SoTEL2025 Trendsetter6 - Heutagogy and Gen AI: A conversation

<p dir="ltr">SoTEL2025 Virtual Symposium Trendsetter6 presentation:</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Dr</b><b> </b><a href="https://ns-proxy1.massey.ac.nz/massey/expertise/profile.cfm?stref=804422" target="_blank"><b>Vickel Narayan</b></a> & <b>Dr</b> <a href="https://staff-profiles.cqu.edu.au/home/view/2104" target="_blank"><b>Robert Vanderburg</b></a>, “Heutagogy and Generative AI: A conversation”, 13th June, 12-1pm AEST</p><p dir="ltr">Higher education (HE) has existed and functioned in its defined boundaries, practices,</p><p dir="ltr">policies and procedures for centuries. This has served the HE institutes well, providing</p><p dir="ltr">certainty, control, power and legitimacy. While emerging technologies have posed some</p><p dir="ltr">challenges, higher education institutions have managed to stand their ground without having</p><p dir="ltr">to change. The pandemic in 2019 forced HE institutions to become agile with their ingrained</p><p dir="ltr">practices and rules, to explore uncharted avenues to facilitate education. For the first time in</p><p dir="ltr">modern education, we witnessed a vast scale of unprecedented changes to how we interact</p><p dir="ltr">with learners and how we facilitate learning and teaching. For once, the learners were seen</p><p dir="ltr">as partners in the learning process. We trusted our students and let go of some of the</p><p dir="ltr">control as borders shut, and we pivoted to online education. We redesigned our</p><p dir="ltr">assessments to integrate relevance and authenticity, even providing autonomy to the</p><p dir="ltr">learners to co-create the assessments with us. Mobile phones and social media tools played</p><p dir="ltr">a critical role in bridging the student and academic world, the learning with teaching as they</p><p dir="ltr">existed in different spaces. With learning eventuating away from the scheduled classes and</p><p dir="ltr">highly structured ecosystems, learners gained ownership over their learning path and</p><p dir="ltr">processes—the beginnings of self-regulated and determined learning.</p><p dir="ltr">As life, however, began to normalise, HE institutions started rolling back the changes and</p><p dir="ltr">progress made during the pandemic. Where online learning was once seen as the</p><p dir="ltr">equivalent of the premier face-to-face teaching, it now stands as a legacy of the pandemic,</p><p dir="ltr">dethroned and marginalised. The lessons learnt were forgone in favour of on-campus</p><p dir="ltr">learning until the rise of ChatGPT in late 2022. HE institutions again faced a seismic threat to</p><p dir="ltr">the integrity of their processes and learning and teaching in general. Unlike the pandemic,</p><p dir="ltr">ChatGPT has been on a relentless march over the last three years, inspiring many diverse</p><p dir="ltr">offspring capable of imitating human-like language, writing and creative capabilities</p><p dir="ltr">collectively known as generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI). Perhaps, the pandemic was</p><p dir="ltr">an early warning of things to come, and the lessons during this period were critical to</p><p dir="ltr">understanding and implementing strategies for effective integration of Gen AI in education.</p><p dir="ltr">The pandemic created uncertainty when certainty was known, whereas Gen AI has created</p><p dir="ltr">uncertainty when certainty is unclear.</p><p dir="ltr">Against this backdrop, we will engage in a conversation related to the bigger issues in</p><p dir="ltr">education, as we feel Gen AI has brought us to a juncture where critical distinctions need to</p><p dir="ltr">be made or understood. For example, education and learning. Are they synonymous, or is</p><p dir="ltr">there a difference? Does the distinction matter and why? Why is it relevant to the current</p><p dir="ltr">Gen AI climate and the future of learning (or education)? We will draw upon the principles of</p><p dir="ltr">heutagogy and their parallels to the pandemic pedagogy. We will revisit the role social media</p><p dir="ltr">tools played, along with smartphones during this time and their alignment to heutagogy. We</p><p dir="ltr">will dare to stargaze on mobile and personalised instances on Gen AI and their implications</p><p dir="ltr">on education. We conclude that the future of education in the Gen AI realm is on</p><p dir="ltr">learner-centred, regulated and determined principles. Principles that are built on partnership,</p><p dir="ltr">trust, criticality, kindness, hope, and authenticity, which help enable learner voice in their</p><p dir="ltr">journey of learning to become and be.</p>