How AI Can Transform Assessment and Student Success with Mychelle Pride

Full Transcript

Dr. Cristi Ford (00:00):
Inclusivity isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when you think about AI, but what if it could be? Our guest today shares how we can use AI to build more equitable and human-centered learning experiences. Join us on a new episode of Teach and Learn.
Intro (00:18):
Welcome to Teach and Learn, a podcast for curious educators brought to you by D two L.
Dr. Cristi Ford (00:23):
Each week we’ll meet some of the sharpest minds in the K to 20 space. Sharpen your pencils, class is about to begin. Welcome back to Teach and Learn, the podcast where we explore the future of education with people shaping it. I’m your host, Dr. Christi Ford, and today we’re diving into a conversation that’s both urgent and inspiring. How do we harness AI to build a more equitable, inclusive and human-centered learning experience? I’ve had the pleasure of meeting today’s guest, Mychelle Pride, academic director in the pro-Vice Chancellor student office at the Open University, UK. I met her this summer at the Eden Conference and her keynote, Harnessing AI for Equitable, Inclusive and Personalized Education, really struck a deep chord with me. She invited us in that talk not to just think differently about AI, but to feel differently about how we define success, inclusion, and even assessment in this new era of learning. Mychelle, thank you so much for joining us today. I have so been looking forward to the continuous conversation with you.
Mychelle Pride (01:29):
Likewise. It was such a pleasure to meet you.
Dr. Cristi Ford (01:32):
So I’m going to just jump right in. I think that you have so much to offer the Teach and Learn community, and so I’m going to kind of refer back to a couple of points that for me, I call them mic drop moments when I was listening to your keynote this summer. One of those was, as I was listening to you in your keynote, you said you’ve made a statement, don’t slice a problem that doesn’t exist. So I’d love to really just unpack this here a bit, and thinking especially in the context of as institutions are rapidly adopting AI tools or thinking about the ways in which they’re creating a strategy around AI, how do we stay grounded in the real challenges learners and educators face today rather than solving for the wrong thing or letting tech define the problem for us?
Mychelle Pride (02:18):
That’s a really good question. You talk about mic drop moments, and I talk about mythical soundbites. So we’ve all been in that meeting where someone says, and factually correctly will say, “Students are using artificial intelligence for cheating.” And then the next meeting someone says, “Oh yeah, students are using artificial intelligence.” Someone else goes, “Yeah, more than half of our students are.” And then a couple of meetings down the line, someone goes, “Yeah, 50% of our students are using artificial, more than 50% of our students.” And you go, well, hang on a minute. That was never actually said, but it becomes a truth because someone put a number to it. So now there’s this belief that more than 50% of our students, which is all of them, are using artificial intelligence for cheating. So think about a parallel universe where someone says in a meeting, “Our students are using AI irresponsibly in their assessment.” And someone else says, “How do you know that?” Or, so rather than taking it factually, you just go, “Oh, that’s really interesting. Can you unpack that for me? How do you know that?”
(03:19):
And then you start to have this conversation, you realize, actually there is no evidence, so let’s get the evidence. Let’s do some scholarship within our institution. Let’s do some fact finding. So this is the slicing, right? Let’s figure out what’s actually going on. Let’s find out. And so you get the question, to what extent are students using? In what ways are students using? And for me, why are students using AI irresponsibly? So rather than automatically assuming it’s a student who’s in the wrong and the student is cheating, think about, well, if that activity actually exists, which we know it does for some students, why? And so then start to do the scholarship and you find out maybe it’s because your students are time poor and because your assessment’s boring and it doesn’t actually relate to their real life and what they’re going to be doing in their real life. So you figure out then, right, well, what we need to do in the first instance is maybe up-skill our students and their time management. So let’s start there.
Dr. Cristi Ford (04:14):
I love that. I love that. And I think it furthers the conversation, the conversation we know is so complex around AI and student usage, and so I really appreciate how you double down and ask questions around what is the why? And to your point, a statement’s been made and then it becomes fact, and we really don’t have the evidence and the data to back that up.
Mychelle Pride (04:36):
Absolutely right. And so where’s the evidence? What is the fact? And so it’s really important that we start exploring and get to the crux of it because it may well be that we should have looked at assessment a long time ago and we’ve been using the same assessment for the last 10 years. And of course students are going to cheat because not only can they use AI, they can go to an essay mill and get an answer because we’ve been doing the same assessment for the last 10 years. So let’s really understand the behavior, let’s really understand the problems with our own assessment, and really break it down and slice it into the pieces that then can be solved. So that for me is how do you slice a problem that doesn’t exist, figure out what the actual problem is, slice that up, and then find a solution to it.
(05:15):
And I think for me, I also really believe that AI is a revolutionary technology as in its current state because it’s been around for 50 plus years. However, I think more importantly as educators, we don’t need to focus on that. We need to focus on solid pedagogy and what is it that our students need? What are we giving our students? Are we giving them what they need?
Dr. Cristi Ford (05:35):
I would wholeheartedly agree with that. I think focusing on the pedagogical approach, you also talk about, in your response, the andragogical approach and [inaudible 00:05:43] approach to really thinking about learning, and if we focus on that… You’ve done some amazing work and Open University is really known for innovation in learning at scale. And so as we’re this conversation, I wonder, can you give us maybe a window into the types of AI research or pilots or practices happening across the institution right now, and particularly given your area of emphasis, those tied to student success, equity or teaching innovation?
Mychelle Pride (06:14):
Absolutely. So the Open University, for people who don’t know, we’ve been around for 55 years and it was a brainchild in the sixties that was, well, we have a lot of people who need education but can’t go to education and honor our traditional students. So we are a distance-only higher education provider. And of course, at that point in time, it was on the television, so we broadcast on the television, and then we had our own post office service, we posted things out, we recorded feedback for students on cassettes and sent the cassettes out to students so they could put the cassette in and play it at home to get their feedback. So we’ve been doing all kinds of things before other people started doing it. And then we got into the online learning. And of course when I started working at the Open University, people said to me, “You’ll never get a job anywhere else because no one else does distance learning.” Well, then came COVID.
Dr. Cristi Ford (07:01):
Surprise.
Mychelle Pride (07:02):
Surprise. So actually people are now very interested in what the OU is doing. So we have a unit called the Knowledge Media Institute. They’ve been doing AI research for years and years. I’d have to put a disclaimer out that my husband works in the Knowledge Media Institute, so I’m a little bit biased about the work that they do. But they have been working with LLMs, large language models, for a long time. They’re mostly text-based, so they have the world’s largest repository of open access, scientific peer-reviewed journals. They’ve got about 50 million full PDF texts. They’ve been collecting them for 10 years. It’s called Core. So that’s a great tool. So what we can do, we can have Core GPT. So we build an AI on top of it and then students can interrogate it to get a real peer-reviewed verified source when they’re doing their own research or when they’re doing their assignments and they need some more information.
(07:51):
We have also a place called the Institution of Educational Technology, and they’ve been working on learning analytics for a long time, so we are very lucky. We have 160,000 students a year, so we’ve got loads of data. So before we started, I was talking a little bit about my PhD, which I’m doing currently, and I was just like, “Oh yeah, here’s 1.2 million records for you to look at,” Right? That’s incredible that we have access to that. And then I could do some analysis on those records. You talk about success, really understanding what it takes for students to be successful. So we’ve got those things that are AI driven and have been around for a little while. More recently we’ve been doing scholarship into, is our assessment robust? So looking at different AI tools, looking at, is our assessment robust? We did a project across the entire university. We looked at 17 different types of assessment, and I was part of that group. I was led by my colleague Liz Hardy. And in that, only one type of assessment at that time actually could outperform Chat GPT.
(08:51):
And this was an action plan that students had to do and they had to bring it back to a real life, real, real life scenario, and it was quite prescriptive as well. So that was really great to look at the different… We had evidence then to say, yeah, our assessment does need to move on. These are all the assessment types that actually students can game if they want to. The computing department, of course, is doing a lot of research. And interestingly, I thought, our modern languages department, because machine learning has been used for translation for longer than people, than Gen AI has been in the public domain. So they’re kind of two years ahead of the game in this in understanding how students are using translation tools. So it’s very interesting how they’ve been looking at their assessment and we’ve been learning from them and what they’re doing in their assessment. And then we’ve created a digital literacy framework specifically through an EDI lens. So equality, diversity and inclusion is what we say in England, I think it’s DEI is what you say in the states maybe, but equality, diversity, inclusion, accessibility.
(09:50):
With that lens, what are the critical digital literacy skills that our staff need? So we’ve been working on that. We have an AI agent that is for staff, and what happens is a student submits a query, it goes through the AI agent that writes an email, and that email then is picked up by a staff member who triages it, makes sure that it’s right. It’s saving a lot of time for our staff, and then our staff can say, rather than having to rewrite the same emails over and over, they can then actually spend the time looking at the details of that query and getting a much better response back to our students. And that’s a real human in the loop and working with our students. We are a four Nations University, that means England, Northern Ireland, Wales, and Scotland, so our students are all over. Globally as well, but predominantly four nations, so this is a great way for us to be able to engage with our students. We’re running a big festival, it’s called Fiesta. My colleague Miriam Halk has set this up. It’s a two-week AI festival. We’re running it.
(10:49):
It’s for all staff and it has all kinds of things that you could possibly imagine related to AI and education, and it’s free and everything’s recorded, people can drop in and drop out, and also what I like about that is it’s colleague led. So we just opened it up, the institution and said, “Come and deliver sessions,” And we’ve got more than 50 sessions that colleagues have stepped up to deliver. So it’s not costing us. In a time when it’s really financially tight in the sector, we’ve got our colleagues coming and sharing their experience and their knowledge, and we’ve got the few outside speakers coming in as well, which is great. We’re the developing a, it’s called Know our Students. But when I say that, people think I mean zero hours, but it’s knowing our students. It’s just the way I pronounce it. So know our students architecture, which builds on learning analytics to a much higher degree so that we really understand who our students are, their motivations for studying, and that’s going to become our platform for personalization, which we can talk about in a bit if you’re interested.
(11:45):
We’re working on an AI digital assistant specifically for our students’ side of things. We have a platform that is launching in the autumn that’s already… Actually, I think they launched this week, I should say. It’s a student performance tool. So students can go in and track their own progress because one of the things that we find institutions do is that they don’t let students see the data that they have about them. And this is very much about being transparent with the data and students seeing the data. So we’ve got that coming out as well. We have something that’s really important for equity, and that’s called an inclusive curriculum tool. We’ve been working on this for about five years. This inclusive curriculum tool is a way for every module team to review their curriculum materials and see, is it inclusive? So for example, we’ll look at language, we’ll look at case studies, we’ll look at images. There are lots of different ways that we look at it through different lenses. So we look at it through ethnicity, we look at it through socioeconomic status, we look at it through mental health and well-being.
(12:45):
So it’s a way making sure that your curriculum’s truly inclusive and representative. And we are now digitizing that, we’re AI enabling that tool. So the AI tool can absolutely do the initial review and then it gives our tutors, our staff, more time, or academics, to actually update the curriculum to make it more inclusive. So that’s one of my personal favorites. And we’re also working on an AI enabled student success coach, so how can we better support our students? AI enabled, human supporters. So there’s loads going on, like I said. So in summary, we’ve got our Knowledge Media Institute that’s doing lots of tech stuff and real heavy research, we’ve got the Institute of Educational Technology that’s looking at the educational side, and then we’ve got academics across the institution doing all kinds of great work trying to improve the learning experience for our students.
Dr. Cristi Ford (13:31):
Mychelle, how do we keep up? I mean, I’m listening to you and there’s so many great things happening.
Mychelle Pride (13:36):
So much happening.
Dr. Cristi Ford (13:37):
What I will say for our listeners, listeners, as much as we can, we will get links from Mychelle and share those with you in this episode. So if you want to learn more about some of the projects that Mychelle’s mentioned, you’ll have access to some of those. I mean, from everything, I’ve never heard of an AI festival before. That’s the first time I’ve ever…
Mychelle Pride (13:56):
FAIESTA. F-A-I… And I’m embarrassed, I can’t remember what it stands for, but it’s the Festival of AI something teaching and assessment in supporting teaching assessment, I think that’s what it’s called. My colleague Miriam Halk and Eleanor Moore, they are incredible. They are so passionate. They’re doing this on the weekends, right? They’re so mad about it.
Dr. Cristi Ford (14:11):
Wow.
Mychelle Pride (14:12):
Yeah, we hired Miriam as an academic lead, and I think that’s important to note. We have academic leads for artificial intelligence and assessment. We have academic leads for artificial intelligence in learning, teaching, and assessment. And so these are really institutional movers and shakers. They’re fabulous. We couldn’t do these things without them.
Dr. Cristi Ford (14:32):
So you’ve offered so much. I want to make sure that at some point in this episode, I want to get back to the assessment piece, but let’s move into talking a little bit more about personalization. I really think… This was another piece from your keynote that I really found powerful. When we talked about, we need to know what is personalization in the time of AI. And so how are you, as you shared a couple of high-level examples, how are you and your colleagues really thinking about that definition and really maybe how has it evolved from previous understandings of personalized learning and the work you’re doing?
Mychelle Pride (15:02):
Yeah, that’s a really good question, how has it evolved? Because personalization isn’t new, and if you ask 10 people, you’ll get 10 different answers of what is personalization. And it’s become a buzzword. It’s kind of become the savior. So all of those naysayers for AI, they go, the response is, “Ah, but there’s personalization.” And then when you break it down, it’s like, well, what do you actually mean by that? So I started thinking about when I first started teaching, and then it was teacher trainer, we had differentiated learning, and I had to prepare as a student, a trainee teacher, I had to prepare my materials for different activities, different levels in the class would be responsive to the different students within my class. So I think it’s evolving from there, but people seem to have forgotten that we’ve had differentiated learning. Microsoft has had adaptive exams for a very long time, so I was very fortunate to do my Microsoft certified solutions developer and systems engineer, systems develop solutions engineer, whichever way around it was.
(15:54):
I can’t remember now. But all those tests were adaptive. So if you’ve got it right, then the next question would be made harder or easier and see where you land. So we know about these things, they’re not new. So two years ago I ran a project called The Future of Learning and Assessment, and we were setting up the terms of reference or what we were planning to do, and I wanted to put the word personalization in it. And a colleague said to me, “Well, we already personalize our learning. The students have a personalized tutor, they get personalized feedback.” She’s like, “Why is that different now?” And that really gave me pause to thought, and I thought, “Well, yeah, but that’s a really narrow view of personalization, so what do we mean by personalization?” So I started to unpick that a little bit, and I began to explore what it means in the AI era. So we consulted with over 1500 students and staff and asking them what they thought personalization meant to them, and the recurrent theme was around student choice.
(16:48):
Now, interestingly in who you ask, you get, it’s the institution making the choice for the students. You got to flip that. It’s the student making the choice that is best for them. So I think in the AI era, it’s about, yes, we will have learning analytics to recommend and nudge students, but we really have to help students become more autonomous learners. We really need to enable and facilitate more choice for our students, and we need to shift that thinking. One of my colleagues has this great idea, his name is Matthew Moran, and he has this idea that there will be no textbooks in the future, and so a course material will be a large language model, what am I trying to say? A holder, container of all of the materials that exist around a particular topic. What the students get is what he’s calling a skin. So that’s what sits on top of it. And this is how students interact with those materials. So if they’re freshmen or sophomore, it’s a much more guided and supported way of interacting and developing the critical thinking skills.
(17:51):
By the time they’re juniors and seniors, you expect them to have the critical thinking skills, so that skin is going to be different. The way in which students interact with the LLN is going to be different. And I think that’s really interesting because at the moment, a lot of our academic time is spent on writing curriculum.
Dr. Cristi Ford (18:07):
As I listen to you talk about that, Mychelle, that’s really an interesting concept because really you’re talking about this knowledge ecosystem, let’s say, around social psychology. And if it’s a skin that’s on top of it, then you’re, maybe through Socratic method or other ways, you’re really asking students to engage with that content as opposed to read, discuss, evaluate the way we’ve done learning historically.
Mychelle Pride (18:33):
I think it’s fascinating. I think the opportunities are unbelievable. I think co-creation is really important. And so…
Dr. Cristi Ford (18:37):
Me too.
Mychelle Pride (18:38):
We hear this all the time, but that’s another buzzword. So what do we mean? And for me, it’s about co-design with a representative student body who are remunerated, right?
Dr. Cristi Ford (18:48):
Yeah.
Mychelle Pride (18:48):
Nope, don’t get students to do it for free, figure out ways, clever ways, if you don’t have the money in your institution, that you can remunerate students for their time. We’ve said earlier, they’re time poor, but yet we want them to get involved in the co-design, so what are the benefits? How can we remunerate them in some way for that co-design? I think that’s really important. My colleague, Kate Lister, and I, we are co-chairs of the International Council for Distance Education, Global Advocacy Campaign for Distance Learning. Very long title there.
Dr. Cristi Ford (19:15):
Say that five times fast.
Mychelle Pride (19:17):
Exactly. And so ICDE is the acronym for the council, and we are the Europe, we’re responsible for Europe, we’re working with colleagues across Europe, so this is outside of the OU, it includes the OU, but it’s across Europe, and we were asking them what does that personalization mean for them? And where we landed, I really liked this, it was this idea that the student believes that their course has been personalized for them. So we are at scale 160,000, and my husband said, his analogy is brilliant, the Ford Transit van, there’s X number of parts for Ford Transit van. I guess you have those in the US. Do you? Yeah, all good. Yeah, so there are X thousand parts for van, but there’s over 2 million combinations of vans. So everybody feels like their own van is personal to them, yet it’s come from a finite set of options.
(20:07):
And so I like that idea that an institution has that finite set of options, but the combination is almost infinite. Mathematically it can’t be infinite, but the combination makes a student feel like, “Yeah, my learning is for me and it’s been designed for me.” So I really like that understanding of what we mean by personalization.
Dr. Cristi Ford (20:25):
Let me ask you a question just on that piece in terms of, you made a clear distinction that the student says that the course has been, or the learning experience has been personalized for me. As you think about the assessment side of that, how are we consistently checking in with students to be able to, to your earlier point, what I made as an earlier point, in terms of you helping us redefine what are the metrics we use for success and how can they be more inclusive of our learners? And so I am just thinking about that and wondering how do we make that paradigm shift at institutions when we’ve historically been just so focused on traditional metrics?
Mychelle Pride (21:05):
And structure, right? Traditional structures.
Dr. Cristi Ford (21:07):
Yes.
Mychelle Pride (21:07):
So we work with students on this, so it’s student’s perspective, and I’m going to look at some notes because I think I want to get it right, what the student said. So the student said they want AI to generate personalized learning materials so that each student has different course materials and different assessment. They were really keen on adaptive learning. We’ve talked a little bit about adaptive assessment, but adaptive learning as well. So I saw one that is, students can push the button that says, “Explain that again please.” Right? The explain it again button, or, “Explain it in a different way, please.” I like that one better because…
Dr. Cristi Ford (21:37):
I do too.
Mychelle Pride (21:38):
Yeah, they want to take assessment when they are ready. No, I think that’s really interesting because at least in our institution, we have STICS Assessment.
Dr. Cristi Ford (21:48):
Many institutions.
Mychelle Pride (21:49):
Yeah, exactly. So this idea that the students can take assessment when they’re ready and then assess in a way that the student can demonstrate their learning. So I’ve got a little bit of attention with this one because I absolutely agree. We know the evidence shows, the research shows that a choice in assessment gives us better outcomes. It’s much more equitable. On the flip side, we can’t have a student take every single assessment be a PowerPoint presentation,
Dr. Cristi Ford (22:12):
Right. Agreed.
Mychelle Pride (22:14):
They really wouldn’t be well-rounded. When they went to a certain employer to get a job, they’d be like, “Wow, I do a great PowerPoint presentation.” So we need to think about choice. And this is where I think actually within the personalization, I think there needs to be the essential student experience, and the personalized student experience. So the essential student experience is what must every student have when they leave the institution? So to be successful, these are the things that the students must have and must know when they leave. And then we have the personalized bit, which is all of the student choice, the student autonomy, the learning that they need to learn, how they need to learn, when they need to learn for their own study and motivation and study goals. So I’ve just got a student quote I’d like to read to you, if that’s okay.
Dr. Cristi Ford (22:56):
That sounds great.
Mychelle Pride (22:57):
With our students for the future. So the student said, “I’m imagining that at the end of a week’s study I might engage with an AI entity either online or in virtual reality. This entity will ask me about how I feel the week has been.” I think that’s really interesting. “What key points I have discovered, and then show me something to describe, with reference to that week’s learning, and maybe bringing in some other module concepts too. I would then receive some feedback which would guide me to review some things or to not forget others. This would be a soft assessment that would inform directed learning and revision.”
Dr. Cristi Ford (23:33):
That’s great.
Mychelle Pride (23:34):
It’s great.
Dr. Cristi Ford (23:35):
Wow, that’s so powerful. And it actually leads me into my next question and where I wanted to come back to. I remembered in your talk at Eden, you had us pause and asked us to reflect as an audience… You’re smiling because you know exactly where I’m going. You asked us to reflect on our best assessment memory, and I remember it being just such a human reflective moment, and I just said to myself, I have to ask her, why did she center that question and how does it relate to even the student’s quote and what we’re talking about re-imagining assessment in the era of AI?
Mychelle Pride (24:09):
Well, I’ll tell you something funny. A couple of days before my talk, I was scrolling through YouTube or a TikTok or… I don’t use TikTok. Whatever the kids use these days. And there was this person that said, the best way to start a presentation is once upon a time. And I was like, I’m going to try that. So that’s exactly what I did in this presentation. I started with, “Once upon a time,” And the whole room went quiet. I said, “Once upon a time, you were all students.” And then I asked you to reflect on what was your best learning experience. And people, when you ask that question, they think about a teacher quite often, they think about a person or an experience. Answering that best learning experience is quite easy for people. What is quite difficult for people to answer is what was your best ever assessment experience? People immediately think of the horrible assessment, like their driving test, or they think about assessment that wasn’t good. It is really hard for people to think about assessment that was good.
(25:07):
And so my challenge to the sector is let’s make assessment a learning experience, so think about it as assessment for learning, think about assessment as a learning experience, and then it’s something that students want to do. Because I flippantly say, create assessments that students want to do and they’ll do it. They [inaudible 00:25:24], right? Now that’s a flippant, that’s really hard to do Through co-creation, co-design with students, we can get closer to that, and really understanding and knowing our students, we can get closer to. But yeah, asking that question, what was your best ever assessment experience? I think causes us all to reflect on our own ability to design or not design assessment. And I think what we do, because I don’t know about you, but at the Open University, we hire people for their academic brilliance, their research, they’re not necessarily trained teachers. They’re not trained in writing assessment, and then we ask them to lead modules and write assessment.
(26:00):
And so for me, it’s like I want people to think about, right, when was the last time I saw what the latest research was into writing assessment, what a good assessment is? Well, I think we’re in an existential crisis now at the minute around what is assessment and institutions need to decide why are we assessing students for what purpose? How are we going to assess them and really rethink that assessment piece. So that’s why I asked that. And AI can be incredibly helpful in assessment design.
Dr. Cristi Ford (26:26):
It can. I love that question, and I really reflected deeply on it at the talk and then afterwards, and as I’m listening to you share your comments now, it just reminds me that even in you asking us that about our learning experience and our assessment experience, to your point, we’re hired for expertise, but sometimes we forget what it’s like to be that learner and to be in that moment of vulnerability and trying to navigate and wanting to do the right thing and really wanting to walk away with. We talk about we want deep learning for our students versus surface learning, but how are we creating opportunities that learning can be assessed in ways to catapult that? So I just thought it was brilliant to…
Mychelle Pride (27:09):
And we’d so often see assessment of learning.
Dr. Cristi Ford (27:11):
Of course.
Mychelle Pride (27:11):
And it’s like, no, use the assessment for learning. And just to your point there about forgetting what it’s like to be a learner, I would encourage everybody to do a hobby that you’re rubbish at, terrible at because I figured that out. I always thought you had to be good at your hobbies. And I love ice skating. I’m mad about ice skating. I ice skate three mornings a week.
Dr. Cristi Ford (27:29):
Oh wow.
Mychelle Pride (27:30):
Absolutely mad about it. I am terrible. It humbles me because it makes me remember what it’s like to find it difficult to learn.
Dr. Cristi Ford (27:38):
That’s right.
Mychelle Pride (27:39):
And then that I can take that with me because many of us educators, we’re good students.
Dr. Cristi Ford (27:47):
It’s true.
Mychelle Pride (27:48):
We like struggle.
Dr. Cristi Ford (27:49):
And then you get to remember that joy of learning, right? Because as I’m listening to you talk about ice skating, I can hear your passion and your joy around it no matter if you’re proficient or not, right? I hear that and that passion there.
Mychelle Pride (28:01):
And I remember the high fives that my coach… He hardly ever gives a high five. I had two in five years. I remember the high fives. Oh, and then this morning was quite funny because I said, “Oh, we better go to the barrier for this one.” He’s like, he goes, “Actually, we’re getting off ice for this one.”
Dr. Cristi Ford (28:17):
He just was scaffolding your learning for you.
Mychelle Pride (28:19):
He was scaffolding my learning. And that’s so important. That’s so important. And so for me, it’s like, really, I want people to really dig down deep and think about their own assessment experiences and think about how it could have been better.
Dr. Cristi Ford (28:32):
That’s right.
Mychelle Pride (28:32):
And then quite often people will say, will reflect on an assessment experience that was terrible, but the end result they were really proud of. I don’t want that. I want people to reflect on assessment that really works
Dr. Cristi Ford (28:43):
And was transformational for them, right? Yeah, I think that was really key. And as I was listening to you talk about all the things that Open University is doing, one of the things I jotted down quickly, because you said a lot.
Mychelle Pride (28:54):
Sorry. And I talk quickly too.
Dr. Cristi Ford (28:56):
No, it’s all good. But talking about students tracking their own data and that historically institutions don’t do a great job of letting students have access. And so I’d love to ask you, as we think about the most urgent ethical dilemmas in AI development, whether it be about bias or transparency or student agency, what are some of the principles that guide your work as you engage in these dilemmas? And maybe if you want to share a couple, we’d love to hear them.
Mychelle Pride (29:22):
So a personal reflection is my own PhD because I started out my PhD using learning analytics and doing analysis. Like I said, I had a 1.2 million record data set. And I very quickly realized that in learning analytics, you have to be really careful because you can very quickly say, “I’m going to go with purple. All purple students do this.” Right?
Dr. Cristi Ford (29:44):
Yes.
Mychelle Pride (29:45):
And you could fill in the blank with any demographic. It would be very easy to say 75% of our purple students don’t achieve, rather than actually understanding that it’s because it’s the way that we teach that 75% of our purple students don’t achieve. So I think for me, there’s a huge risk around deficit thinking in learning analytics and identifying students at risk based on demographics, when actually the research shows its behaviors. Are they engaging with your virtual learning environment? Are they engaging with their tutors? So for me, there’s a piece around that. The next piece, which I think a lot of people talk about, is the source data being biased or skewed. So large language models are very, we say white Western, but then even that western is skewed because I’m from New Zealand, and if you put New Zealand in the middle of the map, it changes West and East.
Dr. Cristi Ford (30:34):
It does.
Mychelle Pride (30:35):
So it’s thinking about that too. But we really need to think about that. We’ve worked so hard at the Open University on inclusive curriculum and we can very easily go backwards if we used LLMs that had biased data sets in them, so that’s important as well. We talked about the transparency. Students need to know what data you have on them, how you’re using it. If you have a dashboard that shows how students are performing, then let the students see that too, however you measure it, whether it’s outcomes, whether it’s attendance, whatever it might be, but let students see that too. I think that’s really important. I think there’s a risk to trust being broken with students if you’re not sharing the data, if you’re using it without, and explaining why and how it’s being used. I think that’s really important. I think if you’re creating tools with your own large language models where you’re populating them, that’s fine, but if you’re buying in bespoke solutions, I think that’s a problem because we don’t know what dataset it’s been trained on to create that educational solution, off the shelf education solution, I should say.
(31:39):
Student agency is really important. For me, that’s a real ethical piece that we need to make sure that we are using technology wisely and responsibly to ensure that our students have agency. We need to think about the digital divide, so digital poverty. We know the subscription prices for the best tools. A lot of our students can’t afford those. Or I was just looking at some of the debt rates, the incredible debt that people get themselves into, and we don’t want to be adding to people’s debts by expecting them to have technology and use technology, so we have to be careful about that. So for me, I have got a few principles that I try to follow, engage with students early and often. So I think we used to talk about Microsoft Word or whatever product you use, save early, save often, and I say with students, engage early, engage often.
Dr. Cristi Ford (32:27):
That’s great.
Mychelle Pride (32:30):
So I’ve seen too often where a decision is made and then they go and say, oh, it’s like, “Oh, we’ll get the students as critical readers,” And then you don’t take on board what the students say because it’s too late in the process. So it’s really, really important that you bring students in early. I also think you need to meet the students where they are. And I don’t mean necessarily physically, although that’s helpful too, but understand their backgrounds, engage in those backgrounds, enrich in your own curriculum, learning and assessment with their backgrounds, not with your own backgrounds. I think that’s really important. We’ve all had that teacher who you know that if you want to get them off track, you just say something about golf and then off he goes with the golf. So it’s actually about understanding your students, knowing your students, engaging with your students where they are. Every day is a learning day for me. Nothing surprises me anymore.
(33:16):
I like to come to things with an open mind. I want to learn. I want to hear what people are saying. And ultimately for me, the ultimate way to navigate all of this ethical tension is to be a kind human. And if you’re a kind human, then you’re going to go right.
Dr. Cristi Ford (33:31):
This is why I was like, Mychelle doesn’t know it, but she’s going to be a good friend and colleague and she’s coming on the show.
Mychelle Pride (33:37):
Oh, well, I loved your talk too. I mean, let’s flip that for a minute for our listeners. If you have not heard Christi speak, oh my God, you were brilliant. I got so inspired in hearing you speak. So yeah, absolutely.
Dr. Cristi Ford (33:46):
I’m so happy. Well, I’m glad that we have connected. And as the listeners connect with your work, I want to leave with a final question for you. We’ve talked about a lot in this episode, but if we think about the next five years, to you, when you think about all that you’ve shared in this episode, what would meaningful progress look like to you in terms of AI, in its role in creating more inclusive and responsive higher education systems? What would be some positive indicators of change?
Mychelle Pride (34:18):
So inclusion baked in, not bolted on. So we design for inclusion, we design for mattering, and we design for belonging. So we move beyond just that inclusive approach, but we think about mattering and belonging. We design with our students. So for me, it would be absolutely normal to have students involved. There’s a north star for me, and that is, and I don’t like that phrase, but I’ve just used it, every student comes to your university and has a brilliant experience and they’ve achieved the best of their abilities without needing special treatment, right? Oh look, here comes a cat. I told you it might turn up. So there are students, and I think that’s really important, that our students can access, they can study, they can achieve without having to ask… Now it’s sitting on my mouse. Without having to ask for differential treatment. And I think that’s really important, is that we have our students feel included, respected, that they matter and they belong.
(35:14):
I think assessment redesign, I would love to ask that question in five years time of a cohort of students who have just come through, “What was your best assessment experience?” And they go, “Oh, there are too many to just pick one.” There are so many brilliant assessment experiences. I’m confident in my skills as I go out onto the real world or I continue on to more higher education. So that assessment redesign thesis is really important to me. The data transparency we’ve talked about. I think the second to last one I’ll talk about is staff capacity. So it’s all very well for me to say this is the essential student experience, every single student is going to achieve this. If we don’t support, train, develop, encourage, foster, nurture our staff to be able to deliver that.
Dr. Cristi Ford (35:58):
Absolutely.
Mychelle Pride (35:59):
Then we are setting our staff up for failure because we’ll say to the students, “This is what you’re going to get when you come to us. This is what you’re going to have when you leave.” And then they can just turn around and say, “Well, your staff didn’t do that for me.” So we have to have well staff, we have to have nurtured staff, supported, developed staff in order for our students to be successful. And finally, I would love just to be able to say that students from all backgrounds, regardless of what that might mean, feel seen, supported, and able to achieve.
Dr. Cristi Ford (36:27):
Man, I echo all of those.
Mychelle Pride (36:30):
Utopia, right?
Dr. Cristi Ford (36:31):
All of those sentiments, I’m living. I really thank you for being here because I think that people like you continue to move this work forward, and us elevating these conversations and pushing the boundaries is really how we’re going to get there. So thank you so much for being here today. Really a pleasure. I could have talked to you for another hour.
Mychelle Pride (36:50):
[inaudible 00:36:50] a cat cameo.
Dr. Cristi Ford (36:54):
I really appreciate you being here, Mychelle. Thanks for joining me.
Mychelle Pride (36:57):
Thank you for asking me, and I look forward to our collaborations moving forwards.
Dr. Cristi Ford (37:00):
Absolutely. I feel the same. Thanks again.
Mychelle Pride (37:03):
Thank you so much, Christi.
Dr. Cristi Ford (37:05):
Thank you to our dedicated listeners and curious educators everywhere. Remember to follow us on social media. You can find us on X, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Facebook at D two L, and subscribe to the D two L YouTube channel. You can also sign up for the Teaching and Learning studio email list for the latest update on new episodes, articles, as well as masterclasses. And if you have liked what you’ve heard, please don’t forget to rate us, review or share this episode. And remember to subscribe so you never miss what we’ve got in store. You’ve been listening to Teach and Learn, a podcast for curious educators, brought to you by D two L.
Intro (37:41):
To learn more about our K through 20 and corporate solutions, visit d2l.com. Visit the Teaching and Learning studio for more material for educators, by educators, including masterclasses, articles and interviews.
Dr. Cristi Ford (37:54):
And remember to hit that subscribe button. And please take a moment to rate, review and share the podcast. Thanks for joining us. Until next time, school’s out.

Resources Discussed in the Episode

• Knowledge Media Institute (KMI)
• CORE
• CORE GPT
• Institute of Educational Technology
• OU Analyse
• Open University Learning Analytics Dataset
• Generative AI for students
• Open University Professor Mike Sharples
• Research into robust assessment in GenAI era
• Exploring two frameworks from The Open University: Critical AI Literacy Skills and Responsible by Design
• Chatbot for students to disclose disabilities
• AskOU enhances student support with GenAI and wins HESPA award