool provides us with a rare opportunity to transform the student experience with with the kind of human centered activities that AI can't produce. Like, the the the kind of communication or collaboration or, or connection that augments relationships but doesn't necessarily compromise them. And that's where I feel the focus should absolutely be. Yeah. I love that.

Curious, Martin, for your thoughts. Yeah. No. I as you know, Abby, I've sort of been at the intersection of technology and education my whole career. And and there's you know, when I think about running an institution of any size in higher education, As I touched on before, I think there are three things you need to focus on.

The learning and teaching, and that's the one we disproportionately seem to spend most of our time on. But when you talk to students and you talk to them about what the overall experience is like, they'll typically also mention that they want being part of the university from a services perspective to be easy, supportive, and and effective for them. But then more importantly than anything else to them, it is that sense of wanting to belong to a community, to be able to be them genuine selves and be seen and heard and supported, the things that James has touched on. So when we drop technology on that, and today we're talking a lot about generative AI, I think it's really important. And and my thirty plus years of being involved in technology and education has just reinforced for me that belonging has never been a technology problem, and it will not be solved by technology alone.

It goes to what James was just talking about. I want everybody to think about it maybe redefined as care at scale. AI gives us the data and capacity to notice disengaging students earlier and more accurately than ever. It also allows us to pop spot students who have gaps in their learning and their experience that isn't about disengaging, but it's just about not getting access to people or processes that they need. So when we think about AI's possibilities to give us a three hundred and sixty degree digital view of the students, it's not surveillance.

It's a care enabler. So the question every institution should be asking is, do we actually know when a student is struggling or in need, and do we respond fast enough to help them succeed? Because the magic was never technology. The technology is just infrastructure. If we build AI enabled institutions with human connection as the nonnegotiable outcome, we will get it right. And that's not just human connection staff to student.

What I'm really worried about is we're losing the magic of peer to peer connections. We're not investing enough time and effort to engage our students in the life of a higher education provider because that's where those enduring human capabilities that are already the most valuable in the world of work and increasingly will be the most valued in the world of work. That's where they're often nurtured, developed, evidenced well beyond what happens in the lecture room, the classroom, or the online screen that they're engaging in in their learning and teaching. So as you know, Abby, it's near and dear to my heart, this concept of of belonging. And, James, I don't know if you agree or not, but when you look at the world of work today and where the jobs are vanishing, the jobs are vanishing in those in those task y, purely skills based functions.

The jobs that are in or the people who are in the most demand are the ones that have those enduring human capabilities. What I often describe as, you know, sort of the renaissance of the social scientists, and that's what we need to be focused on when we think about belonging inside our institutions. Yeah. I I emphatically agree, Martin. And, like, if if I if I could just add one more one more one more one more point in regard to smaller independent providers, which are the majority of higher education providers, full stop, in Australia.

So it's a minority of providers that are that are really large. The majority are quite small and absolutely are confronted by numerous pressures. We've mentioned budgetary pressures, but there are there are flow on effects. Like, they can't they can't invest in in big beautiful campuses. They can't invest in modern infrastructure.

They can't invest in the kind of online learning resources. Like, they're they're they're restricted to such a considerable a considerable extent. So it's easy in that kind of context as a smaller provider to think to yourself, well, we're at a disadvantage. There's not much we can do. But there is one particular advantage that smaller independent providers have that larger providers would never be able to come even close to matching, and that is the ability to connect meaningfully with each student.

So in the vast majority of public universities, students get lost. Right? They're they're they're oftentimes just a number. They're one student out of thirty thousand or forty thousand or whatever that might be. At a smaller independent provider, they're one of fifty or one of five hundred or one of one thousand where staff know them by by name. They know their background.

They might even know their their partner or whatever it There's something really in that. And I would I would draw on that unparalleled connection and and augment it with the way that technology, now is able to to do quite affordably, as as mentioned earlier. Yeah. It makes me makes my heart warm having been a teacher myself, and my job is literally talking to people all day, every day, Martin and James. So that that point of connection, and that's how we learn and and we share.

I guess keeping on the warm and fuzzy train, if you don't mind, and we'll go into q and a's in a moment. Are there and maybe it's recent or maybe it's in the past. Are there any examples you'd like to share with the audience on how has generative AI or technology tangibly created connection that you've seen and maybe been inspired by or just like to share today? I'll pass to you, Martin, if that's alright. Oh, okay. I I I love this question, Abi.

It's it some people on the or most people probably don't know, but the FutureLearn platform was started by the Open University, and it was my brainchild. It was during the MOOC era, and we wanted to make sure that The Open University alongside the American MOOC providers bought British universities and Commonwealth universities and global universities into the space of providing access to some of our great institutions. And and and it was obviously because we scaled to millions of students. We were using technology as the backbone, Abby. And what I really love about looking back on FutureLearn was that it was never about content delivery.

From day one, our vision was a connection across cultures and contexts. And the technology was the infrastructure, but the magic was what happened between the people, Abby. There was one university in the UK. They offered a course on peace. And part of the scaffolding because there was deep peer to peer sharing to the page level in FutureLearn.

And one of the exercises was they asked people to post an image of what peace represented for them and to give it context. And the whole community, over thirty thousand students could see all of these images of what peace meant for those people. But then then this magic moment happened because we could geolocate everybody. Suddenly, the whole course zoomed back, and you could see lights light up from all around the world of everybody conjecturing what peace meant to them. And it was such a deep personal moment of what peace means for people all around the world.

And it was sort of like the the the world united in a concept of what we want in our societies, our communities, for our families, and our friends. And and it didn't happen. The technology was the infrastructure, but the connection was a fusion of cultures and contexts. And so I I that will live with me as one of my proudest achievements until until I move on from this this earth. That's mine, James.

What what what what comes to mind for you? I I just love that, Martin. That that's quite some quite some legacy. For me, I just just one one one of my favorite innovations that we've introduced stems from our our core philosophy for the past decade, which is that there is nothing. There's nothing more important to us than employability. Like, it constitutes the nucleus of every decision we make.

So all of our curriculum, all of our hiring of educators, all all of our assessments, everything is centered around how can we make our students more employable upon graduation. And so one of the GenAI innovations that has made my heart sing the most has been has been one where students engage in a mock job interview. Now I work for an institution where ninety eight percent of students are international students. So they're automatically at an employment disadvantage because of their accent, for example, or because their language capabilities aren't as strong as somebody else's or because they might not have experience in Australia or oftentimes because they can't sell themselves in the same way that someone who's been born and raised here can when they go for job interviews. And what this simulation does, it it it enables a student to upload any job description that they're that that for a job they've applied for and then engage in a simulated job interview, thereby strengthening, their ability to answer questions confidently and competently with the platform also being able to give them feedback on how they've answered each question.

And that to me, considering our core cohort, has been, really, really, important. Oh, I love that. Consider my heart warmed. The fuzzies are real. Thank you both.

We might dive into some q and a now. There are quite a lot of, questions, I will say. So I'm so sorry if we aren't able to get to your ends sorry, your question today, everyone on the call. But, I'll I'll start with this one here, which I think is a very good question. Why haven't institutions revised courses to include AI rather than trying to discipline students? Maybe, James, considering your oversight of o I hear in so many institutions, why haven't they? Why why do you think is the main reason? I think it's the same reason why many institutions still have lectures and final exams even though they're they're both pedagogically unsound.

Right? And once a lot of evidence that demonstrates that they're pedagogically un sound. And that is that, unfortunately, many decision makers in the higher ed sector can be slow to change, even though we have change management courses that we teach students. So that's the only reason that I can think of, right, where we can be slow to change. And so my my advice would be if after three and a half years of advancements in Gen AI, like, when you compare the first iteration of Chat Shippy Tee to what's available right now, if that doesn't impose unprecedented urgency to to adapt and embrace this technology, then you you risk becoming obsolete. That's that's how that's as extreme as I as I consider it.

For sure. Ma'am, would you like to add, or I can go to Oh, like, I think James nailed it. Just in short, you know, tyranny of conventional wisdom. You know, we're trapped in the way that we've always done things. We're totally ill equipped to be able to deal with these wicked adaptive challenges that things like generative AI present, you know, to leverage Heifetz and Linsky's work.

We keep trying to treat everything as a linear challenge when actually it's an adaptive challenge, and it requires an adaptive mindset to survive. And the most dangerous place to be right now is in denial or lethargic. Both of those are going to be catastrophic for you as the new world of work and learning unfolds. So I know we wanna try to get through more questions, Abby, but that would be I'll just double click on what James said and add those those little bits. No.

No. That's no worries at all. The the next question is somewhat somewhat related. In your opinions, is Australia, noting a lot of the people on the the the call today are from Australia, are we behind, or are we with the rest of the world in our journey in terms of what we've spoken about today? What are your opinions? Interesting to benchmark. James, do you wanna go first? Yeah.

Sure. Maybe I'll I'll just speak from from a from a regulatory perspective because I'm I'm fortunate through my work with Kaplan. We're we're a multinational institution, so I'm frequently meeting with my colleagues in the UK, in Ireland, in New Zealand, in Canada, in the United States. So I'm frequently in substantive conversations with them about regulatory matters. And what I can tell you is that irrespective of what view you may hold of TEQSA as our higher education regulator, TEQSA is by far more advanced and more sophisticated in their support and understanding and approach to GenAI than any of the other regulators.

And I personally find that really inspiring. It may not feel like it to you when you get an RFI after you submit a particular application for a course accreditation. But trust me, as someone who's aware of what's happening, are really closely aware of what's happening elsewhere, we're really fortunate that they're our regulator. Yeah. Look.

I'll I'll just jump in, Abby, and say, look. We're definitely not behind in Australia, and I would say most leaders of institutions are well beyond denial, I think, and in fact, understands the impact. What I worry about is something that I touched on before, which is lethargy. So if we compare ourselves to other universities around the world, we're in front. But is that really the peer group that we need to be comparing ourselves to? You know, what we're often blind to, the competitors that are entering the market or serving the needs of our students that are not like us.

So if we just compare ourselves to ourselves, yeah, Australia is doing fine. We're about as good as, if not better, than other HE providers around the world, but that's not what's going on. The entire learning ecosystem is being new is being redesigned. New entrants and new types of learning are emerging on a daily basis. So it's not good enough for us to just benchmark ourselves against other global HE providers.

We've got a benchmark against the bleeding edge thought leaders and the other providers that are entering the market and and serving literally millions of students that don't even show up on our radar screens for what we need to do differently to be relevant in the communities that we serve. Yeah. Absolutely. I think it is always helpful to zoom out, to zoom in, if that makes sense. It's almost like when you're playing netball, they always say move back, and then you've got more options to throw the ball to.

Yeah. I just encourage people. Go out and look at what OpenAI is doing in education And ask yourself the question of all the use cases that OpenAI could choose to invest their money to disrupt segments, why was education in their top three? Just go look at what they're doing, and you you can you might be scornful. You might be critical. You might be judgmental.

You might be dismissive. But it's not going away, and it's gonna change everything, and we know that. Because look at Google certificates. Look at Salesforce trailhead. Look at what Microsoft, Cisco, and Intel have been doing for decades.

This is a movie that has been around a long time. Whenever we fail to respond, nature abhors a vacuum. Others will come in and and and fill that vacuum, and this vacuum is growing faster than everything anything we've seen in the history of humankind without meaning to be alarmist. Sorry. The second coffee just kicked in.

No. You're right. And I warm and fuzzy you too much, then we had to bring it back. Back. It is really important, Martin.

I appreciate that. On that point, James Martin, this will be our last question before we wrap up today. Just a question around, you know, right now, we're sort of describing this as horizon one. What's next? What do you foresee next? Because as you said, James, this is moving very quickly. Probably the next time we host a webinar like this, things will look a little bit different.

What's next? What's two and three? I if you were to ask any member of my team to use one word to describe me, I guarantee you the word that a majority would use is technophobe, and that would be right. I'm genuinely a technophobe. And yet I know that within five years, the way that education is done will be unrecognizable. I struggle to predict what that will be, Abigail, but I know it will be unrecognizable. And that's why I feel it's critical that we're experimenting, that we're piloting, and as much as as much as possible, moving towards a systemic cycle of trialing and embedding, trialing and embedding, and then evaluating.

That's critical. Yeah. And, Abi, I know because we've only got three minutes left. I I just say, I agree with what James said. You're a fool if you try to predict where this is going right now because I was in love with ChatGPT, and suddenly I met Claude.

And in the space of a Sunday, I divorced ChatGPT and married Claude. So but what I would say, if I had to headline it, it would be unconstrained personalization. Yeah. That would be my headline of you won't predict where the technology is going to go, but what it's going to enable is unconstrained personalization. I love that.

Unconstrained. Thank both so much. We only have two minutes, so I won't ask another question because, you know, we might go on. But thank you for joining us, and thank you to everyone that's on the call today live or watching the recording. Thank you for all the work you do in your everyday, and you'll continue to, you know, shaping the future of education for our students, but also for ourselves.

Just a few reminders before we wrap up. The recording will be available, as I said. You can also register for the next webinar in this series if you're curious, to learn more. That will be happening on May eighth, I believe, and you can register for that the same way you registered for this webinar. I also want to remind you to, you know, stay connected.

Keep these conversations going, whether it's with a vendor representative or, really any sort of peak body that you work with. And, yeah, I hope today was helpful to you. And, again, thank you, Martin, and thank you, James. It's been a joy. Thank you, James.

Thank you, Abby. Thank you. Great conversation. Thanks for coming, everybody. Thank you. Bye. See you.