Shropshire Farming Talk: Harper Adams University and Artificial Intelligence

 Its centrality to our lives is set to grow – and that’s as true for the industries which Harper Adams University serves across the food and farming sectors as any other industry.

In the last two years AI has become a desktop tool or pocket tool used by students and staff alike. This brings both challenges and opportunities.

While a lot has been said about AI and student assessment, we also need to focus on how to prepare our students with the skills they need for a future in which AI will feature. 

Earlier this month, I spoke at a major international Learning and Teaching conference at the University of Zayed, in the United Arab Emirates. In my talk, I set out to explore what AI’s role may be in teaching, learning and assessment. 

Today’s students will work with AI in their careers and they will use it in their wider life too – when accessing healthcare, shopping, and perhaps in ways not yet thought of.

During my talk, I identified some of the skills that need to be developed to ensure that they have a working understanding of AI while also learning about their main subjects. 

I suggested they will need confident subject knowledge to assess whether AI is working well, and a critical mindset so they can work with some of the ethical, accessibility and environmental challenges posed by AI. 

There are already practical approaches that can be adopted by educators when working with AI - including building your own course chat bot, introducing AI tasks into assessment, and using AI to develop students’ abilities to seek and use feedback. As educators, we need to work with existing sound practices as well as trying new tools.  

Given the novelty of some emerging AI approaches in teaching, I also encouraged colleagues to engage in scholarship of their learning and teaching, exploring the topic of AI with students - and doing so in a way that tries to build an evidence base of what works. 

At Harper Adams, we’re already developing examples of this – Senior Lecturer in Entomology, Dr Heather Campbell and her MSc students Thomas Bluck, Ella Curry, Derrick Harris, Billie Pike and Bethany Wright recently explored the use of AI for coding in ecology.

Meanwhile, Harper Business School Lecturer Stephen Hall undertook an educational action research project, where he looked at AI in assessment and how staff respond.  

It was great to take the research being done at Harper Adams and share it internationally, and colleagues at Zayed University made me very welcome.

Their event was a rich source of ideas, as well as an opportunity to engage with educators from many different institutions. 

Higher education professionals and organisations around the world are considering how to engage with AI in a constructive way so that we prepare our learners, while also navigating some of the more challenging ethical and environmental complexities.

International engagement is valuable, as different countries and regions are responding to AI in different ways. 

It is useful for us all to look outwards, to understand and learn from that diversity.   

 by Professor Lydia Arnold,  Harper Adams University’s Associate Pro Vice-Chancellor (Learning, Teaching and Digital)