News & Events

UCD Teaching & Learning are pleased to present a featured speaker series on Generative AI in Higher Education. The speakers have a wide range of experiences and bring external insights to UCD. As commercial GenAI tools continue to influence higher education discussions, this series offers the UCD Teaching & Learning community opportunities to engage with leading voices in educational technology, pedagogy, and assessment innovation. Each session will explore different dimensions of how GenAI is impacting conversations on teaching practices, curriculum design, and student learning experiences. These conversations aim to support colleagues in navigating the challenges and possibilities that GenAI presents, while fostering thoughtful, equity-minded approaches to technology integration in our teaching.

Pitfalls, Paradoxes and Promises: Navigating the AI roads ahead

Drawing on over three years working in the complex and contested landscape at the nexus of AI, pedagogy, research and everyday use for work and study in higher education, Martin Compton argues that debates about AI are too often hyped and framed as binary choices between existential risk and utopian opportunity. This session reframes AI as a shared road that institutions, staff and students are already travelling, albeit at different speeds and with uneven confidence and willingness. Using the lenses of pitfalls, paradoxes and promises, Martin will highlight common concerns around academic integrity, deskilling, bias and policy uncertainty, while also surfacing tensions between efficiency and understanding, innovation and tradition, and automation and care. Rather than treating AI as a single technology or problem, Martin proposes a more plural view of AI, variously viewing AI as tool, AI as disruption, and AI as a catalyst for rethinking teaching, assessment and learning.

Dr Martin Compton PFHEA, SCMALT (he/him) is an Associate Professor (Academic Practice, Inclusion and Innovation) and Head of the Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT) at the University of East London. With over 30 years' experience as an educator, Dr Compton champions compassionate approaches to teaching and learning. His recent work examines assessment innovation in the age of AI and advocating for developmental feedback practices that decentre grades. As an experienced digital educator, Senior Certified member of the Association for Learning Technology and Principal Fellow of the HEA, he brings both theoretical insight and practical expertise to conversations about technology's role in transforming higher education.

To book a place please follow the links below:

If you are UCD Staff please go to http://bit.ly/BookTLstaffevent.

If you are a UCD Student please book at https://bit.ly/TLstudentevent