Today, I will speak about AI in higher education and specifically the impact it is having on staff in higher education. AI is often talked about as a double-edged sword in education. There are benefits for students with personalised learning, continuous feedback and delivery of education through multi-media. Students have different learning styles and now we can deliver education in different ways to suit them. However, this is putting increased pressure on staff. The staff are not getting the same benefits from AI. It is putting increased workloads on them and we are not focused enough on this and do not talk enough about it. These are the very people on whom we depend to deliver all the wonderful things we are hearing about today to upskill our workforce for the future. It is the staff we expect to do that upskilling. Why are they facing these additional pressures? They are all being asked to redesign assessments. We are in a post-plagiarism world, as it is called. Our traditional form of assessment, the final written exam, guarantees academic integrity but is also vulnerable to issues around the use of AI. Staff are having to learn new systems and to do things differently through AI. Even if AI is used for assessment purposes, it still needs human verification. One study found that 75% of students were failed by the AI grader so all of those had to be verified. Lecturers are conducting mini viva voces on written assignments to ensure academic integrity is maintained, that the students are learning what they were taught, what it was intended for them to learn and that they have embedded that learning. AI grading is also generating more student queries than forms of traditional assessment. One study found that 88% of students queried their AI generated grade. This is in a context where we are facing an ever increasing arms race with AI technology. There is a race between the detection tools to check whether an assignment submitted used AI and students' evasion tactics. In the short term, I do not see that the extra workload on staff in higher education institutions will reduce. In fact, we could be facing a number of years of constant pressure to try to maintain the standards and integrity. I welcome the Higher Education Authority's new framework on AI. It creates a groundwork around it but we also need to support it more with openness to change. We need to look at ways to support our staff. One in five staff in higher education is on a temporary contract. They need support to manage these changes.

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