As part of the GenAI and education event series, Digital Education are running a workshop on Exploring the ethics of AI with games-based learning. It will be held in person at the IOE, on Wednesday 26th November 12-2pm. Register online via the event page.

Participants will get the opportunity to find out about two games that are currently being developed in collaboration with staff and students. Originating as a UCL Changemakers project, the games tackle different ethical issues of Generative AI and uses cards and tabletop mechanics to encourage discussion and critical reflection. Taking a games-based learning approach allows the ethics of Generative AI to be embedded into teaching in a fun and accessible way, allowing players to experiment and experience conflict and different kinds of failure in low stakes environments.

Come and try out:

AI Empire

A card game, in which players make decisions on how to host and run your own generative AI model. As you develop your model you will draw on global resources. Will you work with or against other players to collect, store and manage data? Can you be the first to develop your model without running out of energy or water?

TP Traveller

Advances in quantum mechanics have led to breakthroughs allowing teleportation. As companies rapidly roll out services for individuals and businesses to use, things are moving very quickly with unintended impacts for you and the rest of society. How will you respond to the hype for this new disruptive technology?

The session will include a brief introduction to the games, a chance to experience a short playthrough/couple of rounds with each one, and the opportunity to give feedback and find out more about using the games in your teaching.  Reserve a place via the event page.

Rebecca Wilson based in the UCL Digital Education Team and Theo Bryer an academic based in the IOE have collaborated for many years developing creative approaches to working with digital technology. In 2017 they visited Bengaluru and worked in schools and a children’s home making films with young people.

In this blog entry they write about their research trip to Kathmandu, Nepal in March 2025 working with teachers, MA students and primary school children. The project was funded by a grant from the IOE Global Engagement Fund.

Group film project at Kathmandu University

We arrived in Kathmandu to find ourselves in the aftermath of a violent demonstration and in the midst of an evening curfew. After a long detour we finally arrived to the peace and tranquility of our traditional Newari style guest house in Patan, on the outskirts of Kathmandu.

After this dramatic beginning and despite the air quality being the worst in the world during the time we were there, the next ten days unfolded as planned. We participated in course development meetings and co-taught a series of practice-based workshops, with MA Education students in Kathmandu University and at a local school. These workshops were co-designed with our academic colleague Mr Sushrut Acharya. He lectures on similar teacher education programmes to us and was interested in the creative pedagogies proposed in Theo’s chapter: Multimodal meaning-making through digital media [Bryer, T., Pitfield, M., & Coles, J. (2024). Drama at the Heart of English: Transforming Practice in the Secondary. Routledge.

Sushrut Acharya Lecturer at Kathmandu University

Our aim was to focus on what Sushrut refers to as ‘transformative teaching methods’ that the students, who were all teachers, might adapt in their school contexts. These involved students exploring the potential of digital production and drama to teach aspects of literary texts but with a broader application to cross-curricular teaching too. We invited them to engage in a series of drama activities and then to shoot and edit very short films inspired by an excerpt of Chapter 5 from Shelley’s Frankenstein; a response to the question: How do we know the creature is alive?

… the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

Below are links to three of the short films teachers made in an afternoon workshop.
Frankenstein
Alive
The Creature

We were also fortunate to have the opportunity to run a drama and digital photography workshop with some amazing primary pupils and their teachers in the Genuine Secondary School in Bhaktapur on the outskirts of Kathmandu. We worked on a drama inspired by a traditional story exploring bravery, tenacity and focus with a class of enthusiastic 10-year-olds.

Photos taken by young people on iPads of our drama activity in school in Kathmandu.

Our ten days collaborating with teachers and academic colleagues was an inspirational experience, and our active learning approach was welcomed and co-developed in this very different context. This collaboration will continue to develop, exploring the possibilities of future international partnerships supported by the Prospero.digital platform. We are also in discussion with our UCL Nepali colleague Dr Ranjita Dhital (Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Health Studies, Arts and Sciences BASc) about developing digital arts and drama-based interventions in Nepal and the UK.

Drama workshop at Kathmandu university

We were interested in aspects of the performative culture that we encountered in public spaces, including dancing and music-making that was often being recorded. The Botanical Gardens and Garden of Dreams provided a filmic backdrop to these activities. The teachers and children that we worked with seemed very responsive to working with digital technology in creative ways.

What inspired us most was the ethos of the teachers and academic staff that we engaged with; the ways that relationships and care clearly sustained them in challenging circumstances, expressed through sharing of food and many acts of kindness. This experience gave us a significant perspective on our own work and context.

Lunchtime feast brought in by students

Rebecca Wilson has worked for over 20 years as part of the Initial Teacher Education programme at the IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society – the team rated ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted in 2024. As part of the UCL Digital Education Team, Rebecca continues to promote the creative use of new technologies as a teaching and learning tool and seeks to develop the skills and knowledge of UCL staff and students.

Dr Theo Bryer runs the English with Drama PGCE and the Creativity from Theory to Practice module, part of the MA English Education and MA Digital Media: Education to which Rebecca also contributes. Theo researches the relationship between live and recorded drama and the ways that assuming a role can support learning.

This summer, as part of the ExtendED Learning programme, the Digital Skills Development team is offering an exciting opportunity for taught students to get a glimpse into the world of a data analyst.

Storytelling through data: Think like a data analyst is a two-day workshop in which students will uncover and communicate the stories held within data. They will learn the basics of data analysis and visualisation using Microsoft Power BI and tell the compelling story of their data by using ‘Pechakucha’ presentation techniques and designing impactful infographics with the online tool Canva.  They will undertake a data analysis group project, investigating real-world data and presenting their findings as a team.

This opportunity is specifically offered to postgraduate taught and undergraduate students as part of the wider ExtendED Learning programme to provide additional opportunities to develop skills beyond the curriculum.

For full details and to book, view this event on our Events calendar.

The following is a guest post by Lucy Porte who is studying for an MSc in Health Informatics at UCL. In January, Lucy travelled all the way from Manchester to join us at #LearnHack in London. Here is her report:

Up Up and Away! 

I had the best weekend recently at #LearnHack 7.0, sponsored by the UCL Centre for Engineering Education and hosted by the School of Management. A distance-learning student, I could not resist the temptation to do a research based hackathon from the centre of Canary Wharf and so headed down to London for the weekend. When we got to the 50th floor of One Canada Square, I knew my decision had payed off. 

One Canada Square. Credit: Janina Dewitz

 The themes this year were Generative AI and assessment and feedback, to tie into #LearnHack’s overall focus on innovation in a research and education setting. There were so many different parts of the event, from board game sessions to brainstorming workshops, pizza breaks to Brewdog pints, an evening seeing the winter lights display and even a competition to see who could make the best AI-generated artwork. This was all alongside the main activity, the creation of our #LearnHack artefacts, which we would get to present at the end of the three days. 

Everyone having fun. Credit: Janina Dewitz

Having only attended one hackathon before and being fairly out of my depth, I was quite apprehensive about this element. Luckily there was a range of amazing project topics to choose from, including game design, UX design, qualitative research pipelines, a tool to perform automated marking and a tool to summarise biomedical research papers. I really struggled with choosing one of these, and spent a lot of the first two days discussing projects with people and gathering ideas for implementation. In the end I chose the last project because it tied into my studies in Health Informatics. 

Protocol Optimiser. Credit: Amy Li

Amy, Jenny and myself soon got to work creating a prototype for our idea. Thanks to Amy’s extensive background work, we were quickly able to focus on our objectives and train a ChatGPT to extract method steps from biomedical papers according to a framework we had found online. Because of ChatGPT’s learning capacity we could iteratively improve the tool to create better results and even evaluate its own performance. We were all very surprised to be granted first prize, which included $1000 of AWS tokens and UCL Changemakers funding to continue the project! 

The team! Credit: Janina Dewitz

We are going to be presenting a poster about our idea at the BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium in April, and can’t wait to see what comes out of the Changemakers funding, but will be sure to feed back! I honestly didn’t realise I could get so much out of one weekend with the Digital Education team, and would encourage everyone to subscribe to the #LearnHack mailing list, so you can be first in line for next year! 

Lucy Porte 

Photo by Headway on Unsplash

Online Learning is a rapidly expanding area in higher education around the world. While it became a necessity during the pandemic, an increasing number of students and short course learners are choosing to study their degrees fully online. Currently UCL offers around 40 postgraduate programmes with a significant distance learning component, just over half of which are delivered fully remotely.

As such, we’re setting up an Online Learning Community of Practice (OLCoP; catchy, we know) to bring together staff who teach and support online programmes, modules, and short courses at UCL.

At this stage, OLCoP is an informal group, and we hope to use regular meetings and the Teams space to:

• Share best practices in online teaching and learning
• Build a communication hub between academic departments, central, and local services
• Identify and recommend professional development opportunities
• Disseminate new and changing information relating to policy, quality assurance, pedagogies, technology, and more
• Ensure that issues relating to equity, diversity, and inclusion in online learning are properly represented
• Gather actionable feedback from staff and students regarding online learning experiences.

You can join our Teams space to see information about upcoming events.

We will be holding our first meeting of OLCoP on 13th March 2024 at 2:30pm.

This first meeting will take place as a hybrid event and act as an opportunity to get to know other staff teaching and developing online courses.

Those who wish to attend in person can join us at the training suite at the Anna Freud Centre, not too far from King’s Cross station, while those who prefer to join online can do so via Teams. We will have facilitators in both spaces.

You can register to attend using the form linked above.

We hope you can join us!

On the weekend 26 – 28 January I helped to facilitate and took part in the seventh iteration of #LearnHack.

#LearnHack is a community hackathon organised by an interdisciplinary UCL team. The original event was held in November 2015 in collaboration with UCL Innovation and Enterprise at IDEALondon. The 2024 version was the first time it has been run as a hybrid event. It was held over the weekend of 26-28 January in the School of Management department at Canary Wharf in collaboration with the Faculty of Engineering, Digital Education and UCL Changemakers. Participants came from 12 different UCL departments, alumni, and external guests from Jisc. Everyone was invited to submit project proposals for how to improve UCL based on pre-agreed themes. The themes this year were AI and Assessment with overlap between the two.

Being fairly new to UCL I had not come across this event before, but when I was told about the ethos behind it which is to empower a community of staff, students, researchers and alumni to tackle challenges collaboratively and creatively, it sounded right up my street. I am a big advocate of playful learning and creating a safe space for experimentation and failure. I also liked the interdisciplinary approach which encourages people from all backgrounds to work together and learn from each other.  Anyone with a valid UCL email address can submit a project proposal to be worked on over the weekend and anyone can run a learning session to share their skills or ideas with participants. Everyone is encouraged to attend welcome talks on the Friday evening to hear about the different projects and get to know each other and form teams. Participants have the weekend to work on their chosen project and also take part in learning sessions.

I’m always up for a challenge, so I not only put forward a project proposal and ran a learning session, but I also helped to facilitate the online attendees on the Friday evening and Saturday morning. This meant it was a packed weekend and I got to experience all the different elements of #LearnHack, including joining online on the second day. 

View from UCL School of Management at Canary Wharf.

The venue was amazing, with great views of London, and the School of Management spaces were perfect for collaboration and hybrid events. The learning sessions were great, I particularly enjoyed learning how to use Lumi and GitHub to create and host H5P activities outside of Moodle so that they can be shared externally. I also found out about the game that ARC had devised for engineers and developers to learn about the issues associated with generative AI where players can help prevent or create an AI Fiasco.

My own session on making a playful AI chatbot was run online but many people joined from the room. The session encouraged people to experiment with different types of chat bots and have a go at creating their own. We managed to create some interesting applications in the short time we had including a bot that accurately answered questions on using Moodle, Zoom and Turnitin. We also explored how a bot’s personality can impact a user’s interactions and perceptions on the accuracy of its responses and had some interesting discussions on some of the ethical issues involved with users uploading material to datasets.

In-between games, food and learning sessions, teams worked on five different projects. I was impressed with all the project teams and the work they managed to produce in such a short space of time. The winning team stood out in particular, as they created a working prototype using ChatGPT. Their project aims to reduce the time that medical science students spend manually searching through articles looking for replicable research. This team now have Student ChangeMaker funding to create an optimiser to filter through biomedical research papers and extract quality quantitative methods. It is hoped that the ‘protocol optimiser’ will streamline workflows for researchers and students to find suitable lab work. I am looking forward to following the development of their project and hopefully they will report back at a changemaker event later in the year.

#LearnHack 7 Feedback on participants ‘best bits’ of the event.

Despite smaller numbers of attendees than hoped, feedback from participants was positive with calls to raise awareness amongst the student population with promotion in freshers’ week and from careers to encourage students to join. Personally, I had a great time, although next time I wouldn’t try to do quite so much and would either stick to being involved in a project or helping to facilitate and run sessions. The Faculty of Engineering has already given the go ahead for #LearnHack8 and we are currently exploring possibilities with running some mini #LearnHack events before then, so watch this space for more details and if you have an idea for a project then get in touch.