Prem Kumar & Clare Ray
The point of a university education has always been to help students reach their full potential and become well-rounded individuals prepared to make meaningful contributions to their communities and the world. But how do we achieve that if, in the words of Sonal Minocha, our present undergraduate programmes are often ‘dominated with coping with the present and, at worst, the past’. Do we believe that by measuring improvement in highly predictable assessments, we are also determining the acquisition of complex graduate outcomes and attributes? This is, at best, a confusion of simultaneity with causality. In other words, might it be that our best students succeed despite us, whilst our weakest students fail because of us? With a falling demand for university places among school-leavers and a rapidly increasing demand for industrial and professional apprenticeships coupled to the dropping of any requirement of degree classes or even A-level results from the application forms of several significant employers, has there ever been a more critical time for us to reappraise our mission.
In 1886, Friedrich Nietzsche stated that ‘Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love’ and it is our belief that we should look to (re)engender in our students a desire for learning and adaptability through long-lasting changes in behaviour based upon experience, rather than the desired acquisition of a degree qualification that can simply reward a lack of imagination. Thus, if you are concerned that your students are producing answers that may be indistinguishable from AI-generated ones then you are simply asking the wrong questions. Our conjecture is that measures of desire and adaptability will better determine ‘educational gain’ but, more importantly, will future-proof ‘career-readiness’ in these exciting and data-rich but increasingly uncertain and highly unpredictable AI-times. This interactive, end-of-conference, session will be used to help summarise and distil the key ideas from the day by exploring the concept of what a University education should confer upon a learner and how or even whether that is measurable. The future requires us and our students to be able to undertake rapid learning, unlearning and adaptation. Are we ready?