With the rise of Large Language Models (LLM) and their potential this year the FMS TEL Team have been successful in an application for funding. We are in the very early stages of planning out how we can integrate some of our services with a LLM whilst also maintaining security over the data.
We have looked at feedback from a recent survey and are taking on board ideas from colleagues and students, to help guide us through this exploratory work.
This is just the beginning and we will keep you updated on our progress.
Gamma.app is an A.I-based tool which generates presentations, documents, and webpages. It’s focus on presentations makes it of potential interest to those involved in teaching and learning. https://gamma.app
Quick Look:
In ‘guided mode’, I gave a title ‘history of Newcastle upon Tyne’, and Gamma provided a choice of templates and then generated a suggested presentation structure within a few seconds. It then generated a deck of 8 slides in about 1 minute. The slide deck included relevant images and could be exported as Powerpoint or PDF. Additionally, Gamma allows for the import of custom text, which it adapts and converts into a slide deck or document. The ‘AI editor’ provides options, such as “Suggest a professional theme”, “Give more detail”, “Give me a more exciting way to say this” etc.
Cost:
Gamma currently (October 2023) has a three tier model:
Free limited use – you get a one-off 400 ‘AI Credits’ (credits used each time you generate a document), exported slides and documents are branded
‘Plus’ – £78/year, 400 ‘AI Credits’ per month
‘Pro’ – £147/year, unlimted credits and extra features
Thoughts:
Gamma is a powerful tool which can quickly generate slide decks and documents which are ‘usable’ with little modification. With all the focus on the tools of the ‘big players’, such as Microsoft/Chat-GPT and Google, it is refreshing to see a tool from a seemingly independent company (though, like many other A.I. apps, it may well be using the back-end services of Chat-GPT ).
Of course, to use A.I. generated materials, it is important to have grounded subject knowledge and critically review and adapt outputs, to avoid mistakes. It is also important to carefully word the prompts which you provide to the A.I.; for example, a presentation generated for me by Gamma, about “Newcastle University”, included accurate information about the 19th century pre-cursors of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, but then mentioned a merger with UCL in 2002, and included a photo of Newcastle University in Australia.
There are obvious plagiarism and academic integrity issues to consider. In common with most other A.I. apps, there is no acknowledgement of the source materials used in training of the A.I. As such it may be part-based on copyrighted materials and licenced content such as Wikipedia, which has an Attribution-Share-Alike licence. Likewise, the source of images aren’t acknowledged – though the ‘A.I. Editor’ does give the option of ‘all images’ (even if licencing unknown), ‘Free to use’ (which seem ‘loose’, by including sources which don’t generally display image licence information, such as Facebook and Twitter) and ‘Free to use commercially’ – and you can click through to the source of the image. The pricing model for Gamma is similar to that of other A.I. tools, all of which lead the universal problem of inequality of access, giving advantage to students from more well-off backgrounds. But these tools are widely available now, and this is the new reality that H.E. needs to adapt to.
We are delighted to share that our colleagues Leonard Shapiro, Iain Keenan and student Ella Hobbs have had their work on Haptic Surface Painting (HSP) published.
The paper describes the development and evaluation of haptic surface painting (HSP), a novel body painting approach that has been designed to support learner exploration and observation of anatomy. HSP involves the use of touch, sight, and food colouring to locate and paint the positions of muscles, tendons, ligaments, and bones directly on to the skin. Having used HSP, medical students identified that the approach was accessible, flexible, and empowering, and provided positive impacts on their three-dimensional spatial awareness and cognitive freedom when studying clinically relevant anatomical concepts.
As part of work on the Exploring 3D Anatomy MOOC, brought to life with help from FMS TEL, Iain and Leonard have also developed this as an asynchronous workshop that students can follow at home with video guidance. This, alongside other Exploring 3D Anatomy exercises are available as a free course to a wider audience.
Some group tasks are easier to complete using Word/Excel/PowerPoint. The easiest way I have found to share the files with students is to create a folder in SharePoint and provide a link to the folder in Canvas.
Task while the module is running
At the end of the academic year, I find its best practice to upload the completed documents and remove the link to SharePoint.
Task after module is complete
Benefits
Files are not lost, should a member of staff leave the University
The SharePoint files can be rolled back to a previous version and reused
The link in the original task can be used year after year
Files can no longer be edited by past students
Negatives
Can be time consuming if you have a lot of group activity files to upload
We’ve all been there. That tab that we had open ten minutes ago has just disappeared! Luckily, theres a solution for that.
The Solution
Pressing Ctrl + Shift + T(Command + Shift + T on a mac) will reopen crashed or closed Chrome tabs. You can repeat this shortcut until it runs out of tabs and closed windows to restore from your history.
