VC interview with Ali Moore on ABC Melbourne

Mornings with Ali Moore

TOPICS: ABC MELBOURNE'S 'RADIO IN RESIDENCY' AT DEAKIN’S GEELONG WATERFRONT CAMPUS IN MARCH, THE RISE OF AI AND CHAT GPT AND DEAKIN’S RESPONSE

ALI MOORE: Professor Iain Martin is the Vice-Chancellor of Deakin. Good morning, Professor Martin.

IAIN MARTIN: Good morning, and it's great to be here.

MOORE: And soon we’ll be able to say, “Great to be here, too,” when ABC Melbourne is down in Geelong. You are playing host at Deakin, so tell us about the pop-up radio studio.

MARTIN: So, it’s in our Waterfront campus, which for those of you who don’t know is opposite the pier on the Geelong waterfront. It’s a great location where the studio is surrounded by glass, so it’s really visible.

Last year it was a great opportunity to share a lot of what was going on around the Geelong region and bring ABC Radio Melbourne to Geelong. I think it worked really well, and we are absolutely delighted to be hosting you again.

MOORE: From the university’s perspective, what’s in it for you?

MARTIN: There’s obviously an awareness of what we’re doing as a university, but part of what we want to do is to continue to push that universities are not closed entities; we’re part of the community.

We’re inextricably linked to so much of what goes on in and around Geelong, it’s another way of doing that. We’ve also got a lot of communications and media students at the university, and it’s great for them to see us having those active links with the profession.

MOORE: Listeners can come along and watch and participate, can’t they? As you said, it’s glass. It’s very visual. So, there is just sort of an open invitation?

MARTIN: Absolutely, yes. And last year there were lots of people just sitting outside. The weather was reasonably kind to us last time around. I hope it will continue to be this time. But it is a wonderful location. It’s right on the Geelong waterfront. And over the last few weeks, I’ve been wandering down along there in the evening, and it is just a great location. It's been so good after COVID to see it really coming back to life this summer.

MOORE: So if you are keen, the schedule for who will be down there and when visit www.abc.net.au/geelong is where you can find it. Hop online and have a look, and we will keep reminding you so you can pop along.

Of course, Professor Iain Martin, you are Vice-Chancellor of Deakin University, so you are perfectly placed to discuss some of the issues we’ve been talking about this morning around ChatGPT because the Victorian Education Department has banned it in state schools for the time being, but the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA), which is your regulator, has also put you on notice around the integrity issues associated with ChatGPT. How do you see it down at Deakin?

MARTIN: We have a number of people who’ve been looking at the implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and what happens within universities for quite some time. ChatGPT has brought this absolutely into public focus. But the technology is not new. What ChatGPT has done has brought an upscaled version that is very easily publicly accessible.

These are tools that will not go away, whether in the university environment, the work environment, or other places. As educators, we’ve got to find the best balance between ensuring that we are confident that our students have those core skills, knowledge, and attributes that we’re talking about, but at the same time, they are equipped to deal with those tools.

So, we’ve taken a view that simply saying you can’t use them is not the approach we want to take. It’s how do we educate our students on the strengths and weaknesses of ChatGPT, when you can use it, when you can’t use it, making sure that in the same way as you use other resources, you attribute that: “This bit of my work was done using ChatGPT.” All of that is going to be really important.

If we can’t educate our students about using this in the university environment, they will go out into the work environment and be able to use it but not necessarily know the gaps, the weaknesses and the strengths of these tools. So we think it’s like so many technological advances – it’s the way people interact with it, the framework you put around it is so important.

So, yes, we’re not understating just how significant this is, but we think that nuanced approach, thinking about how it’s integrated with what we do, and how we design assessments in the right way, is the way we want to handle it. Absolutely we are there.

MOORE: I suppose my question would be: well, how do you do that? How do you get that nuanced approach? How do you walk that line between using it and not abusing it, for want of a better word? And how do you, as the educational institution, have the things in place that you will need to have in place for those students who don’t play by the rules?

MARTIN: There’s no one piece in this. There’s an education component – and this year, we’ll be rolling out to our students and staff the education piece around this, making sure that students are aware if they use it, you have to attribute its use. If you don’t, that is cheating and academic misconduct, and you go down that path.

There is a lot of work happening in our institution and most universities around what this means for assessment tasks that we ask students to do. We don’t believe that simply going back to pen and paper, as an example, is the right thing to do because, again, assessments that are authentic and really reflect the task we want our students to be able to do are important.

Alongside that, we will continue to look at how technology can help on the other side, which is detection. We’ve gone from using tools like Turnitin to detect plagiarism being the exception to being an almost globally universal norm. I suspect that with time some of those tools will catch up. At the moment, they’re not accurate enough. But I think they will.

MOORE: That’s one of the issues, isn’t it? Because the very same people who have produced ChatGPT have also produced, well, a couple of possible ways of trying to assess. But they’re not very accurate. I think one that I read had a 26 per cent chance of picking whether a chatbot had been used.

MARTIN: Yes, it picked up one in four, but, equally, one in 10 it said you cheated when you hadn’t. So they’re not good enough to use at the moment.

MOORE: That’s not helpful, is it?

MARTIN: No. But I don’t underestimate that this is complicated. Technology is evolving at an extraordinarily rapid pace in these areas, and we will have to continually adapt, refine and reflect. But, as I say, I don’t want to extrapolate back to a school environment where they’re facing different challenges, but certainly, in that university environment, we believe that this slightly more nuanced approach is the right way to go.

MOORE: And I note that the regulator says it’s working with you – with the Deakin University Centre for Research and Assessment and Digital Learning (CRADLE). Have you actively got people sitting there trying to work out how you can work this into your system but with protections?

MARTIN: Absolutely. We’ve got some of the best assessment experts in the world working at CRADLE. They are actively looking at this. Indeed, a number of people have been looking at it for quite some time, and ahead of the extraordinary global interest in ChatGPT.

MOORE: Can we just talk briefly about the other side of this, I was saying earlier today that TEQSA, in their statement, raises ethical issues from the other side, so not from the students’ side but from the institutions’ side. Particularly in relation to academics using it to grade or provide feedback on assessment tasks or to write grant applications. They are really interesting propositions, aren’t they, for academics?

MARTIN: They are. And in the same way that we will have to work with students to educate them, give them the tools to equip and understand and realise where it is appropriate and not, we need to go there.

I don’t think some of this is absolutely black and white. So if you look at, say, the instance of giving students advice on where they’re going, I think that in some areas, we will start to use AI as an informative tool – the student produces a bit of work, the AI can actually say, “Well, actually, you’re not right there.” And I think that will come.

But if we start to say the alternative, which is the student thinks this has been marked by a human being and, in fact, the academic has just simply delegated the task to AI, that would absolutely be wrong.

MOORE: Well, there’s a lot of ground to cover on this one and I know that it is a challenge for, well, everyone. A challenge and an opportunity. Professor Iain Martin, lovely to talk to you, and we’ll see you down in Geelong pretty soon.

MARTIN: Thank you very much indeed.

MOORE: Professor Iain Martin there, the Vice-Chancellor of Deakin University. ABC Radio Melbourne is heading to Geelong at the end of the month. Various broadcasters will be down there on and off through March.

ENDS

Media contact:
Glen Atwell
Media and Corporate Communications Director, Deakin University
E: glen.atwell@deakin.edu.au
T: @DeakinMedia