UNE hosted its third Learning and Teaching Symposium on Thursday 28th July. Running the entire day, the symposium was well attended, with over 130 registrations and 13 sets of presentations.

Rather than a theme, this year’s Learning and Teaching Symposium was built around the key question ‘Engagement – One problem but with many solutions?’  Engagement can be challenging, but symposium presenters were able to showcase the many and varied ways they engage with their students, with each other, and with big ideas.

The symposium began with a keynote address by Professor Phill Dawson, Associate Director of the Centre for Research in Assessment and Digital Learning (CRADLE) at Deakin University.

According to Phill, “student engagement and academic integrity are inseparable…. Cheating is the ultimate disengagement”. During the keynote, Phill demonstrated the sophistication of online tools that can be used to support cheating.

He demonstrated how a website that uses an artificial intelligence (AI) engine can be used to write essays. Phill typed a number of keywords and the synopsis of his keynote presentation into the site and a reasonably passable essay appeared on the screen. On another AI site, he created an ‘original’ image simply by supplying a phrase. Writing ‘cat doing a chemical distillation as soviet propaganda’ yielded surprisingly good results.

While cheating can never be stopped entirely, good assessment design, adopting a range of academic integrity approaches, and programmatic level assessment, can together help reduce the incidences of cheating. 

Following the keynote were 12 presentations from colleagues across the UNE community exploring engagement in its various shapes and forms. The presentations covered a range of diverse topics on engagement including: existentialist approaches to engagement; narrative and storytelling; mini case studies; communities of practice; iterative learning design; engaging with weekly readings; student-initiated extensions; pedagogy of care; gaps between engagement rhetoric and reality; breaking down silos;; engaging student support; unit re-design, and even mention of the Spanish Inquisition (and nobody expected that!). After each presentation lively chats ensued evidencing a good deal of engagement on behalf of the audience.  

Thanks to all of the symposium presenters, organisers, and attendees. We look forward to the next Learning and Teaching Symposium in 2023.

Recordings of all the presentations will be available soon on the Learning and Teaching Symposium website (https://symposium.une.edu.au).