Navigating the AI Frontier: How Academic Institutions Can Effectively Train Staff and Students on the use of AI in Assessment

This article has been prepared for the BLE Blog by Kirsty Branch, Learning Technologist (Digital Assessment) at the University of London

The rapid integration of AI into academic life presents both exciting opportunities and significant challenges. For universities and colleges to harness AI's potential, while safeguarding academic integrity and preparing individuals for the future, effective, targeted training for both staff and students is essential. During the most recent meeting of the BLE's Assessment Special Interest Group, we discussed and planned potential training topics for delivering training around the issue of AI and assessment. Here's a look at the suggestions that were made about how institutions approach this critical task.

A central recommendation that was discussed in the workshops is to adopt a broader approach covering the appropriate use of AI for both staff and students. While focusing on tools and their impact for staff, the training should place a specific emphasis on integrity and ethical use for students. This is crucial not only for academic work but also for preparing them for the professional world. Acknowledging and discussing the risks of overreliance on AI – such as poorer academic performance, loss of personal voice, and the assumption that these tools will always be available in the workplace – is vital for both groups.

Key Training Areas:

Training needs to be comprehensive and address multiple facets of AI use:

• Academic Integrity and Ethical Considerations: This was a recurring core theme of each group in the session. Training should directly address academic integrity and AI, exploring the necessity of making changes to assessments in light of AI capabilities. Practical sessions focusing on the pitfalls of AI for assessment redesign and academic integrity can help develop a core understanding. Using case studies to show the inherent bias with AI models was suggested as a way to highlight ethical concerns tangibly. Furthermore, it is recommended to make policy more explicit in academic manuals, linking clear guidance to assessment design and the rationale regarding integrity requirements related to degree awarding powers.

• Ethics and Critical Literacy: Beyond just using AI, we discussed how individuals need to understand its foundations and limitations. Training can delve into the ethics and geopolitics of AI, covering topics like who owns the tools, the origin and nature of training data, and the limitations of models. Exploring why AI produces certain outputs, including hallucinations, is key. There should be a focus on criticality for everyone, including whether staff apply critical skills to AI output. Information literacy, including AI, was also highlighted as a necessary skill for both staff and students.

• Real-World Relevance and Equity: Connecting AI training to careers for both staff and students is important, addressing common concerns about AI's impact on their future. Students, in particular, may be more concerned about career implications than immediate assessment challenges. Discussions about the unequal playing field where students paying for subscriptions might access better models and whether AI use disadvantages those who don’t use it are also crucial ethical points to cover. Staff need guidance on how to make AI use as inclusive and ethical as possible.

Suggested Formats and Audience Considerations:

In the workshop we also discussed how training can be delivered in various ways to cater to different needs and schedules:

• Diverse Formats: Options include webinars, face-to-face workshops, and asynchronous resources like self-paced courses, reference guides, FAQs, and blogs. Discipline-specific sessions, organised by faculty or departments, are highly valuable as they can tailor content, such as building in ethics and critical literacy of AI for specific fields. Encouraging case studies and establishing communities of practice can also foster shared learning and collaboration, including potentially collaboration between staff and students on AI use.

• Tailored Audiences: Training should target staff, students, and sometimes both groups together. Staff may feel less confident in their AI skills and require a reserved space to ask questions and express worries. Staff also need dedicated training time, with a suggestion that this might be added to workload models in the short term. Asynchronous resources, conversely, might offer more opportunities for shared training between staff and students. Training should also target those not using AI to any great extent to build their confidence.

Effectively training academic communities on ethical AI use requires a multi-faceted approach that addresses integrity, critical thinking, practical application, and real-world concerns, delivered through formats that suit the distinct needs and comfort levels of both staff and students.

A Note About the Writing of This Blog Post

This process was a true collaboration. The ideas and creative input in this post all came from participants in the SIG Assessment group. The post was then drafted by Kirsty Branch and refined with the assistance of AI — in this case, using NotebookLM — to help clarify and bring together everyone's contributions.

Presenting from a new angle?

This blogpost was authored by Dr Matthew W Darlison, Lecturer at the UCL Institute of HealthInformatics.

It’s rare - at least in my experience - to walk around a corner and have your breath taken away by a technology that feels so intuitively right that you wonder why it isn’t already everywhere, but that’s what happened early in 2019, and I’ve been working out ever since why that moment made such a dramatic impact.

I was accustomed to a variety of styles of presentation, in both physical space and on screen:

• The actor, who uses the space available to the full, and for whom a projection screen with slides serves as a backdrop;

• The newscaster, who stays firmly behind the desk or lectern, facing front, while their slides are displayed beside them in space;

• The weather forecaster, who moves in front of their slides but is fastidious about facing the front, and practiced enough to point uncannily to things seemingly by touch (probably because they have a screen relaying the camera feed somewhere off to the side) and not to obscure anything important;

• The irrepressible enthusiast, who starts off like a weather forecaster, but - overcome with passion - often turns away from the audience to talk into the screen while pointing at some or other part of it.

• The wizard (of Oz?) who is never even seen, manifesting only as a disembodied voice over full-screen pictures;

• The Cheshire cat - a talking head that appears in front of the material being presented, speaks, and then often disappears again. 

What I saw as I came around that corner, though, was none of these. Rather it was a presentation style reminiscent of the puppeteers and presenters of the children’s TV of my youth. A technology that demanded that the presenter face the front, but that placed the stuff of the presentation between them and me, on an invisible surface that I felt like I could reach out and touch.

I’d met the lightboard - you should too, if you get the chance.

Jason and the Adventure of 254

On a chilly morning in early January 2025, a small gathering of the BLE-London Digital Accessibility Working Group met at the Wellcome Collection to see the inspiring and creatively innovative exhibition by artist, Jason Wilsher-Mills. The exhibition tracks the period of Wilsher-Mills' childhood during the 1980s when he was laid up in hospital, paralysed from the neck down. The installations (sculptures, dioramas and illustrations) bring together vivid colour, avant-garde design and cheeky humour to convey what was happening to the artist at the time, and how the experience awakened his artistic skills. 

Colleagues who attended the outing have shared their responses to the exhibition below. Huge thanks for their contributions. The exhibition has now finished (we caught it in its last week), but the website is still available here.

Simon Parr, School of Advance Study:

"I found the ‘Jason and the Adventure of 254’ exhibition a highly enjoyable and
thought-provoking experience. It engaged with issues of disability, the body, creativity, and self-expression in a profound, engaging and sometimes, light-hearted way. It also used metaphors effectively to describe the experience of illness and disability, and the two that had the most impact on me were the small virus-carrying soldiers attacking the patient and the flashing lights on the giant patient. The lights illustrated the breakdown in communication between the brain and the body.

"An important thing I took from the exhibition was the capacity of young people to create rich worlds of their own with the influences available to them, even when they have limited movement and spend much of their lives in hospital. It all demonstrated the importance of nurturing the rich insights and contribution to all conversations from people with disabilities and how we need to do everything in our power to make this possible. For example, in the 1980s, the main piece of assistive technology available to Jason was a mouth-operated paintbrush, and even this rudimentary tool allowed him to share his creativity. This made me think about how we can all benefit when the improved technologies we have today are properly deployed."

Angela Taylor, SOAS:

"A fun and playful exhibition that introduces the social model of disability through art and lived experience. Great to share this with the digital accessibility working group and get out of the office at the start of term!"

Naomi Bain, Birkbeck:

"It was an unusual exhibition experience. Everything had a distinctive look, which was bold, busy, jarring, even ugly. While the exhibition was about the experiences of someone from a different background to me and was about his illness, medical procedures and disability, it was immediately relatable as I also grew up in the 80s. The style, the colours and the news and popular culture references took me back. 

"The central piece, the figure in bed, was a compelling depiction of how the artist felt as a child being confined to a hospital bed and to a body that was not functioning as it previously had and did not feel like home to him any more. To me it brought back memories of childhood illnesses when I had delirium and my hands and feet felt huge and heavy. 

"Being able to touch the artwork made the experience really different too. The tactile experience added something."

Carmen Fernandez, University of the Arts:

"I loved the exhibition. The whole concept with the gigantic bed as central point and the artist's style of drawing, which as he explains in the video, is influenced by his growing up in 70s and 80s: psychodelia, comics and TV. 

"The artwork reflects a strong connection with his family which I found very moving. There is a mixture of humour and seriousness, addressing the complex range of emotions of a child who had to learn too much about illness, treatment and disability at an early age. I think is fantastic how all this is conveyed in the drawings and especially in the dioramas, and we can see and feel his memories and reinterpretations of childhood experiences form an adult's point of view. 

"I found the artist's personal journey very inspiring: learning who you are, which were the people and experiences that influenced both who you are now and your current view of the world.

"I'm glad I didn't miss it."

AI voice-cloning to help a sick friend speak again

Steven McCombe, Educational Video & Multimedia Specialist at City St George's, University of London, recently published a beautifully written case study about how he developed an app to give his friend a voice. By exploring a range of audio technologies and harnessing the power of Artificial Intelligence, Steven was able to create a way for his friend to communicate with his own voice after he lost the ability to speak due to an aggressive form of cancer. 

The full article, which is both inspiring and moving, can be accessed here on the Learning at City blog. 

Taking Action for the International Day of Persons with Disabilities

This blog post was authored by Dr Sylwia Frankowska-Takhari, Educational Technologist specialising in Digital Accessibility at City St George's, University of London. The original article is available here.

3 December marks the United Nations’ International Day of Persons with Disabilities (IDPD), an annual opportunity to reflect on and promote the rights, well-being, and inclusion of people with disabilities in all aspects of life. Established in 1992, the IDPD seeks to raise awareness of disability issues and mobilise support for creating a more inclusive world. This year’s theme highlights the leadership of people with disabilities, which invites us to focus on and amplify the voices of disabled students and staff in our university community.

The IDPD is a perfect moment to commit to practical actions that uphold accessibility and inclusion. Here are a few ways staff can get involved this year:

1. Commit to teaching accessibly
   Whether you’re delivering lectures, facilitating group work, or designing online content, consider how your approach can be more inclusive. Simple changes like ensuring videos are captioned, using accessible presentation formats, or sharing materials in advance can make a significant difference.
2. Improve the accessibility of your resources
   Review the digital materials you create or use in your teaching and administrative roles. Ensure documents, PDFs, and slides meet accessibility standards and are usable for everyone, including screen reader users.
3. Learn more about accessibility
   City's Digital Accessibility Guide provides clear, actionable advice on creating accessible resources. We have also curated a selection of accessibility and inclusion related resources.

By taking these steps, we can build a more inclusive university where disabled students and staff feel valued and empowered. Let’s use this IDPD not just to celebrate progress but to commit to improving accessibility and inclusion across our institution. Hope you feel inspired!