UCT Teaching and Learning Conference (TLC): Workshop day

About this workshop

Since Chat GPT became commercially available in 2022, the higher education sector has been grappling with the use of generative AI in teaching and learning practices. At UCT, there have been varied approaches and responses from different faculties and departments. At the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching (CILT), we have developed general AI literacies guides for staff and students. However, these resources have limited applications without discipline-specific adaptations. Students and teaching staff will benefit most from discipline-specific AI literacies that respond to the complexities, practices, and nuances of their fields. This workshop provides a space for you to explore AI literacies for your specific course, in your discipline, and for your students. Using a template, you will identify and explore some of the literacies related to your course and begin to unpack the AI literacies that are relevant to your discipline and your students. The workshop is also an opportunity to connect with colleagues across departments, share challenges and ideas, and learn from different disciplinary perspectives.

About this workshop

'Inevitability of AI’ narratives have emerged in higher education and society, such as AI saving us time and the need for AI literacy skills for employability. As UCT staff, we may (consciously or unconsciously) perpetuate these narratives in how we support students. While multiple and varied AI narratives have emerged, we will draw on decolonial approaches and futures thinking to unpack some of the inevitability narratives of Generative AI use in higher education. This workshop aims to help staff and students analyse the AI narratives within UCT and whose interests they serve and whose futures they assume. It also aims to help participants consider their roles in supporting future equitable approaches to Generative AI. Using the concepts of epistemic disobedience and delinking, this workshop invites participants to consider how we frame the use of Generative AI and to consider the types of (preferred) futures we would like to see in our learning and teaching contexts. For example, what are the different narratives and who do they serve? What are the associated values and ethical perspectives? What changes would we make to the way AI is managed? The key question of the workshop is: How can we rethink assumptions about AI to imagine and co-create sustainable/equitable/contextually responsive higher education futures. From a decolonial perspective, we might ask how GenAI can act as a site of reproduction of, or resistance to, colonial power structures. The envisioned outcome is for participants to leave with an approach to navigate the narratives around Generative AI in their departments and ideas to explore towards preferred futures, which can be used to inform their learning and teaching. This can help to reconsider contextual approaches to AI in curriculum development and assessment design.

About this workshop

Courses, particularly those that report to professional or external regulatory bodies (such as the Engineering Council for South Africa, the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants (SAICA), or the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA) ), often face pressures to report on a wide range of student outcomes that go beyond specific courses and points-based grades. While this workshop will be most useful for courses with externally defined Learning Outcomes (graduate attributes, professional values and attributes, etc.) that they need to report on, it is open to academic staff and administrators in any course. During the session we will explore the use of the Learning Outcomes tool in Amathuba, from importing existing learning outcomes from an Outcome Set (such as the ECSA Graduate Attributes), to creating course-specific learning outcomes for your own use. We will show you how to associate learning outcomes with assessments and rubric criteria, as well as the learning materials included in your Content tool, and how to assess using Learning Outcomes in the process of marking student submissions. We will also explore the Lumi Outcome function in Amathuba, which uses AI to suggest Learning Outcome Alignments for Assignments, Quizzes, Discussions and Pages, and how to use the Outcomes Alignment tool in Content to track how your learning outcomes are aligned to activities and materials in your course. Lastly, we will show you dashboards where you can track Learning Outcomes achievement across different courses and/or years, and how this data could be used for reporting purposes. After completing this workshop, participants should have either imported or developed an appropriate set of Learning Outcomes, and associated them with the key assessments in their programmes and courses. They should be able to assess students using Learning Outcomes and extract that information for reporting purposes.

About this workshop

In this workshop we explore opportunities for first-year mathematics students to identify as mathematical knowers, that is, to experience university mathematics as meaningful and as a space where they belong. Historically, core first-year mathematics at UCT has sought to offer students a firm foundation, relative to school mathematics, for further study and application in other sciences, while continuing to grapple with legacy educational inequities in who is seen as a mathematical knower. In this context, generative AI has emerged as a resource that can, with increasing accuracy, perform mathematics practices long valued in first-year mathematics — recognising patterns, conjecturing, proving, performing procedures — and answer students' questions directly, on demand. This workshop is designed for us – students, tutors and lecturers – to practise our critical (AI) literacies, together: to explore what ways of knowing we value in core first-year mathematics that takes equity and access seriously. And to consider what pedagogies and learning resources (viewed broadly, with AI as a possibility) might enable relevant mathematical ‘knowing’. Our team brings four years of work – as curriculum designers, lecturers, and tutors – seeking to make inroads into the stubborn challenges of access and success in undergraduate mathematics. We seek to create opportunities for students to learn and use mathematics practices – discourse practices, learning practices, language practices – identified in research and practice as important in first-year mathematics. The workshop has three parts, each with a take-way. 

• Part 1: experiencing being a mathematical knower in an activity assuming only school mathematics knowledge. 
• Part 2: (critically) discussing our mathematics practices, and related pedagogies and resources. 
• Part 3: identifying ideas and relations for taking our learning forward in practice.

About this workshop

'Connection reconfigured’ is a timely invitation to consider the nexus between human, AI agent and a fast-evolving world in the age of bots. Our interest in the social uses of literacies on our academic literacies courses (DOH1002F Writing in the Humanities, and ASL1203S Writing Across Borders) urges us to stay abreast of technological advances that students encounter in their day-to-day lives. As uncomfortable as change may be, it gets us to reflect on how innovation at the service of pedagogy can transform the purveyors, recipients and tools of knowledge in productive ways. This workshop presents a special opportunity for facilitators and participants alike to interact with a newly launched critical reading AI agent, Sokraites. Who is Sokraites? As the name suggests, it is an agent whose behaviour models that of the ancient Greek philosopher, Socrates. In an age of readily available answers, we are reminded of Socrates’s words, ‘To find yourself, think for yourself’. We wonder if there is still a place for this form of experiential learning. The culprit we are told is AI that masquerades, hallucinates and displaces the thinker. But what if it weren’t the thinker, but the questioner? Sokraites was thus carefully designed by Aditi Hunma and Moeain Arend at UCT in partnership with Isazi.ai to pose questions on academic readings to allow each student to develop a personalised reading pathway. As participants experience this Socratic encounter for themselves, we also share some points of caution. The workshop culminates in participants putting together a schema that gives expression to how they could harness AI in their disciplines to promote their pedagogical vision. It would also allow participants to imagine how students’ connection with their humanity, their thinking and sentient selves could be reconfigured.

About this workshop

About this workshop

A zine is a self-published, easily reproduced, printed form of self expression. Pronounced as “zeen,” they are typically booklets made in small batches and distributed. Using magazines, scissors, glue, and pens, each participant will make one page in response to a prompt of their choosing: how AI in education makes them feel, a metaphor for AI, whose knowledge inspires them, or a value they want to protect in education. On the same page, participants will also depict their discipline in words and images, showing how their thinking is shaped by the field they work in. The workshop will conclude with a circle discussion in which participants surface some feelings and thoughts that emerged through the zine-making experience. No artistic skill is needed. Individual pages will be collected and compiled into a zine that will be shared digitally with all participants after the session.

About this workshop

Keen to make your teaching materials more accessible, but stretched for time? Join our workshop at TLC to explore how to use AI to remove barriers to learning, faster. Teaching is a relationship of care, and removing barriers to learning is part of that care. Yet educators work under significant time constraints, making accessibility feel like another demanding task rather than an integral part of teaching. This workshop offers a practical, supportive space to explore how accessibility can become part of everyday teaching practice. Drawing on the ENABLE framework, we will position accessibility as universal access. This means that accessible teaching materials benefit all students, including students with disabilities, with different learning preferences, with limited internet access, or those learning in different environments. Using a PowerPoint presentation provided, we will investigate accessibility using the Microsoft Office Accessibility Checker and focus on interpreting the checker’s results. Participants will experiment with AI as a time-saving tool for accessibility. In particular, we will use a prompt template to generate meaningful alternative text for different kinds of images, including photographs, graphs, diagrams, and infographics that you might use in your teaching materials. Come ready to investigate, discuss, and improve a set of teaching materials with us.