Keynote Speakers

Title

Exploring the Potential for Technology Enabled Peer Assessment, Peer Feedback and Self-assessment
 (This Keynote session will be delivered in hybrid mode with physical venue at Creative Arts Room, 1/F, MMW Library.)

Dr Edd Pitt

Reader and Director PGCHE
Centre for the Study of Higher Education
University of Kent, UK

Speaker Bio

Edd is a Reader in Higher Education and Academic Practice and the Programme Director for the Post Graduate Certificate in Higher Education, in the centre for the study of higher education at the University of Kent, UK. Edd has recently been collaborating with Academics in the UK, Ireland, Hong Kong and Australia. His principal research field is Assessment and Feedback with a particular focus upon student's use of feedback. His current research agenda explores signature feedback practices, curriculum design principles aligned to assessment and feedback and the development of both teacher and student feedback literacy. His most recent publication was a systematic literature review of Assessment and Feedback research articles between 2016 – 2021, commissioned by Advance HE.

Abstract

How we design assessments and opportunities for feedback enactment are critical aspects of teaching practice. We know that assessment design offers a key point of leverage for enhancing education, as many students strategically focus on it. The challenge is how we create motivating, stimulating and challenging assessments which offer integrated and meaningful feedback. Feedback can be one of the most powerful ways of enhancing students’ learning if students are given opportunities to seek out or use all available sources of feedback to improve. Designing opportunities into curricula for students to receive, interpret, and act on feedback can act as a bridge between the assessments students are completing and the teaching environment. With increasing workload pressures and conflicting agendas what if academics do not always have to be the source of this feedback or the ones making assessment judgements? In this keynote I will explore how peers can be active sources of feedback generation alongside making assessment judgments aligned to student performance and how this all can be usefully enabled by recent advancements in technology.

Title

Orchestrating a Physical Classroom as a Digital System
 (This Keynote session will be delivered online.)

Professor Pierre Dillenbourg

Associate Vice President for Education
École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland

Speaker Bio

A former teacher in elementary school, Pierre Dillenbourg graduated in educational science (University of Mons, Belgium). He started his research on learning technologies in 1984. In 1986, he has been of the first in the world to apply machine learning to develop a self-improving teaching system. He obtained a PhD in computer science from the University of Lancaster (UK), in the domain of artificial intelligence applications for education. He joined EPFL in 2002. He has been the director of Center for Research and Support on Learning and its Technologies, then academic director of Center for Digital Education. He is full professor in learning technologies in the School of Computer & Communication Sciences, where he is the head of the CHILI Lab: "Computer-Human Interaction for Learning & Instruction”. He is the director of the leading house DUAL-T, which develops technologies for dual vocational education systems. With EPFL colleagues, he launched in 2017 the Swiss EdTech Collider, an incubator with 80 start-ups in learning technologies. In 2018, he co-founded LEARN, the EPFL Center of Learning Sciences that brings together the local initiatives in educational innovation. He is a fellow of the International Society for Learning Sciences. He currently is the Associate Vice-President for Education at EPFL.

Abstract

Is a physical classroom so different from a space in the meta verse ? Not completely ! A classroom does constitute some kind of large digital system within a physical populated by bodies and objects.. The input devices of this system are not a keyboard and mouse, but an entire classroom equipped with sensors. The output device of this system is not a screen but a set of digital elements distributed in the class. Input data are processed by multiple operators that aggregate, compare and visualize data. The resulting dashboards are used for monitoring the learners’ progress in order to decide when and to whom to intervene. They are also used to compile data from the constructivist activities for supporting the debriefing phase, as well as to predict the completion time of an activity. Monitoring, debriefing and timing are central processes in classroom orchestration.

Title

What You Want to Know about GPT: Basics, Experiences, and Opportunities
 (This Keynote session will be delivered online.)

Professor Maiga Chang

Full Professor, School of Computing and Information Systems
Athabasca University, Canada

Speaker Bio

Dr. Maiga Chang is a Full Professor in the School of Computing and Information Systems at Athabasca University, Canada. He is IEEE Senior Member. Dr. Chang has been appointed as an IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Visitor for 2023 to 2025 and also received Distinguished Researcher Award from Asia Pacific Society on Computers in Education (APSCE) in 2022. Dr. Chang is now Chair (2018~2023) of IEEE Technical Community of Learning Technology (TCLT), Executive Committee member of Asia-Pacific Society for Computers in Education (2017~2024, APSCE) and Global Chinese Society for Computing in Education (2016~2025, GCSCE), and Vice President (2022~) of International Association of Smart Learning Environments (IASLE). He is also editors-in-chief (2019~) of Journal of Educational Technology & Society (Open Access SSCI) and has given more than 135 talks and published more than 250 conference papers, journal papers, and book chapters.

Abstract

Since OpenAI launched ChatGPT last November, it grabs everyone's attention. ChatGPT is built on GPT which stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer. This talk will explain what is GPT with the basics and also share some experiences we have seen on the use of GPT/ChatGPT. At the end, the potential of using GPT/ChatGPT in education will be discussed.

Title

Teaching How a Robot Learns: At the Crossroad Between AI Education and Metacognition
 (This Keynote session will be delivered in hybrid mode with physical venue at Creative Arts Room, 1/F, MMW Library.)

Dr. Thomas Deneux

Research Engineer
Paris-Saclay Institute of Neuroscience
CNRS & Paris-Saclay University

Speaker Bio

Thomas Deneux did his PhD in Artificial Intelligence at Paris' Ecole Normale Supérieure. He then led his postdoctoral research in Neurobiology, at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and at the French Center for National Scientific Research (CNRS). This research was driven by the question of to what extent can brain activity be modelled and simulated.

Thomas now leads the Data Analysis team at the CNRS Paris-Saclay Institute of Neuroscience. There he conceived a learning robot to teach how Artificial Intelligence works and he has founded the Learning Robots company which commercializes this solution. He also new research in Science Education to question the benefits of teaching AI even from a young age.

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning education are entering the classrooms. But what should be taught exactly about AI to primary and secondary school students? Rather than just manipulating a black box, we advocate that pupils should also open this black box, and understand how does AI work.

To this intention I will present the “AlphAI” resource to teach AI through the manipulation of a learning robot and through the detailed visualization of artificial neural networks and other AI algorithms. I will then present the result of experimentations led with primary school students (aged 8-11) where we taught AI also in order to questions the similarities and differences between AI and human, and help the pupils question their own learning strategies.