My teaching work spans computing, cyber security and research skills, with a particular interest in helping students connect technical concepts to wider questions of design, reliability, risk and real-world practice. I have also worked on curriculum development, programme design and educational resources across university and professional-learning contexts.

AI, learning and assessments

These are 2 assessment design concepts that I am experimenting with currently:

Cognitive Reclaiming is an assessment-design concept I am developing in response to students’ increasing use of generative AI. It builds on the established concept of cognitive offloading: rather than simply discouraging offloading, students identify a capability they have been routinely offloading to AI that they consider valuable to develop or retain, and ‘reclaim’ it. Read more in the assessment design document.

Working along side AI: It is important that one of the aims of education is to ensure that students can complete cognitive tasks without the help of AI. However, as generative AI becomes part of professional practice, graduate level teaching should also aim to help students work intelligently alongside AI retaining their own knowledge, judgement and responsibility.

In this proposed approach, students are given a task or problem that requires reasoning, judgement or application of knowledge. Students complete the task on their own first, compare results in groups, then give the task to AI to complete, with minimal prompting. The assignment task is to compare and reflect on what is produced to identify where human input is valuable. The ultimate aim is to identify what abilities the students should develop in order to best compliment the use of AI.