Award recipient: Highly commendable contribution
The advent of GenAI (Generative Artificial Intelligence) has emerged as one of the most disruptive forces of the digital age. GenAI tools have significantly challenged our understanding of knowledge and skills. As well, they have greatly undermined our understanding of the modern assessment regime, especially when it involves the unsupervised production of an assessment artefact, such as an essay submitted for assessment.
However, against these very challenging events, GenAI tools, such as ChatGPT4, present transformative opportunities for academics. This presentation will act as an interactive workshop whereby I will demonstrate my recent experiences in using ChatGPT4 as part of the review of the Post Graduate Course Portfolio at The Hotel School. As an aside, my focus is on the global hotel industry, but the concepts, principles and processes apply to all fields and disciplines.
In the time permitted, I will show how, in less than half a day, it is possible to:
- conduct a survey of local and global competitive courses and institutions
- identify and review key challenges confronting the industry
- design a course curriculum based upon the aspired Course Learning Outcomes that also considers the aforementioned competitors survey and industry review
- structure a course that scaffolds learning from elemental to advanced, especially as they address the course learning outcomes
- design a “standardised” pedagogy to makes full use of available technology whilst addressing the respective unit learning outcomes
- design a “standardised” assessment regime that ensures assessment security, authenticity and veracity
- assemble a current reading list for a unit
- produce a multiple-choice quiz based upon the prescribed reading of a journal article.
Recognising that ChatGPT4 is based upon “word association” rather than facts, the exercise will show that the tool can ONLY function as a teaching assistant / research assistant – the key intellectual input MUST come from us, informed by our expertise and experience. Nonetheless, tools like this have the capacity to transform many elements of course design and development and deployment.
Postscript: on the morning of submitting this proposal, OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT4, announced a beta version of ChatGPT5 that can hear, see and speak. The next iteration will clearly become a “digital personal assistant” with whom we can engage in “natural conversation”.
I can’t wait to ask it to “open the pod bay doors”.
As a result of this workshop colleagues will have an insight to, and better understanding of how they can significantly increase their effectiveness and efficient in course design and development by the deft use of GenAI tools.