S6E10 - Exploring AI in education: enhancements, ethics, and future directions w/ NCFE

In this episode, James Lane, the Digital Sector Manager at NCFE, and Dr Gray Mytton, from the NCFE Innovation Team, discuss the evolving role of artificial intelligence within education and its broader implications.

Join the team as they discuss how AI, particularly generative AI, is currently being used by colleagues, and the wider education sector, primarily for routine tasks and as a creative brainstorming tool.

The conversation touches on the ethical considerations of AI, including security concerns and bias in AI training data.  James and Gray also explore the potential future of AI in assessments, emphasising the importance of changing assessment models to integrate AI ethically and effectively.

The discussion concludes with insights into NCFE's innovative projects, including a generative AI exam builder and efforts to develop locally hosted large language models, presenting a forward-thinking approach to AI in education.

00:00 Introduction to AI at NCFE

01:50 Conversational AI and its applications

05:53 Exploring free AI tools and their evolution

07:37 Prompt engineering and AI tool comparisons

09:39 Ethical considerations in AI usage

16:19 AI in exam and assessment creation

21:27 Generating and using AI data sets

24:26 Security concerns and open source LLMs

26:31 Exploring user interfaces for local LLMs

28:01 Creating an internal document library

29:34 DIY vs. buying AI solutions

33:33 Training data and quality control

36:45 Using AI in exams and assessments: challenges and opportunities

42:11 Future of AI in Education

47:46 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

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You've joined us in season 6 and, if you've enjoyed this conversation, you might want to visit our episode feed and subscribe to POD-CACHE for more. New episodes are published once a fortnight and there are lots of great conversations to catch up on. 

Want to hear more from this week's guests?

You can find information about the Assessment Innovation Fund, discussed during the episode, on the NCFE website, and can read the OU Research report on developing robust assessments using generative AI.

In addition, you might want to join Gray for this useful recorded session which explores current AI writing detectors, showing why their accuracy measures are hard to understand, the tools available to disguise AI outputs, and practical suggestions for the use of AI writing detectors in education.

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