At an education symposium three weeks ago, renowned AI expert Professor Danny Liu told delegates how generative AI can revolutionise education and why we, as a sector, should be launching this change now.
The 2025 Learning and Teaching Symposium, hosted by ACAP University College, explored how artificial intelligence can transform education ethically, and comes at a crucial time when educational institutions across Australia are grappling with the incorporation of AI tools into teaching and preparing students for AI-integrated workplaces.
Liu, from the University of Sydney, is a leading voice in ethical AI use in education, and recently released videos on behalf of the Australian Government exploring the risks and opportunities of its potential impact on academic integrity.
He spoke at length about the need for students to develop employable skills in AI and contemporary technology, and reframing AI as a “cognitive partner” that can enhance and assist academic and clinical work.
“Many people think that generative AI is there to do your work for you, they see AI as something that drafts things which we check and approve,” he said.
“It’s probably more helpful to see AI as a partner or collaborator that you can bounce ideas off and get fresh perspectives from.”
Dr Colin Webber has been busy making moves on this exact front.
For the past five years Webber has been Dean of SAE, but since August last year has been on secondment as Senior Scholar for Curriculum Reform (Gen AI) with Navitas, the parent company of SAE University College and ACAP University College.
SAE University College is a leader in creative media education, with courses across animation, audio, computer science, creative industries, design, film, games, music, VFX and virtual production, while ACAP provides quality higher education in psychology, counselling, coaching, criminology, law, social work, management, accounting and IT.
Webber’s secondment is proof positive of just how seriously SAE is taking AI.
“It gives an indication of what we see as important around AI,” Webber tells EducationHQ.
“We could have theoretically called me ‘Senior Scholar for Academic Integrity’ or something like that, that’s been the initial, sometimes knee-jerk, reaction of the education industry.
“In our case, we’ve gone straight into the ‘no, we actually need to have a look at the whole curriculum, not just securing existing things’.”
Webber says Sydney University has been running an early-stage pilot research program called Cogniti, which is “basically a shell that sits around an LLM interface, such as Chat GPT”, and allows the user to customise the way that it responds.
“So we developed a bit of a framework about how we would like our staff and students to use such tools, because we’re really conscious that students and staff can use any number of free tools for anything,” Webber says.
“You can absolutely get a free version of ChatGPT and ask it to write a reflection about your recent learning experience, and it’ll do a pretty good job to get you started, but what we wanted to do was come up with ways of targeted activities.”
We have an opportunity using AI to develop the human skills of young people before they get too set in their ways, and to work on our brain plasticity for the older ones among us, Dr Colin Webber, pictured above, says.
Webber started by calling them ‘one-shot tools’ with the idea that teachers and students would learn something.
“So instead of developing an agent that writes your reflection, it takes you through the process of reflection,” he says.
While very much in its early stages, it’s enabling teachers to develop lesson plans for their classes, that rather than saying to the AI, ‘here’s my content, give me a lesson plan’, will rather guide them through a learning process.
Webber explains that at SAE, for example, students engage in a great deal of project-based learning.
“So the agent understands that there’s a reflective component, that we’re likely doing a project, that there’s a brief involved in that, that there are milestones, that there are feedback expectations, that a project might go over several weeks - so it takes you through the process answering those questions while you’re developing the lesson plan,” he explains.
“So the idea of these agents really was that any time you use it, you’re learning about the process in the background.”
Webber explains that while AI has only in the last few years come to public prominence with the emergence of generative AI like ChatGPT, DALL-E (for image generation), Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, the reality is, it’s been around us for much longer.
A good analogy is the transistor, he offers.
“So when transistors were initially developed, they were big, they were cumbersome, they could only be created by a few companies, and if you had a product that had transistors in it, you put it on the package,” Webber says.
“But transistors are now ubiquitous. Nobody says, ‘I’ve got a product that’s got transistors in it’. AI is going to be like that. It’s going to be everywhere.”
From an education perspective, the most important thing, the tech expert says, is deciding what you want to create and why you want to use any given tool that you might be using.
“So is it a matter to help you extend your creativity? Is it something to help you do something faster? Is it something to help you break a mental block? Is it something that is going to be able to generate something which you’d never thought of?” he poses.
“Or is it something you’re going to copy the work of somebody else? So some of that work is ethical, and some of it isn’t.”
AI isn’t changing the decisions that we have to make about our creative work or our academic work, Webber argues, it’s just “shone a really big spotlight on it”.
“So it’s always been about, am I going to copy somebody else’s work? Am I going to pay somebody else to do my work for me because I don’t know how to do it? Am I going to pay a team of people to do the in-between-ing work in an animation – so, am I going to do it longhand? Am I going to now use a tool that will interpolate all that data for me?”
Webber says as a sector, nay as a society, we really need to be conscious that this is not where it ends. It’s not that AI is coming, it’s absolutely here. It’s been here for years and years in education, but also in commerce and in the creative industries.
“But the LLM ChatGPT has become what everybody can access, what everybody can see – so it’s not new, but the opportunity for us to work alongside it, I think also really shines a really strong light on how we collaborate and communicate with each other.”
Part 2 in this series on AI in education will look at how well schools are utilising the technology and what school leaders perhaps could be thinking more about, in terms of their approach.
