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Congratulations to the 2023 winners of the Vice-Chancellor’s Education Excellence Awards

The Vice-Chancellor’s Education Excellence Awards aim to raise the status of education at Newcastle University by rewarding individuals and teams who have made a marked impact on the student educational experience. 

The 2023 winners of the Vice-Chancellor’s Education Excellence Awards have now been announced, with two winning submissions out of a very competitive field of nominations: 

Dr Carys Watts
School of Biomedical, Nutritional and Sport Sciences 

A photograph of Carys Watts

Dr Watts receives her award for her sustained, and much valued, record of achievement and dedication to student learning and support. She is commended for her excellent work on the Support to Study, Virtual Exchange and Study Abroad initiatives, and more generally for her collegiality and passion for teaching.

Carys commented “I am delighted to receive this award and to be recognised for progressing student mobility, co-creativity and enterprise activities. Working with some incredible colleagues and teaching a diverse student community keeps me motivated, reflective and innovative in my approach to education”.

Rosalind Beaumont
School X

A photograph of Rosalind Beaumont

Rosalind receives her award for her record of innovation and creativity in support of student learning and staff development, both within her School and Faculty and more widely across the University. She is praised for her teaching excellence, dedication to sustainability, and for her support and contributions to the University’s Professional Standards Framework scheme.

Rosalind remarked “It’s an honour to be recognised by my peers for my work with both students and staff in different educational contexts at Newcastle over the last 15+ years. I’m here through a lot of determination, luck, and the countless conversations with colleagues and students which have helped shape me into the educator and colleague I am today. Thank you to all of you who have been part of my development so far – there’s always more to do, so let’s get on with it!”

The panel, chaired by Ruth Valentine (Interim PVC Education), were extremely impressed with the scale of impact, breadth of activity, and the creative approaches to education and student support demonstrated by all awardees. 

For more information about the awards, and how to apply next year, please visit the Learning and Teaching @ Newcastle website

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Collaborative Curriculum Redesign for Sustainable Education: Challenges and Best Practices

PowerPoint slide with the tile of the presentation: Collaborative Curriculum Redesign for Sustainable Education: Challenges and Best Practices

In a recent presentation at the Three Rivers Conference, Learning and Teaching Development Service (LTDS) advisers Gosia Rabenda Derman and Michelle Black shared their learning on collaborative approaches to curriculum redesign from a project they have been working on with academic and professional colleagues in the School of Natural and Environmental Sciences (SNES). Read the summary of the presentation, and learn more about the project.

Continue reading “Collaborative Curriculum Redesign for Sustainable Education: Challenges and Best Practices”
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Art of the Possible – Retrospective

On Friday, at the end of this Art of the Possible event, we got together with Dr David Kennedy, Dean of Digital Education, to look back over the main themes and to find out his views on some of the common questions and challenges running through the week.

Many thanks to David for this conversation, to all our speakers and presenters who have contributed over the week, and to colleagues who have come along and shared their insights and questions.

Let’s keep these conversations going!

You can catch up on recordings and resources from links on this blog:

Key University Resources on AI

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Microsoft and AI

In this Art of the Possible presentation, Jack Ennis and Jo Robinson-Lamb from NUIT’s Digital Adoption Team walked us through some of the AI driven productivity tools that are already available in Microsoft products and then whetted our appetites with previews of Microsoft products being developed now.

Their Microsoft and AI presentation covers:

  • Introduction to NUIT Digital Adoption Team
  • What is possible now – Editor, PPT Designer, MS Designer, Bing Chat
  • What is coming – Copilot

The Copilot videos that Jack played in the session were omitted from the recording – to see them follow the links we have added in the recording or go to them directly with the links below:

If you would like to keep up to date with the latest news and events relating to M365, please join Teams@Newcastle.

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Putting AI to work

On Wednesday morning as part of our Art of the Possible week, we heard from three colleagues who have been working with and using AI. They brought very different perspectives:

  • Dr Stephen Parnell, from APL, described his experiments with Midjourney, an image generating tool. Stephen outlined and illustrated how he has used AI generated images to explore his own research interests and catalyse creativity with his students. (View Steven’s slides).

  • Dr James Stanfield, ECLS presented reflections from his students’ use of AI in a Masters module, revealing their sophisticated multi-tooled approaches. For his students of Technology Enhanced Learning, James encouraged experimentation and positive use of AI to help support their learning.  Acknowledging the use of AI was an integral part of their assessment. (View James’ slides)
  • Dr David Grundy, NUBS, described his own use of AI as a productivity tool and walked us through how he uses AI to produce audio podcasts feeding the output from ChatGPT prompts into his own AI generated cloned voice to make MP3 files. (View David’s slides)

You can catch up on this session from the recording below:

Use the contents page in the recording (^) to jump to specific segments or scroll to the following timestamps: Stephen 0.00; James 16:16, David 34:24

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Learning and Teaching @ Newcastle University Podcast – AI at Newcastle University

The Learning & Teaching @ Newcastle University podcast was launched in the 2021 Art of the Possible week Blended learning: effective practice. This monthly podcast celebrates the great things we are doing in learning and teaching here at Newcastle University.

In each episode we hear from a wide range of guests, and guest hosts to discover more about their stories and the work behind their stories. These can be long form conversations, magazine style articles, and much more.

In the latest episode (episode 37), Ben Steel from LTDS sat down with Pro Vice Chancellor Education Professor Ruth Valentine and Dean of Digital Education Dr David Kennedy.

AI text generating technologies have been around for a long time, but they have made significant advances in recent years. Most are trained on extensive data sets and are capable of producing human-like written content quickly and easily. There has been a lot of media coverage of these tools recently (in particular ChatGPT) with concerns raised about the risk they present to academic integrity. 

As with all emerging technologies, it is our role as educators to explore and investigate the opportunities they provide to our students’ educational experience, as well as to consider any potential negative impacts. Ben, Ruth and David discuss Newcastle University’s response to these tools, with a focus on the five principles for the use of AI at Newcastle.

You can find this episode (and our back catalogue) at the following places: 

Our site on the Learning and Teaching @ Newcastle website

Apple

Spotify

Next time we are going to look at our 2023 Art of the Possible week AI in Education, with highlights from our sessions. 

So, remember to download, like, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts from. If you are new to podcasts, you will see some useful links on each episode page.   

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Getting to Grips with AI: A Selection of Articles

An AI-generated image of a vast library of books, used to highlight the difficulty of keeping up to speed with AI literature.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a rapidly changing landscape, with new and innovative tools emerging constantly. But how can you keep up-to-date with the latest developments and trends in this fast-moving field? In this blog post we will share some of our favourite articles on AI to help get you started:

QAA: Maintaining quality and standards in the ChatGPT era

JISC: Generative AI Primer

UNESCO: Guide to using ChatGPT in higher education

JISC Webinar: Bias and explainability in artificial intelligence

Teaching with ChatGPT: Examples of Practice

To find out more about AI at Newcastle University, and keep up-to-speed with new and emerging developments in the use of AI in teaching and assessment, please visit our Learning and Teaching @ Newcastle site.

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Embracing AI – opening our Art of the Possible Week

We were delighted to welcome Debbie Kemp, MBA director from Kent Business School to open our Art of the Possible week. Debbie described her practical experience of openly embracing AI in her module on “Delivering Innovation”. She shared her initial fears and concerns and reflected on the response of students and the wider impact of AI use on their programmes.

We said to the students “we have taught you how to use AI in an ethical way… use it”

Many thanks to Debbie for such an engaging talk and for giving permissions to share the recording. It generated many questions and comments.

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Art of the Possible – AI in Education 26-30 June 2023

This year there have been many conversations about AI in Education – at School level, with our students and between colleagues. Next week we have further opportunities to keep the conversation going and learn together. What’s clear is that no one person is the expert in this fast moving space.

Over the week we have a number of in-person and online events. We will also be adding to this blog over the week. Come back to see posts about AI, outputs from our events and the next AI themed episode of our Learning and Teaching @ Newcastle podcast.

Add your thoughts

Throughout the week we will be collating questions and opportunities and adding them to two Padlet boards. Get involved by adding your own thoughts to these boards or upvoting ideas that resonate with your own. At the end of the week we’ll revisit these with our Dean of Digital Education, Dr David Kennedy.

Questions about AI

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Open Questions Padlet in a new window

Opportunities

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Open Opportunities Padlet in a new window

What’s on over the week

We have a few places left on many of our in-person and online events:

Monday 26 June 

  • Embracing the AI Landscape: Debbie Kemp from the University of Kent will open our week, sharing and reflecting on how she has incorporated AI in her teaching and assessment. 
    Online 10:00-10:45 
  • Introduction to AI: a one-hour overview from LTDS and FMS TEL colleagues.   
    In person 14:00-15:00 

Wednesday 28 June 

  • AI and Assessment: a one-hour session exploring the impact of AI on assessment.  
    In person 10:00-11:00 
  • Embracing AI @Newcastle: find out how colleagues at Newcastle University are embracing AI in their teaching and learning.  
    Online 14:00-15:00 

Thursday 29 June 

  • Hands on Explore AI Tools: Join us in the Herschel Learning lab to try out a range of AI tools. 
    In-person, bring your own device: 10:00-11:30 
  • Microsoft 365 and AI: Join the NUIT Digital Adoption team for an overview of what is currently possible, and what the future holds, for AI in Microsoft 365.  
    Online 14:00-15:00 

Friday 30 June 

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