Demystifying AI for FE Educators: 12 Days of AI Christmas
Details: Written by Kelly Worsnop
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Published:
Written by:
Dr Christopher Tuffnell, FHEA
Head of Digital Learning and Teaching at The Skills Network
As we prepare to bid farewell to 2024, it’s clear that generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has been the year’s disruptive force in education. Challenges range from ensuring academic integrity and the need for assessment redesign, to a flurry of new ‘pedagogical’ tools (I use the term lightly) that promise to make teaching and learning easier for all involved. Whatever your stance, GenAI is impacting the educational landscape and rather than adhering to Darwin’s “adapt and survive” approach, here at The Skills Network our mantra is to adapt and thrive!
If you’re an educator worried about GenAI's impact, what can you do in the new year to reap the technology's benefits while mitigating the potential risks to thrive in 2025? Firstly, it’s worth noting that no technology add-on will improve learning and teaching. There’s lots of hype around AI tools, but they don’t replace the need for ongoing educator professional development to keep your teaching practice informed, based on solid pedagogical underpinning from established and emerging evidence in fields such as learning science.
However, in line with the festive season, we'd like to offer our 12 tips to help FE educators embrace AI effectively in the coming year - Please sing along!
12 Tips to Help FE Educators Embrace AI Effectively in 2025
On the 1st day of Christmas The Skills Network suggested for me:
To begin with transparency
Start the new year by being open with your students about how GenAI can be used in your setting. Explain your thoughts on AI’s role in learning, teaching and assessment, and engage your students in discussions, maybe a think-pair-share, to get them thinking about its benefits and limitations. As none of us really know the long-term impact of GenAI in education, being open and transparent about it can help build trust, giving your students a voice that also engages them in critical thinking about AI.
On the 2nd day of Christmas The Skills Network suggested for me:
To foster AI literacy
Building on the previous discussion about the benefits and limitations of GenAI, introduce your students to the basics of AI to provide a foundational understanding of the technology. You don’t need to create this content, there are a wide variety of credible resources that you can curate. I would utilise a flipped learning approach by directing students to MOOC platforms (Massive Open Online Courses, such as Coursera and Future Learn, which are online learning resources with no attendance limits) to engage in self-directed study, covering topics on how AI works, its ethical considerations, and its applications. Once in the classroom build on the content with some collaborative active learning activities to ensure collective comprehension and understanding.
On the 3rd day of Christmas The Skills Network suggested for me:
To co-develop AI policies
Once you have a collective foundation of AI knowledge a good approach is to co-create AI policies with students and other colleagues. Collaborative policymaking helps to make sure diverse perspectives are heard and incorporated, ensuring that rules around AI use are relevant and equitable. The collective approach can also enhance buy-in and adherence to the policy.
On the 4th day of Christmas The Skills Network suggested for me:
To turn students into AI critics
Encourage your students to critically evaluate AI-generated content. For example, have them compare responses from tools like ChatGPT and Claude, identify and discuss strengths, weaknesses, and biases, then fact-check against reliable sources. This approach helps to develop digital literacy and critical thinking. It could happen as small group work that provides summary overviews to the whole group, leading to discussions around prompting, interrogation of information, and the need to have in-depth knowledge. In addition to identifying what they are trying to achieve with the tool in order to get a quality output.
On the 5th day of Christmas The Skills Network suggested for me:
To leverage AI for personalised feedback
AI tools can provide students with instant, tailored feedback, identifying areas for improvement and suggesting resources. You could encourage your students to input a 'version 1' of their work, prompting a tool (ChatGPT or Claude) to “take the role of…[contextually relevant] assessor/coach/guide” and "provide detailed feedback or identify areas for improvement.” The students can then incorporate the feedback, if relevant, into their 'version 2' offering and critically reflect on why or why they incorporated certain elements of feedback. This approach can enhance learning outcomes and the critical thinking/analysis ability of your students while freeing up your time for facilitation and discussion.
On the 6th day of Christmas The Skills Network suggested for me:
To embrace AI-driven adaptive learning
Using a GenAI tool to take your students on a personalised journey can be a fun way to engage them in a topic (think choose your own adventure books). Start by prompting the tool to follow an educational theory such as Lev Vygotsky’s “zone of proximal development” to ensure that the learning experience is scaffolded, then prompt to provide an adaptive experience by offering the student two/three potential responses. This can work well with language learning but can be used creatively with most topics, adapting content to individual student needs, allowing them to progress at their own pace and adjusting complexity based on their performance.
On the 7th day of Christmas The Skills Network suggested for me:
To enhance creativity
I tend to think of GenAI as my assistant, who has access to a whole wealth of information, but with little knowledge of how to use that information and therefore needs a lot of direction. It can be a great tool for you or your students to use as a creative partner in projects. Prompt him/it to “think” about creative solutions, brainstorm alternative ideas or generate unique visuals. AI tools can help students and educators explore new dimensions of creativity.
On the 8th day of Christmas The Skills Network suggested for me:
To protect academic integrity
It has been well documented that GenAI poses challenges to traditional assessment methods. In my experience, while the tools can output an essay-type response quickly and easily, if the student doesn’t have a deep understanding of the desired output the result is quite poor, and there are generally clear indications of AI-generated content.
I think the true emerging challenge is our assessment design, we need to have assessments that require personal insights or practical applications, which are contextualised, creative, problem or project based. Perhaps students develop multiple portfolio artefacts that they can speak to and reflect upon frequently.
There's obviously a wider ongoing debate around assessment and how much control educators can have, in the short term GenAI can be prompted by entering desired learning outcomes before asking the tool to suggest “AI proof” assessments or perhaps more effectively, assessments that utilise GenAI as part of the process. My thoughts are that we should move to assessing the process rather than the product as much as we can.
On the 9th day of Christmas The Skills Network suggested for me:
To use AI for administrative efficiency (or not)
There are an increasing number of ‘AI-powered’ tools that promise to streamline tasks like lesson planning, grading, and resource development. I would utilise these tools with caution—my experimentation has shown that while things can be done quickly, it may be at the sacrifice of quality and/or pedagogical accuracy. For example, when I’ve used these tools to generate learning outcomes (what learners should know, understand, or be able to do by the end of a lesson or course), they have often produced outcomes that are not appropriately structured, measurable, or particularly well-aligned to assessments. The output has been very general and sometimes perpetuates prevalent myths, such as ‘learning styles.’ These tools appear to reduce workload but do so at the expense of good pedagogical design, ultimately compromising educational quality.
On the 10th day of Christmas The Skills Network suggested for me:
To build AI ethics into curriculum
Continuing the early point of fostering AI literacy - AI foundations can be further built upon once students have an understanding of GenAI in their educational setting, they can start to think about the ramifications of AI in the reshaping industries, and what ethical implications can be foreseen. Embed discussions on AI ethics, data privacy, and digital footprints into your curriculum to help prepare students for the workforce.
On the 11th day of Christmas The Skills Network suggested for me:
To provide equitable access
Ensuring that all your students have access and training to the AI tools you will be using is a key consideration for leveraging AI effectively in your teaching. All the use cases we’ve discussed on this festive-themed round-up are achievable with the free versions of ChatGPT or Claude, and I’m sure we’ll all be feeling Microsoft’s integration of Co-Pilot into MS Office in the coming year. I’ve purposefully not discussed apps built on large language models (LLMs)—AI systems trained on vast amounts of text data to generate human-like responses—mainly because I believe that, overall, they are unreliable, inaccurate, and developed with too much tech focus and not enough educationalist input.
On the 12th day of Christmas The Skills Network suggested for me:
To keep learning and reflecting
Finally, the message loops back around to my original point, that educators need to keep experimenting, and evolving to adapt and thrive. The AI landscape will continue to evolve rapidly. So, stay informed, attend training sessions, and reflect on how these tools impact teaching and learning. Continuous professional development is key to tune out the hype and technology to enhance your learning successfully.
Looking Ahead to 2025
As we step into the new year, let’s embrace AI as an enabler of enriched learning experiences. We should consider how to foster collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity by harnessing AI’s potential while upholding the values of education.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from The Skills Network!
How are you planning to integrate AI in 2025? Please feel free to let us know: chris.tuffnell@theskillsnetwork.com