Here be Dragons: Is fear of generative AI in HE failing to prepare students for employment?

Description

The logarithmic growth in the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) such as Chat GTP, Bard and DALL-E over the past two years has caused a tsunami of discussion about the future of academia, students, employability, and the world.

Many Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) were taken by surprise by the sudden engagement by students with Chat GPT at the start of 2023, and the summer of 2023 saw a plethora of amendments and revisions to academic framework regulations. For many HEIs, GenAI is viewed as a series of existential threats: students “will” immediately use GenAI to write their coursework for them, none of the plagiarism detection software packages are remotely sophisticated enough to detect it, degrees and diplomas will become meaningless, and the ivory tower will fall (and with it, all semblance of a sophisticated society).

Many businesses of the other hand as embracing the use of GenAI as a tool to write reports, carry our research, and free the time of employees for different tasks. Law firms are starting to use GenAI to produce draft briefs, marketing companies to produce advertising strategies, architects to generate innovative building designs, and so on. To say that the business world has embraced GenAI is to say that it has embraced the Internet.

This paper builds on existing research, which initially used existing literature to trace the dichotomy between what HEIs believe businesses want, and what businesses believe HEIs should be doing.

It fits within the “Employability and AI” strand of the conference, and is part of a wider project exploring how HEIs can better use GenAI to upskill students and prepare them for the employment opportunities which will actually exist in a few years’ time.
By July, the project team will have undertaken a Q sort of results from a targeted questionnaire, and have prepared an initial model for ensuring that 21st century employability is fully embedded into HEIs.

Period	3 Jul 2024
Event title	Advance HE Teaching and Learning Conference 2024: Future-Focused Education: Innovation, Inclusion, and Impact
Event type	Conference
Location	Nottingham, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International