How do you teach a course about the societal impact of technology. For Ildikó Plájás and Tina Harris in their Anthropology master course Designing In(ter)ventions into Human-Machine Entanglements, this meant making the UvA AI Chat an active participant.

You have a fantastic case study — one that perfectly illustrates the core concepts of your course — but you’ve used it so many times that students are starting to greet it with a familiar sigh. So, Brandon Armstrong and his colleagues had a thought: what if we could keep the intricate power dynamics of the case, but wrap them in a fresh scenario that would be more engaging to our students? That’s when he turned to the UvA AI Chat to act as a creative teammate.

What if an AI assistant could help you beat that blank page and get the ball rolling? Chei Billedo took part in the AI pilot program to see if the UvA AI Chat could help generate multiple-choice questions for the final exam of the Psychology of Misinformation course she teaches together with Anna Fenko. Her experience offers an interesting, real-world peek into the pros and cons of welcoming an AI into your course preparation.

Providing detailed, timely feedback on assignments can feel like an impossible task. Luke Korthals created a fully automated feedback pipeline to solve this problem. His cutting-edge project provides a powerful glimpse into the future of educational technology, along with a crucial warning for its use in the present.

Is there a manual for the manuals? Moss Shukla created a custom AI assistant, the BT Thesis Guru, to act as a friendly expert on the manual. His pilot project is a brilliant showcase of how AI Personas can make complex information accessible and save everyone valuable time.

Autistic voices are missing from both research and (research-based) education. UvA lecturer Dr Ileana Grama found this striking. Therefore, she wanted to develop a course on neurodiversity research. This became Neurodiversity: Participatory Action in Research and Education.

Last July, the Education Research Days (ORD) 2024 took place in Tilburg, with the theme: Education of Value(s). TLC policy researchers Nynke, Lotte, Jet, Marije and Svenne were there and are happy to tell you more about it!

Teacher Byron Adams shares his experiences with implementing the Visible Learning Trajectories tool into his courses.

How can we use AI to enrich our education? What opportunities does it offer, and what objections should we consider? And how can we prepare our students for a world in which AI is an everyday tool? Many initiatives and pilots are underway within the university to use AI tools ethically. To use AI properly, AI literacy is very important. This is the ability to understand and use AI applications. To increase this AI literacy of teachers, programme directors and faculty administrators, the AI Maturity in Education Scan (AIMES) is currently being developed. A joint initiative of the UvA and VU Amsterdam that has been running since January 2024. We speak to initiator and project leader Luuk Terbeek about AIMES.  

In academic year 2023-2024, the Assessment Track (‘BKE’) was offered for the first time, providing a unique opportunity for teachers to delve deep into the seven stages of the assessment cycle. Through interactive workshops, self-study, and collaborative projects, participants were encouraged to reflect on their current approach to assessment and provided with tools to enhance their assessment quality, ensuring constructive alignment with Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs).