Guest speaker - Helen Beetham
We are very pleased that Helen Beetham, consultant researcher in digital education, will present a keynote address and facilitate a workshop at the 2024 Teaching and Learning Symposium. View the programme outline.
Keynote abstract
Helen Beetham, consultant researcher in digital education
University learning in an age of AI
A critic of what she calls ‘AI fantasy and fatalism’, Helen invites us to step out of the hype cycle and focus on student learning. What value does university learning have when so much knowledge is available online? What use is expertise, when statistical models can produce (apparently) credible opinions and solutions? Rather than accelerating our productivity to the pace of the new ‘learning’ machines, Helen suggests that educators look again at what we know about student learning and its value. Finding AI fantasies improbable, but steering away from a narrative of decline, Helen invites teachers to see our own disciplinary knowledges and practices as adequate resources for supporting students through ‘disruptive’ times.
Workshop abstract
Realising the opportunities across time (synchronous/asynchronous) and space (online and in-person) to enhance student learning
Taking a different direction to her keynote presentation, Helen shares themes and resources from a recent Jisc project Beyond Blended. This set out to review and build on lessons from the pandemic shift to online teaching, and apply them to the ’new normal’ of in-person teaching with digital elements. The workshop is an invitation to think about the student experience as a blend of online and in-person, live and independent learning, and of teaching as helping students to navigate these with increasing agency and confidence. It is also an opportunity to reflect on diversity, equity and inclusion as issues of time and place (among other resources). There is a close fit between the Beyond Blended resources and the Flexible and Inclusive Teaching (FIT) pathways developed at Oxford that will also be used at the workshop.
Helen's biography
Helen Beetham is a researcher and consultant in digital education. She has edited a number of standard texts including Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age with Rhona Sharpe and has published peer-reviewed articles on topics from digital literacy to surveillance pedagogies, and from curriculum practice to feminist theories of technology.
Helen has advised universities in the UK, Europe, Africa and Australasia on their digital education strategies, and has worked for international bodies such as the EU, UNICEF, UNESCO and the Commonwealth of Learning.
Since 2004 she has played a leading role in Jisc programmes, building capacity for digital transformation in universities, and helping to centre the student experience in strategic thinking. Her Digital Capabilities framework is widely used in universities, in and beyond the UK.
Helen is currently completing a book ‘Teaching Critical Subjects in the Digital University’ on developing students’ critical digital literacies through subject teaching.
Her substack, Imperfect Offerings, has been recommended by the Guardian/Observer for its ‘wise and thoughtful’ critique of generative AI.
How to contact Helen
helenbeetham.substack.com, @helenbeetham, helen.beetham@gmail.com
