Quick Insight: Babe Sheba on Genuinely Integrating AI into Higher Ed

The exact role of artificial intelligence in higher education (and society itself) is currently being written, with sincere predictions veering from catastrophe to paradise gathering the greatest visibility. In this Quick Insight video, Baba Sheba, director of digital innovation and transformation at City Saint George’s, University of London, argues that with the digital age upon us regardless, here the one unacceptable response is inaction. He gives some real-life examples of how artificial intelligence is being used to the benefit of higher education.

A transcript of his remarks appears below the video.

I’m Baba Sheba. I’m the director of digital innovation and transformation at City Saint George’s, University of London, and my work there is to coordinate the academic efforts across the institution, particularly in the areas of digital transformation, artificial intelligence and so on. So all the different ingredients that we need in order to be much more digitally capable as a university.

Now, in terms of how we enable experimentation at scale within the university environment, we’ve been progressing this through a combination of approaches. One of them is by prioritizing the need to shift people’s mindset across the university. And a different sort of instrument that we use for those sort of activities a really good example is something that I call the digital dialogues.

The dialogues are a series of activities, like there might be the gathering of people across the university just to have conversations about specific sort of team athlete areas.

So as a good example, in September last year, we ran an AI day that was focused on assessment and we brought folks together from different faculties within the university just to have discussions around the implications of assessment, implications of AI for assessment in their respective domains.

But in terms of actual experimentation, I think one of the things that has been missing in the past is supporting those localized experimentations. So those might be things that individual academics are doing within their respective area.

So, a lot of my work has been around how we identify those pockets of innovation and then support them and where there is evidence that the innovation can lend itself to scale, then thinking about how we do that. So that might be the need to support at an infrastructure level.

A live example at the moment is that there are lots of AI-driven innovation within the university that require a coordinated sort of support at the infrastructure level. That might be things like AI enablement, particularly with sort of API enablement in a guard-railed way that allows for safe experimentation for those things, but also just identifying what’s working, what people are doing, where it might lend itself to copying, in all those areas. And we are beginning to see real impact there.

Just to give you a couple of examples, we’ve been working very closely with a few organizations like Sage Publishing, Wolfram Research Europe and Raspberry Pi Foundation recently. Now, one of the things we’ve been doing is building this suite of cognitive copilot, which are your AI-driven, Socratic-style learning companions that are able to act as a skills tutor to support a learner on their journey towards the sort of mastery, if you like, of a particular sort of foundational competency.

And a lot of our focus so far has been in the areas of critical thinking, computational thinking and AI literacy and all these sorts of ethical implications that we need to sort of embed into, into that. The approach has been to build, to iterate, to prototype, to learn and to see what we need to put in place within the university in order to enable this to move from a pilot phase into the sort of business-as-usual environment.

So that that’s one example of a sort of strategic innovation that brings together academia and technological innovators and industry together. But there are also some really good localized examples that have reached a point where they’re gaining momentum within the university.