Thierry Mocktail team

This course has been a very rich and valuable experience, that I wasn’t really expecting. Our group meetings, with very nice people from different backgrounds and cultures (Mirna, Cath, Musa, Torkel, Haleluya, Antonio, Wallace…), the subjects we studied, the PBL and fish model, the texts we read and the documents our group produced gave me a huge amount of practical, theoretical and personal input.

After 30 years of teaching, it’s easy to fall into a routine, using the same recipes, the same tricks, but this course made me think outside the box, wanting to explore new roads, implementing new teaching strategies. The place of AI, too important not to learn more about it, how to use it and not fight against it, scaffolding, a basic knowledge that you don’t necessarily think of after many years of teaching, , learning how to learn together by including the students in the learning process from the beginning of the course. All these were key moments of this course

I’m sure that everything I discovered, learned during this course will from now on influence the way I teach, the way I interact with my students, how I design my lessons whether on campus (most of my teaching) or online (I have 2 online courses and I will definitely going to reorganise them to make room for some of the knowledge acquired in this course : working on a trust teacher-student, collaborating in a group, synchronous/asynchronous teaching, using new tools like Padlet, Miro, Canva…). I knew that these tools existed, but I was perhaps a little bit afraid to use them (either because I didn’t know how to use them or because I didn’t want to make things difficult for myself or my students). But this course gave me the envy to really using all this tools to increase the interaction students-teacher-students, putting the students more in the centre, making them more active than passive learners.

Today, this technology has become inevitable, although it can sometimes be a little frightening as we get older, for fear of not being able to master it, of seeing students who are much more at ease with it, or on the contrary, being unable to use it. But the potential for teaching in this technology is so great that it would be a shame not to take full advantage of it, either for reshaping your way of teaching or engaging more your students. But it’s important for our universities to start taking AI seriously, and above all to start thinking about how to integrate it into teacher training. I am surprised, here in Sweden, a country that has long been technologically advanced, that this is not yet really in force. Even though the issue of AI has become a fairly hot topic at our meetings, we are moving forward slowly.

After this course, I’m first going to take a step back before thinking again about all the implications this course may have for my future teaching, extract the best ideas, that I would or should use in my class. And I will definitely reshape some of my courses, introducing scaffolding, implanting the use of AI for my different assignments, using news interactive tools… In short, try to become a more modern and effective teacher. It gave me so many new insights about my own teaching, realizing the depth of what I could do compare to what I do.

To wrap up, I would say it was a great adventure that I would personally recommend to many of my colleagues, who are often in the same situation as me, full of knowledge and experience, but who are looking for new ideas in a world, especially a technological world, that is changing at the speed of light.

Thank you for this experience.

In our group, PBL 6, we considered the use of AI in teaching & learning, focusing on different questions such as:

How can we ensure ethical use of AI in an online space / online classroom?

What is the role of AI in the future (in teaching)?

What are the IP implications related AI outputs, especially creative outputs?

What effect does AI have on our critical thinking as humans?

Can it be used to expand knowledge / or as a shortcut?

How to create contextualised / Personalised assignments (Authentic tasks …which may not be able to be answered easily by AI)?

I was mainly interested in the use or prevention of the use of AI in creating assessments. As a French teacher, if I decide to find assessments that AI will not be able to answer, I should:

-require personal reflections or experiences: “it is also an opportunity to help students think more deeply about their learning and make meaningful connections between their classes and their lives”. (Dr Catlin Tucker)

-let them prepare a topic at home with whatever they want to use and then, without computer in groups, in the classroom, ask specific questions about the topic

-have oral examination (including questions that they did not prepare)

-incorporate creative tasks (a teacher asking students to listen to a podcast/watch a video related to a topic they are learning about can encourage students to create a visual representation of what they are learning in the form of a concept map or sketch note, or an artistic timeline on a piece of paper that combines drawings, dates, and key information. I do that in my class about the French Africa, they must draw a diagram representing la Françafrique, France’s sphere of influence over former French and (also French speaking) Belgian colonies in sub-Saharan Africa. I tried myself with different GAI tools without getting anything interesting and complete, which makes this kind of assessment satisfying.

-incorporate Peer Interaction or Collaboration: when students work together, they benefit from their peers’ support and diverse perspectives, reducing their reliance on AI to complete tasks. Collaborative activities—like group discussions, peer feedback sessions, or cooperative learning tasks—result in a learning environment where students share ideas and problem-solve. Example: In a French class, students can work in small groups to watch a video or analyse pieces of artwork from the French culture. Using the reciprocal teaching strategy, each student would take on a role -summarizer, questioner, clarifier or predictor- to guide the group’s discussion of the media in French.

-challenge students to justify their process: asking students to explain and justify their decision-making process encourages deeper reflection and critical thinking, making it much harder for AI to replicate their work. A teacher can challenge students to record a short video explaining how they solved a problem as if teaching it to a younger student. In the video, students would walk through the process step-by-step, using examples and language that are accessible and easy for younger students to understand.

-ask about details or specific examples that I used in my courses

Every teacher should see AI as a useful tool for improving teaching (Bommenel, E., & Forsyth, R. (2023). The potential impact of AI tools on assessment.), learning to master it, or at least understanding how to use it, so that students understand that this tool, which is now here to stay and perhaps to rule, is not necessarily seen by teachers in a negative light, but as complementary learning tool.

A whole new world has opened to me thanks to topic 4, and I fully intend to put into practice what we’ve been talking about. Not only in designing a new kind of assessment, but also by structuring my lessons differently.

(Dr Catlin Tucker, “Elevating Educational design with AI: Making learning accessible, inclusive and equitable” ‎ Impress (December 20, 2024)

https://ju.se/portal/educate/en/guides/artificial-intelligence/preventing-and-detecting-unauthorised-use-of-ai.html

Bommenel, E., & Forsyth, R. (2023). The potential impact of AI tools on assessment.

https://www.education.lu.se/artikel/potential-impact-ai-tools-assessment

Really recognizing the value of becoming part of a learning community and experience the benefits of social learning is not always something you think about when you engage in studies. Or an aspect that as a teacher you will consider when having new students starting a course. But there are occasions in my classes when real collaborative learning takes place, that moved my own thinking forward.

For instance, during my french course on “la Françafrique” (the course deals with France and Francophone African countries from the perspective of their joint history and political, economic, cultural, and socio-linguistic aspects) , I give students ( divided into small groups of 3 or 4) a core concept or a theme (in this case, for instance : la colonisation inversée/reverse colonisation, le syndrome de Fachoda/Fachoda syndrom, l’aide au développement liée/development aid linked to french intrests…) and in each group , they have to draw a concept map together, linking ideas with arrows and short explanations.Then one member presents to the class his group’s work on the blackboard using a projector. We always have, then, a prompt debrief together about the connections that they made during the exercise (and now I learned that it’s also a good idea to ask them also about the connections they wouldn’t have thought of alone).This exercise work very well according to my experience, because students see that others bring valuable perspectives and learning deepens when ideas are shared.

Sometimes, but rarely, this exercise fails. It happens that students are not thinking together although they are working together. As Ringer, M., Gordon, R., & Vandenbussche, B. (2022) wrote(1)  : “the group’s atmosphere does not feel safe enough for participants to think or speak freely. Despite individual participants thinking useful thoughts, they are not made available to the group. Individual thinking may be creative, but collective thinking is impaired because the thoughts of one member do not become a stimulus for the thinking of others.”

 Another example is the written skills course, where a group of 2 or 3 people go over each other’s texts, correcting any errors (spelling, grammar, syntax, etc.) and explaining these errors. If I simply give them their text back with my corrections, and ask them to correct it again, it won’t be the same thing. They will inevitably be missing their classmates’ thoughts or points of view.

The ways of collaborating that we experimented with during this course ONL251, using various tools such as Padlet, Google slide, with the ‘leader’ giving us an overview of the topic, with guiding questions (that every “student” worked out) , and then sharing a padlet board or a google slide document (e.g.) where each person had to post their solution in real-time or later, was a perfect example of what I could do in my class. Collaborating in real-time, adding ideas, resources. This kind of exercise gives deeper understanding of the topic (whatever it is), enhances communication and teamwork skills, should increase confidence in using collaborative tech tools (as long as the teacher masters them and takes time to explain how they work in a relatively easy way) and the students experience giving and receiving constructive feedback from their peers. Something I’m definitely going to try at the start of the academic year with my two distance learning courses.

(1)Ringer, M., Gordon, R., & Vandenbussche, B. (2022) .Igniting the collective spark: The relevance of thinking together

I’m often in a position where I must share my lessons with my colleagues. There is often a rotation within our language department, which means that we are obliged to prepare courses for a few semesters and then hand them over to other colleagues.

The problems occurring are numerous, even if culture of sharing among teachers is more frequent in Sweden, where transparency is a way of life, compared to France :  afraid of being judged and getting a bad feedback, too busy to take time to explain to colleagues, different pedagogic or way of seeing the problems, jealousy between colleagues, a certain reluctance to share work that has taken a long time to complete, lack of encouragement from the people in charge…

It would be nice to have some guidelines or tools to try and solve these problems.Like for instance having a common tool (platform, teaching blog) where we could go and contribute, and gives advice or feedback on everybody’s documents.As a native French speaker, I often come across language mistakes in documents written by my fellow teachers of french who do not have French as their mother tongue. And it’s not always easy to tell them without appearing to criticize them.But it would be another tool, implying an overload of work (when we have already many digital tools like platforms to take care of).

Having workshop where every teacher shares its own work or it’s way of working with tips, advice could be another alternative (we have started to do that last term and it was interesting to see how other teachers reflect about their own teaching, and the methods they use). But it requires a willingness and a trust of everybody.

Another interesting aspect of this topic was to understand the world of licensed resources and be able to always stand on the right side when using material on internet (pictures as far as I am concerned) . A thought-provoking exercise.