Heutagogy and Gen AI

A conversation

Abstract

(Trendsetter Presentation)

Higher education (HE) has existed and functioned in its defined boundaries, practices, policies and procedures for centuries. This has served the HE institutes well, providing certainty, control, power and legitimacy. While emerging technologies have posed some challenges, higher education institutions have managed to stand their ground without having to change. The pandemic in 2019 forced HE institutions to become agile with their ingrained practices and rules, to explore uncharted avenues to facilitate education. For the first time in modern education, we witnessed a vast scale of unprecedented changes to how we interact with learners and how we facilitate learning and teaching. For once, the learners were seen as partners in the learning process. We trusted our students and let go of some of the control as borders shut, and we pivoted to online education. We redesigned our assessments to integrate relevance and authenticity, even providing autonomy to the learners to co-create the assessments with us. Mobile phones and social media tools played a critical role in bridging the student and academic world, the learning with teaching as they existed in different spaces. With learning eventuating away from the scheduled classes and highly structured ecosystems, learners gained ownership over their learning path and processes—the beginnings of self-regulated and determined learning.

As life, however, began to normalise, HE institutions started rolling back the changes and progress made during the pandemic. Where online learning was once seen as the equivalent of the premier face-to-face teaching, it now stands as a legacy of the pandemic, dethroned and marginalised. The lessons learnt were forgone in favour of on-campus learning until the rise of ChatGPT in late 2022. HE institutions again faced a seismic threat to the integrity of their processes and learning and teaching in general. Unlike the pandemic, ChatGPT has been on a relentless march over the last three years, inspiring many diverse offspring capable of imitating human-like language, writing and creative capabilities collectively known as generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI). Perhaps, the pandemic was an early warning of things to come, and the lessons during this period were critical to understanding and implementing strategies for effective integration of Gen AI in education. The pandemic created uncertainty when certainty was known, whereas Gen AI has created uncertainty when certainty is unclear.

Against this backdrop, we will engage in a conversation related to the bigger issues in education, as we feel Gen AI has brought us to a juncture where critical distinctions need to be made or understood. For example, education and learning. Are they synonymous, or is there a difference? Does the distinction matter and why? Why is it relevant to the current Gen AI climate and the future of learning (or education)? We will draw upon the principles of heutagogy and their parallels to the pandemic pedagogy. We will revisit the role social media tools played, along with smartphones during this time and their alignment to heutagogy. We will dare to stargaze on mobile and personalised instances on Gen AI and their implicationson education. We conclude that the future of education in the Gen AI realm is on learner-centred, regulated and determined principles. Principles that are built on partnership, trust, criticality, kindness, hope, and authenticity, which help enable learner voice in their journey of learning to become and be.