CEDEFOP report - future of VET

The European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training's latest report focuses on the future of vocational education and training in Europe.  A 'stock-take' is undertaken across Europe to identify trends and recommend future research to inform VET.

The report summarises the macro processed influencing VET. These include institutional, curricula, and assessment trends and the need to include adult VET into the mix, given the rapid changes wrought on occupations, work and jobs by digital, social and economic shifts. 

In general, there are 'pendulum effect in VET' creating 'return to basics' exampled by assessments moving towards greater standardisation whilst maintaining the need for authentic assessments which reflect the true skills required to perform job tasks; increasing institutional diversification, autonomy and expansion to meet the growing range of industry needs; the recognition that general knowledge, and skills require focus (rather than specialised occupational skills); the growing need for all individuals to continue professional development beyond initial school/formal tertiary/VET education; and the tensions inherent in diversifying rapidly but needing to ensure 'convergence' towards the main goal of VET. 

Future research proposed for VET include improving the gathering of data to create a research-base for VET institutions; encouragement to undertake the development of methods and contents to undertake research on VET curricula; VET pedagogy; and the need to adopt transdisciplinary approaches to researching VET.

There are several important lessons which Te Pūkenga could draw on to build the evidence base for Aotearoa VET and to inform the institution as it moves forward beyond the current restructure of its organisational structure. What we now need is to ensure on-going commitment to resourcing a Centre for VET research to undertake strategic baseline work and to support the scholarship of ako (teaching and learning) across the institute. 

Bill Gates podcast (Unconfuse) with Sal Khan on the integration of AI into Khan Academy

 A half-hour episode (11th August 2023) of Unconfuse with Bill Gates who speaks to Sal Khan on the integration of AI into Khan Academy as Khanmigo.

Discussed origin of Khan Academy and summarised how Khan Academy is now used in schools to provide for learning. Teachers assist with initial working through, focus on sorting out pinch points and supporting the reflective learning process.

Also discussed the rapid improvement of Gen AI with its possibilities for supporting education and how Sal worked through to realise its application. Promoted the use of AI to further support individualised / personalised learning. 

Also presented the challenges, cost, inaccuracies etc. and the work undertaken in the development of Khanmigo. This has 'parameters' to make it safer for use in schools along with reflecting on how to best use it to encourage learner engagement and deeper learning. Khanmigo is able to work with individuals, and groups (to increase social constructivism). Allows for teacher directed learning activities along with the learning analytics to understand learner progress. Khanmigo is therefore a teacher assistant in a classroom, the teacher being a 'conductor' and learners working to their own learning journey. 

AI improves feedback more thoroughly to improve writing for learners. However, learners will need feedback literacy to leverage off AI capabilities. 

Good to listen to the human dimension from leading thinkers in IT and hear how both consider the merits, challenges and possibilities of AI and its contributions towards personalised education for all. 

Using AI to support research - Dr Fiona Beals

 Notes from a lunch time presentation by Dr. Fiona Beals (Principal Lead on teaching, innovation and research at - Weltec/Whitireia/Te Pūkenga) on Research & AI: When your friend is your foe.

Welcome from Dr. Lee Smith who looks after the section. 

Presentation began with a overview of the landscape right now. There are a whole raft of resources. What you get from AI, is determined but what data it draws on. Prompts are very important, an open prompt does not usually yield useful outputs. Referencing of AI is fraught as it is not possible to go back to the AI to get the same output - using AI is more like an communication. There have been articles written that names AI as an author but this is not really legal as AI is not a person and unable to take responsibility for their share of the work. It works on a predictive algorithm and cannot predict the unpredictable. Predicated on data and critical literacy on the part of the user.

Moved on to do a show and tell with some of the AI tools which are usable for research. Moved from the ones which she has found to not be relevant/applicable, to the one she now uses most.

1) Perplexity - based on ChatGPT. Described as a search engine on steroids. It generates summary and provides a range of 'references'. Note that with ChatGPT, only mines data before 2021, so not always up to date. Triangulation takes time and feels the output is not as good as what is produced by scholarly databases.

2) Paperbrain - currently does not work. and an example of the rapid flux in the landscape with tools coming up and disappearing.

3) PaperDigest - has the functions to do lit review or be a text rewriter. In the text rewriter, the functions include wikify & justify, paraphase, quesionly and summarise. The lit review searches for papers and provides a summary. Only finds literature that is accessible on the internet, not those behind paywall. Therefore, limited lit review rather than comprehensive.

4) elicit - this is the one she recommends to be useful. Demonstrated how she uses this to overview a topic. Ability to collect and overview many articles quickly. Scholarly database will still yield more reliable results. 

There are Ai tools that will allow up of pdf articles but need to be careful with regards to copyright as once the pdf is uploaded, the database will have access.

5) Litmaps - able to pick up from your ORCID account, your work and trace the whakapapa of your or a piece of work. Provides a visual representation of how various papers are related and bring up patterns of themes.

Demonstrated how ChatGPT could be used to help modify an existing spreadsheet to change its function for purposes of quantitative analysis. Prompt engineering is a key, along with existing knowledge of concepts. Without that, it is difficult to evaluate/ triangulate / or verify the AI generated outputs for accuracy. 

Demonstrated how to use BingChat. Firstly uploaded paper/book via EBcoHost database search and ask BingChat to summarise the pdf/page, or as questions of the content and use it to help work out overall gist of the article. Might not work if database has block in it to prevent articles being gleaned. 

Concluded with caveats including the ethical aspects. Important NOT to enter own personal data or to ask it to do data analysis with it! Also remember the implicit biases etc. that are present in the data sources. 

Good session to see how others use AI tools to support research, especially these initial efforts to test and understand how to use these tools to help our work. 

Practical AI for instructors and students - A Wharton interactive crash course

 This series of five videos, from the Wharton School, provides good overviews of integrating AI into education. Each video is around 11 minutes. The contexts are for higher and compulsory education. 

The first video introduces the important concepts of AI. The second covers Gen AI and large language models.

The next three videos provide demonstrations, examples and discussion on prompt engineering, how to use AI as a teacher, and how AI can be used as a personal tutor by students. All emphasise the importance of prompt engineering which in turn relies on learners' foundational literacies and subject conceptual knowledge to be able to evaluate AI outputs and then work out the correct prompts to use, to improve the relevance and quality of outputs. The ability of 'personalised tutors' utilising AI will need to be examined with respect to the academic and foundational literacies required to access the power of AI to support personalised learning environments (PLEs). 

The two presenters Associate Professor Ethan Mollick (faculty director) and Dr. Lilach Mollick (Director of Pedagogy) provide quick overviews and encourage teachers to draw on their experience to make the most that Gen AI offers. 

Two recent papers summarise the work undertaken which are applied in the videos:

Mollick, Ethan R. and Mollick, Lilach, Using AI to Implement Effective Teaching Strategies in Classrooms: Five Strategies, Including Prompts (March 17, 2023 http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4391243 

Mollick, Ethan R. and Mollick, Lilach, Assigning AI: Seven Approaches for Students, with Prompts (June 12, 2023 http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4475995

Eportfolios and AI tools: webinar notes

 Attended the Eportfolio workshop - how to get started with AI tools for portfolios. The session was delivered both online and f2f (La Trobe- Melbourne) and organised by ePortfolios Australia and ePortfolios Ireland. 

The session was presented by Dr. Megan Mize who is Director of ePortfolios and Digital Initiatives in the Digital Initiatives Success Centre at Old Dominion University. 

Alison Miller welcomes everyone and acknowledges Country and the various organisations who have contributed towards this webinar. Helen Chen introduces AAEEBL - Association for authenic, experiential and evidence-based learning. Megan begins with overviewing the AI tools that are already part of eportfolio practice. Slide deck of presentations are found at google docs. 

AI's current role could be to support grammar/syntax, accessibility, colour design and content generation. All of these have been available even before advent of ChatGPT. Introduces ideas of how to leverage Gen AI for faculty to provide more individualised support to learners. Proposed the Riff chatbot as a tool which has potential (as discussed with Leticia Britos Cavagnaro).

Riff chatbot can be useful to help learners how to practice reflection. A demo /try out of Riff chatbot followed for participants to evaluate the tool. The chatbot provides some good prompts on statements which were presented to it - a bit similar to 'ask watson' it repeats back what you contribute but pushes the user to 'dig deeper'. Riff chatbot has option of linking with Moodle. Check this blog for using chatbot to support reflective activity and up-coming book by Cavagnaro.

Then provided an opportunity to try another chatbot - Poe chat. Difficulties getting in through institutional and gmail :( (but did arrive in my institutional after about 10 minutes). Demo undertaken to show capabilities of the chatbot. Prompt engineering is important. Tried the 'colour my site' chat which was set up to provide more targeted information to users. Demonstrated how to set up the chatbot to undertake more targeted responses. An authentic activity not only for teachers but also across many occupations. For example, setting up a bot for a business to answer client enquiries etc. Testing the bot is important to see how it responses to a range of inputs. 

Then provided opportunity to 'build a bot' on Poe. Straight-forward process. Also accessible as IOS or Android app. Poe uses ChatGPT and Claude, so not sure how different the outputs are to just using ChatGPT. Claude has a better privacy policy when compared to many other Gen AI tools. 

Discussed the challenges and the need to test extensively, ensure learners triangulate the outputs, and be aware that 'input = output' holds, and the privacy and ethical issues around using the chatbots. Possibilities for learner driven personalised learning are many. 

Then discussed the ethical concerns with regards to AI and eportfolios, summarised in this blog. Q & A followed with most focusing on practicalities and logistics of using chatbots to support personalised learning.

A good session, providing good examples of how to better use AI to support learning, especially for reflective learning. 

A grammar of the visual - website of the work of Kalantzis and Cope

 As AI advances towards being able to provision outputs across text and images, it is important to better understand, the principles underlying human literacy. Not only text based literacies, but the range of multiliteracies which contribute to daily living.

Kalantzis and Cope's website summarise the precepts attained through several decades of work on literacies. Their interest has always been across the range of literacies rather than solely on text-based literacies. Knowledge learning consists of experiencing, conceptualisation, analysing and applying, 

The site is a good resource to the breathe of work undertaken towards better understanding the complexities of how we learn.