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Episode 7: Technology and pedagogy
95 Plays26 days ago
In this episode, host Charles Knight is joined by Laura Milne, Head of Digital Education at the University of Chester to discuss the ever increasing role of technology in higher education teaching and learning.
They cover artificial intelligence, virtual learning environments and their pros and cons, as well as the role technology plays in making higher education as accessible as possible for as many different people as possible. They also discuss some of the challenges that can arise through the use of technology, such as ensuring assessments are fair and deliver the right learning outcomes for students.
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Transcript
Introduction: Technology's Influence on Education
00:00:14
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Talking Transformation. I'm your host, Charles Knight, Director of Educational Excellence and Student Success. This week, I'm looking forward to 2026 and beyond and asking how technology will continue to influence education, not just as an end in itself, but in pursuit of educational excellence and in regard to things such as workforce development.
00:00:39
Speaker
AI will inevitably feature in these discussions, but questions about curriculum design, assessment, staff capability, student success and institutional culture are just as important.
00:00:52
Speaker
I'm delighted to be joined by Laura Mill, whose work sits at the intersection of technology, education and practice. Laura, thank you for joining me. Laura is Head of Digital Education in the Centre for Academic Innovation and Development at the University of Chester. Hello, Laura.
00:01:10
Speaker
Hi, Charles. Thank you so much for having me. It's great to have you. So, When we look ahead to 2026 and when we think about the kind of work that you're involved in, um there's obviously lots of focus on student success and we at Advance HE talk about educational excellence. How is, in your practice, how is technology supporting that student journey and educational excellence?
Deep Learning and Equitable Access
00:01:39
Speaker
So I think I want to start by saying I don't want... frame educational excellence as just driven by the next shiny thing. I think we we suffer from shiny things syndrome a lot in in higher education, particularly in this age of AI. And there's always going to be the next technology that solves all our problems. I was thinking about educational excellence and I thought about things like um deep transferable learning, particularly about equitable access and outcomes. and ethical and human-centered use of technology. I think we we often flip that narrative. So we start with the technology and then come to the humanity and figure out how to plug those in after the fact. um And i think something that's going to be really important for educational excellence at university is going to be thinking about um building belonging, building easy ways for our students to belong, and because all of those factors pay ah play a part in their their student experience. And I think in terms of excellence,
00:02:37
Speaker
um We've had a few sort of forced additions to our standard toolbox. so lots of suppliers have bolted on some AI into tools that haven't had AI for the last few years. um And technology reshapes that definition of what we need and what we need to do to make education excellent because it starts to become about critical digital literacy skills and how can we support our students to think critically about it what they're using, how they're using it and then how they're go to take those skills out into the workplace after they graduate.
Challenges in Tech Integration Planning
00:03:07
Speaker
So I think the thing that I'm struggling with is um how do we provide space for our students to demonstrate there there's those critical, those skills about criticality very clearly and authentically and push innovation.
00:03:22
Speaker
and use tools appropriately. So there's a lot going on there. Yeah. So just, um and I know having known Laura for a while, like I noticed you can cope with me going slightly off script. i Just want to pick up on a couple of things you mentioned, because these come up a lot with myself and the team are out talking to members in the educational space. I just want to pick up on this thing about shiny toys and especially what we're seeing with vendors and AI add-ons, which is you don't have to go back that far where effectively, if you were doing an implementation or you were thinking about technology enhanced learning,
00:03:58
Speaker
if there would be some software that you would install and there was a kind of really controllable road roadmap. You know, they'd say, we're going to launch version whatever next year. And you think about what that meant.
00:04:10
Speaker
And I've been thinking about this a lot recently. It's so complicated now because many of the services that we use are cloud-based and it's quite common now for me to talk to members of the team or we thought through a process, but then the software changes around us in terms of functionality. And especially we don't want to focus too much on AI, but you're absolutely right.
00:04:35
Speaker
All of the providers, you know everybody's got their a um AI bolt on. Whatever it is you're trying to do, there's always the AI bolt on. And I guess from a and a workforce development and the way you are, which is that intersection of technology and practice, it just makes it much more more complicated because the forward roadmap is more complicated because the feature, if we want to call it that, the feature changes, which can be great and create opportunities, they must just make the kind of planning of what you want to do much more difficult.
00:05:08
Speaker
Yeah, it's hugely difficult to think about that that roadmap with without trying to, I don't know, i feel every now and again like I'm trying to create a logical plan around very nebulous and changeable and ambiguous outcomes. At the end of the day, i always do want to kind of come back to is this is this technology going to add to the student experience and is going to help staff do their jobs better? yeah,
00:05:36
Speaker
that challenge of not being able to plan or being able to plan. I think that that question about where do you see yourself in five years time? Where do you see your institution in five years time can be really, really challenging because we know, we know the values of what we want to do. And sometimes the technology of how we're going to actually get there changes under our feet. And those changes can feel quite scary to staff who are maybe less happy in technology. They need a little bit more support. So i think I'm spending more time thinking about how we can,
00:06:05
Speaker
get people used to responding to change yeah um rather than focusing on a particular skill with a particular tool. Yeah, we um I was involved in writing a blog recently, which is exactly that, which is you've kind of got to operate in the now, but be planning for this uncertain future. And the other thing I think um I just wanted to pick you up on because I think it's really interesting.
00:06:30
Speaker
It just occurs to me in our conversation that you in your role and people in similar roles to you operate in a really interesting space because often what happens is an organizational leader will see a tool that potentially will impact practice or they encounter a vendor and the vendor says, our tool can do these amazing things. And one of the gaps that I've really started to notice is that it's really difficult in this new age of cloud-based services. And this sounds really technical, but it's a really important thing.
00:07:05
Speaker
to If I'm just honest about it, many of the vendors, their licensing is really confusing in the sense of, it's really difficult to understand what you're actually buying or not buying. And and I'll just mention that Microsoft, for example, their licensing is horrendously complicated.
00:07:24
Speaker
So you end up in a, I find that when I talk to people like yourself, you end up in a space which is, that's technically possible, and we could do this with staff and students. But do you realise the actual cost of this if people started to adapt it and the usage really took off? Which is a kind of interesting space because you're kind of moving between, as you've really rightly described it, what's the end benefit for students and staff?
00:07:49
Speaker
That kind of project, how do we embed it? But there's also this kind of But do you understand what that would mean in terms of what this would actually cost? Which I'm not sure a lot of people are as in senior leader teams are aware of as they should be.
Vendor Licensing and Integration Costs
00:08:05
Speaker
Yeah, I think that that's a ah big challenge. I've been thinking about that recently in terms of AI in Moodle, which is a functionality from Moodle 4.5. We don't have AI turned on in our Moodle because it requires plugging into an AI provider and paying them for credits to actually enable that. We are thinking about how we would test that. And we've been doing maths on, okay, cool. Well, what would be 20,000 pounds worth of credits? Is that a reasonable pilot? I don't know. yeah how how many How much does that actually get us? What if what can we do with it? um And i think what I was...
00:08:40
Speaker
hearing your your reflections about that sort driver of technology or pedagogy, um i was minded of Tim Thorn's entangled pedagogy. yeah It's not technology-informed pedagogy or pedagogy-informed technology, which are both sort of illusions because there's always going to be one that drives the other. And actually, it's a it's a sense of those things being enmeshed and entangled. And it becomes about how we can articulate where we are and what we need to do with the tools we have.
00:09:09
Speaker
I'm really, I'm familiar with that. And we tend to make this podcast not too technical. Sorry. No, no, I'm familiar with it because for anyone who is interested in this who's listening, ah Tim's work's really interesting. um And Thorn is spelt, I think, F-A-W-N. Yes. And it's worth checking out his work because it really gets to that tension of...
00:09:28
Speaker
how do you how do you mesh these things together and his work if you listen to this tim your work really reminds me of some of the work that we see in information systems about activity theory but let's not get too technical so the other thing i i just wanted to talk about we talked a bit about ai and we talked about the kind of ai bolt-ons that we're seeing here there and everywhere but one of my reflections as well is again the ai is kind of in some respects, really put attention and reverse this, what's best for
AI's Potential and Student Digital Literacy
00:10:01
Speaker
the students. I've seen lots of practice, which is this tool can do this. How can we use it? Which is the wrong way around. But it's not all about AI. And I think from a educational perspective, I think there's a whole range from my from my view, other ah digital initiatives and things we have to think about in this frame. So when I think about a lot, I used to work at the University of Salford, which had heavy first generation students.
00:10:25
Speaker
are things that you mentioned at the top of the interview, things around equity and digital inclusion, which are still really big issues. Yeah, I think and that's one of the but one of the things that people who are fans of AI say is that, you know, it can it can reduce barriers to understanding. It can support people with language of language challenges learning in English for the first time. There's a whole lot that it can do, that AI can do. but I've also been thinking about other technologies that we use supportively for students. And I think that, that I think in some cases, the high use of technology can itself be a bit of a, it can increase the digital divide. It can be a bit of a barrier to entry because we assume that all these systems are really easy. And it's that myth of digital native, um which we've we've talked about how, how our students are digital natives for many years. And it's it's actually not true because they're digital natives on TikTok. And that's very different from being digital natives on um university VLE systems or other university systems. So, you know, in my perfect world, we'd have this friction-free system where people were able to do what they meant when they meant it. um
00:11:41
Speaker
and And that would make life so much better. I think AI might help with that, but I don't think it's gonna be all getting all the way to that point. Yeah, and and the the flip side, I think, as well, is sometimes you want a little bit of friction. So if I give an example, I record separately. ah I've just started it, my own kind of experimental podcast. And I've done podcasting for a while.
00:12:00
Speaker
And the tools there will edit the podcast for me. But actually, there's something about practice and kind of using your critical thinking to think that really works, that doesn't work in the edit.
00:12:13
Speaker
that I worry sometimes that some of the digital skills, which actually are about critical thinking selection, yeah exactly as you've just mentioned it, if you kind of cede all of that authority to just use AI to say, well, I can do it can save the time.
00:12:27
Speaker
I think you lose a lot. I think you lose a lot. And it's not even about the technology use, is it? It's about the development of critical thinking.
Re-evaluating Assessment Methods
00:12:34
Speaker
Yeah, and the problem solving. How do I solve this problem? Where do i even go to ask the question? How do I even figure out what to do next? And I think that's something sort of as people are pushed for time, have other commitments, both students and staff, they they just want to get the answers and quickly and easily. And AI does AI gives them answers. They may not always be the right answers or the best answers. So that's just worth holding attention with that drive for. I just need the answer now.
00:13:04
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. and And the other thing that I think is really interesting, um expanded a little bit out beyond AI, obviously in your role, um there's lots of interest in...
00:13:16
Speaker
if we get the pedagogy right, how technology therefore helps us improve what we do in teaching alone and learning, it's an enhancement. But one of the things I've thought about a lot is often um our platforms of the technology we use actually kind of expose weaknesses in our kind of existing, in the existing things. i there's always this thing that technology will slide off practice.
00:13:40
Speaker
Yeah. And I kind of think the tricky thing is where you enable technology use or introduce technology, but it really changes practice. That's really difficult to do. Is it's that kind of something you've seen?
00:13:52
Speaker
Yeah, I think um ah think I've seen where technology exposes challenging practice more often than I've seen technology shining through in into good practice. So things like I was thinking really about thus the the process of assessment. I'm stuck on assessment at the moment. I think lots of people in the sector are stuck on assessment. I'm still on the hunt for my digital, my unicorn, my digital assessment platform that's going to do everything and it's going to do it beautifully. And it's going to deliver different forms of assessment, and be able to be marked dynamically with good feedback, literacy built in. I want all of these things. um And I think something I've been thinking about and struggling with is a lot of the ways we assess at the moment, are constrained by technology that was built to serve all the ways of doing things. So the amount of, uh, the number of assessments in an institution that are ah long form essays, um, which get put into turn it in and marked in turn it in because the long form essay has always been a really good use of a really good way of of assessing for many, many years. And now we're stuck with long form essays because it's more difficult to break out of an established system.
00:15:04
Speaker
and re-imagining what assessment needs to be is, i don't know, it's it's such a brain breaking problem, but it's it's it's a great one to get stuck on. It's it's a massive one. I'm gonna be talking to Kay Murdock from, um who who is an expert in academic integrity from Australia. And Kay and I have talked about this a lot together.
00:15:24
Speaker
And what you're talking about there to me is that intersection as well, about technology, pedagogical practice, and then the underlying model of the institution. yeah cause Just like you, i thought a lot about the written essay and last year I was endlessly asked to go and do talks on what will happen. Is the written essay dead and so on and so on.
00:15:43
Speaker
The challenge to say the written essay is dead is not pedagogical technological. It's that the underlying models of institutions rely on high volume, yeah easy to collect, audit, distribute markers and collect marks and then distribute back to. So the systems have evolved around that economic model. And it's really, really challenging because um I'm originally from a business school.
00:16:07
Speaker
You know, if you start to look at large modules and large cohorts, there's a whole range of other pedagogical things that you could do. But you then get into all sorts of really interesting questions and difficult questions about how would you physically schedule, for example, lots of simulations? Yeah. And then from a student perspective, and this is the kind of equity perspective, the other...
00:16:27
Speaker
regardless of what we think about the essay pedagogically, it has lots of advantages for students who potentially are time poor, or they may have health issues that impact their mobility to come on and off campus, or they may, for example, need something that they can do in small chunks. And the essay has lots of equity advantages in some way. So it's just such a puzzle. Yeah, there are, i mean, there are a few other assessment formats that are very challenging for people with anxiety issues or like presentations as ah as a prime one of, oh, we're not going to do essays anymore. We'll just have the whole class do presentations like, yes, but then you've got to mark, monitor, calibrate on that. But you've also got to require your students to do an in-person performance, which isn't necessarily in the learning outcome. So you've kind of got this hidden learning outcome about public speaking, which
00:17:18
Speaker
I know it's one of the things that freaks people out. It's one of the top phobias. when No one told me in my brain setting that public speaking was scary, so I never thought about being scary. Yeah, yeah I think that's absolutely right. And and um it's the challenges as well. One of the kind of knee-jerk reactions to, and we I guess we are talking about assessment AI at the moment, is, you know, let's just get everyone to an exam room. Let's get everyone in an exam room.
00:17:45
Speaker
But then you start to run into other pedagogical problems. And I want to kind of link this the near future. If you look at the United Kingdom and many governments, they really expect institutions to prepare students for the economy that we exist in and for universities to support the economic mission. Now, depending on who you are, you might agree with that or not. But the bottom line is sticking students in an exam room to handwrite essays is not preparing them for the workplace of 2026. I'm not saying exams do not have any pedagogical merit, but if your diet of assessment is just to say, we'll just stick them in big rooms, it's just not, I've just got all sorts of problems with that in terms of generating the actual skills that students need for the future. Yeah, I think Danny Liu commented on on a long ins instagram long LinkedIn post about AI and assessment that having a balanced diet of assessment is really important. yeah And i love the I love the concept of a balanced diet, that there are lots of elements that make up the assessment approach. And I think that that needs to be seen.
00:18:47
Speaker
As a learning designer myself, I always want to see things as a fractal. So you can zoom in and see a smaller picture of how this might be a balanced diet within a unit or you can scale it up and go this is a balanced diet across a whole course and that sort of ability to to see the big picture as a balanced diet but then to zoom in and see how this has been scaffolded throughout is is really really cool and i think it's quite difficult in a lot of university spaces where module leaders only have control over one module and actually something i've been thinking about is how can we how can we spread the transitions between modules how can we make
00:19:24
Speaker
that picture flow better? How can we make the student journey better for for our students? ah it's Yeah, it's a really interesting question, and and maybe something we pick up another podcast, which is, does the modular system make sense for where we're going? In some i mean in the United Kingdom years ago, and they kind of dined off, there were a lot more degrees that were based around integrated curriculums rather than a modular system. And again, it kind of goes to the business model, doesn't it?
00:19:50
Speaker
The modular system makes perfect sense. And in fact, the switch to... in England at least, ah lifetime entitlement, i.e. you can take chunks of student loan for small things, yeah will actually increase the pressure on creating things that are modular, but I'm not sure it serves all students. um To flip this on its head and to kind of bring us to a close, like we could talk for hours on this.
00:20:14
Speaker
To flip it on its head, the other thing that I think, because obviously you and I have spoken a number of times before this, the thing that I think we're both genuinely really interested in and excited in is if you look at from a student perspective, and we get away from some of the scare stories about AI, and we think more broadly about technology-enhanced learning, there just really are lots of, I think, more opportunities to use technology to support marginalised students, to really kind of continue to smash some of the barriers for some students.
00:20:47
Speaker
And for for me, that's the kind of exciting thing in this intersection between technology and pedagogy, that if we think about it really carefully, we can create those transformational life chances for students. I don't know what you're your
Supporting Marginalized Students with Tech
00:21:01
Speaker
view is. Yeah, i think that that's really it's It's so exciting. It is so exciting. And I think part of the work that we're doing at the moment at Chester is um we've got, we've just started a partnership. We're now on Adobe Creative Campus. So we're trying to think about how that can enrich our students' lives and kind of be the one of those lifelong skills that people talk about. People need to be able to
00:21:22
Speaker
to be producers of digital media, not just consumers of digital media. So that's something we've got now for our students, which is very exciting. And then pairing that with um some really novel ways colleagues are using AI. Sorry to bring it back to a AI, but um I was in a session yesterday where a colleague who's ah who's in product design was using AI with her students to help them ideate. And they were really interestingly critical of parts of the process with AI, which it just shows that students are part of this, are really on this journey with us, but they're so aware of the limitations and benefits that AI brings to their process. So just, I think that the the big thing for me in terms of diminishing a digital divide is thinking about how we make sure our resources are accessible on multiple devices and hopefully scaffolding in that sort of ah technology readiness, um
00:22:20
Speaker
when students arrive at university for the first time. I think that's something i've been thinking about quite a lot. And my final kind of short question, going put you on the spot a bit. is there any kind of Is there anything in your own development that you're kind of playing around with or you think may enhance your own practice? i know I've put you on the spot with that one, but I'm always interested.
AI in Feedback and Student Support
00:22:38
Speaker
So and I'm doing a bit of research with some colleagues on AI feedback generation for assessment which is it's a very cool project and it's going to require me to learn a bit more about things like latent semantic analysis doing some some more hardcore quant quant analysis than I've ever done in my in my life so far um so I'm learning that on the one hand and on the other hand I'm trying to play around with chatbots and see if we can figure out how to make chatbots for certain interactions in our student support journey and with learning learning support within modules as well. So those are two things that I'm dabbling with. I'm not very far on either journey yet. I think I think i thought about this. I think at some point in the near future, we'll do a special on chatbots.
00:23:28
Speaker
And I think if you're a bit further along the journey, I'd love to know your thoughts, because one of the things we are saying just to kind of top off the hour in 2026, one of the things that is really, I guess, hot is people have thought about AI, but now starting to see more about AI and automation.
Conclusion: Future Discussions
00:23:43
Speaker
yeah And also, just as you've said, are there places and spaces in which chatbots sensibly can support the student journey? ah And that's a whole other topic. And I think we will do a special on it. But that sounds super exciting.
00:23:57
Speaker
um Thank you, Laura, for joining us. It's always a pleasure. And I ah genuinely do come back and tell us more about that when you've got a bit further in that your journey. And I think I just always enjoy talking to you because you've really always got a really thoughtful way of grounding conversations about technology and where they should be, which is the student pedagogical practice rather than novelty and shiny things. So thank you, Laura.
00:24:25
Speaker
Thanks so much for having me, Charles. Thank you.