First Webinar on AI and Digital Assessment

The first webinar on AI and Digital Assessment went well on 21 January 2025. There were 91 attendees on the day and 230 subsequent views on YouTube. Most of the participants were from UK institutions, from lecturer, learning technologists, and professional services roles. The webinar was chaired by Gemma Westwood and hosted on Class Collaborate. A recording of the webinar is available on YouTube.

To regulate or not to regulate? Finding the balance for Generative AI and digital assessments
In this talk, Alison Gibson described the challenges universities faced in 2023 when generative AI suddenly arrived, and shared their journey from taking generative AI as a scary unknown, to a business-as-usual tool in University of Birmingham from a policy making perspective. This talk outlines the process of building and refining regulations for generative AI and teaching, learning and assessment, and how keeping academic GenAI literacy as the focus allows us to meet people at their point of need. The highlight is how they have influenced University regulations to include the need for students to be able to use Generative AI in their study.

Generative AI and the Future of Digital Assessments: Shifting Focus, Leading Change
Nurun Nahar How has generative AI transformed the landscape of digital assessments, and is it catalysing a shift from focusing on the ‘product’ of assessment to emphasising the ‘process’? Moreover, is this technology nudging institutions to move away from heavily weighted summative assessments toward more frequent, formative, and feedback-rich digital solutions? This talk explored these challenging questions, shedding light on how educational institutions can embrace generative AI to innovate and align assessment practices with evolving learning demands. Nurun shared her experience of shifting the assessment paradigm from product focused summative assessments to process oriented, formative and feedback rich approaches. She emphasised collaborations and building communities to establish examples of good practice in this space. Her example of using a Custom GPT trained as a Socratic Partner to provide feedback on summative coursework drafts attracted interest during discussions.

Artificially Enhanced Assessment – Transforming Evaluation and Feedback
Dr. Lisa Bradley took a step back and looked at the current problems faced by many university staff in a big picture since the Covid 19 pandemic. She summarised it as an issue of “Trust” – trust has broken down between staff and students. The relationship without trust has negative consequences. How do we change the relationship in a world where Generative AI is changing the way we assess and evaluate student learning?
In this engaging talk, Lisa explores the conversations, practices and concerns around the transformative potential of AI technologies to determine the authenticity of assessments and the need for clearer institutional guidance. She recommends assessment reform to be adopted with staff engaging with students in co-design.

Q&A Highlights

The Vevox Word Cloud
During this webinar, we also asked the participants to use three words to describe “the single largest challenge facing digital assessment currently at your institution”, here is a Word Cloud diagram with the top three words being:

• AI & Generative AI
• Authenticity
• Consistency