Keynote Speakers

The introduction of genAI tools has clearly exposed long term inadequacies of some strongly established educational traditions, in particular approaches to grading student learning. These new tools provide everyone with an unprecedented power to generate increasingly sophisticated outputs in the form of text, images, and music, and more recently video and sound recordings. These outputs are produced in response to “prompts”, and the complexity and nature of the prompts that can be crafted has been the subject of a new area of professionalism “prompt engineering”. This phrase overstates the dignity of the prompting activity, it is not a scientific activity or field of study, rather it is a craft that provides generative AI tools with sufficiently nuanced context so as to improve the usability of the output. Since these tools have proven capable of substantially amplifying skilled human performance levels on qualified tasks, and in some cases automating human work in well constrained domains, their integration into professional work has been rapid. Higher Education Institutions would be very unwise to ignore this trend. This talk provides an overview of how this situation has emerged, an analysis of the capabilities and implications of widespread genAI adoption, an overview of the applications of these tools in educational settings and possible avenues for developing the highly relevant education future learners will demand of us. The intention of the talk is to provide a firm research foundation upon which the participants can engage in a nuanced discussion of how the education sector should respond to generative AI and agentic systems.

In an age where artificial intelligence is reshaping how knowledge is produced, trusted, and used, teaching and learning specialists are being called to reassess their pedagogical foundations.

“Agentic” AI systems can independently browse and take action without direct human input. The rise of synthetic research is straining peer review systems, and “ghost learners” are appearing in classrooms. Amid both excitement and concern, education leaders around the world face pressure to act quickly, often with limited evidence to guide their decisions. 

This keynote examines the frictions AI generates across curriculum, assessment, teaching and learning practices and governance, while highlighting the need to protect the public purpose of education. Drawing on the founding vision of MOOCs and open education, the keynote also considers new frontiers:  from public interest AI and digital sovereignty to community-led and human-centred models of learning. Ultimately, it calls for planning education that is ethical and inclusive, where human agency remains the primary architect of educational transformation.