 Let me introduce you to Amica, the world's most advanced humanoid robot. AI powered brain, facial recognition software to interact with humans and have intelligent conversations. Voice, vision, hearing, motorised body parts. It's no secret the machines are coming for our jobs. A recent OECD report forecasts that in the next five years, 30% of our jobs will be displaced. So the burning question is, in the age of artificial intelligence or AI, how can we as educators continue to be human? The answer is quite simple. We need to embrace lifelong learning. So in this presentation, I'll aim to highlight the importance of adopting AI, meanwhile upskilling so that we can differentiate ourselves from the machines. By the end, you'll have a clear understanding of what you need to do to stay relevant in your jobs and organisations. Have you used any of these applications in the past 24 hours? Notting heads, quick show of hands, and have a look around. Thank you, hands down. Well, all of these applications, and of course, hundreds and thousands, many more, use artificial intelligence. So to have a quick scheme of what we've got there, we see home or personal assistance. We see entertainment streaming services, social networks, navigation systems, online shopping, internet search, biometric systems, health and fitness, the list goes on. The reality is many of us are already using artificial intelligence every day as we just demonstrated, and you're aware of. This is a big trend, potentially as significant as the internet boom was back in the 1990s, and we need to pay attention. We need to harness it. The race is on to own the future, and the winner takes all. I mean, just as an example, Microsoft recently invested around $10 billion in open AI, the creators of ChatGPT and Dali. And this year to date, these six major tech companies have collectively added around $4 trillion to their market capital value. It's a lot of zeros. A lot of those gains can be attributed to, you guess it, recent gains in artificial intelligence. In response to Microsoft's massive success with Bing powered by GPT, Google declared a code red. Co-founders Larry and Sergey, they rushed back into the office to save the day for Google. They released Bard. Bard has been pitched as a rival to ChatGPT and Bing, but the launch, the live launch didn't go so well, and you may have recalled. It was actually a fail when Bard gave up some misinformation to a nine-year-old regarding NASA's James Webb telescope. And soon after Google's parent company Alphabet, it shared something like $100 billion in market capital value. So we're talking big states here. People are investing a lot of funds and resources, and many of us are paying attention as to where this is headed. As far as effectively implementing artificial intelligence in education, there's going to be a lot of challenges. However, I believe the fundamental challenge here is aligning the objectives and mission of business with that of society. We're going to need some strong AI controls to safeguard and protect humanity because as it stands, there's no rules. There's no regulations. There's no laws which govern AI. Is this the Wild West? And who do you think is leading it? It's the tech giants. Have they been ethical in their mission to date? Absolutely not. I don't think we can entrust the future of education to these kind of companies. It's up to us. It's our responsibility as educators to ensure a better future for humanity. In the 1950s, science fiction author Isaac Asimov, he published a novel titled I, Robot. And in it, he detailed what's been referred to as the laws of robotics, often cited in books and film and other media. It's also influenced conversations around ethics in artificial intelligence. Now, without reading that, in essence, to summarize it and distill it for you, the laws were about ensuring that robots weren't harm or injure humans, protect humanity, and essentially a bias. That's all well and good in a science fiction novel, but we need something concrete for the real world today and entered the future. Thankfully, the European Union has plans to enact the world's first comprehensive AI laws, currently in draft scheduled for approval before the end of this year. I ask you this. What goes into the massive data sets used to train the AI systems? Any ideas? Algorithms. And what are algorithms? They're essentially opinions embedded in code. The data sets are typically scraped from the internet. That's a relatively quick process, but one in which the AI absorbs the biases and the stereotypes that exist on the web and mirror society with all the ugliness baked in. This is a process of, and you may have heard of, algorithmic bias. So we see this kind of thing in action on our social media feeds as well, where we train the machine and over time it becomes more intelligent, but we're part of the problem here because we're reinforcing and perpetuating the biases that exist in the real world and on the web. Did you see this image circulating online a little earlier this year? There was an explosion at the Pentagon in the United States and at the time, multiple news sources reported it as a real image, a real event, and the markets panicked. They rebounded soon after in a matter of minutes actually when the image was in the event were confirmed fake, AI generated. But during a couple of minutes on the S&P 500 index, we saw a market capital swing of $500 billion or half a trillion dollars. So this is just one stock market, one index, but I believe it illustrates the potential dangers of misinformation by AI. I mean, we're only human and the AI is becoming very intelligent quite quickly. So how are we meant to know the difference between what is real and what is fake? In education, the stakes are even higher because educators and learners are going to need really good critical thinking, evaluation and judgment skills to know what is fact and what is fiction. There's so many opportunities for us to do good with AI in education. I see an open door here, I really do. This is our time. To be honest, the traditional education model it's old, it's broken, it's ready for disruption. So, you know, I think AI presents an opportunity for us as educators. It's like a gift. We just need to know how to harness it. This is the opportunity to reimagine education as we know it. You've no doubt heard of Chat GPT. Who's used it in the past 24 hours? Quick show of hands. Well, it uses a large language model to create a brain that responds to questions that humans ask. We've seen an exponential growth and improvement in large language models such as Chat GPT in a short space of time in terms of the volume of data and the parameters that they're trained on. I mean, to put this in perspective for you, how quickly Chat GPT has improved a year ago that had the intelligence of a nine-year-old. Today, it's got an IQ of 114, which means it's smarter than an average adult. Okay, it can pass SAT exams, which are used for college admission in the United States. It can pass the bar, which means theoretically it could practice law. We have a tool such as Chat GPT, the mind boggles. There are just so many possibilities as to how we as educators could harness it and use it to improve the quality of education. I won't read these, but if you want to have a quick skim, some ideas for educators to improve what they're doing with education. And here's some ideas for learners who are set to be benefactors as well. The learning science says that learners are more likely to engage and learn when we design learning experiences that go beyond text. So that means they need to include multimedia. That may be an image, a video, a sound, an animation, or a combination of those elements. So with that in mind, I've got a few AI tools to generate media in mind that you could use in combination with Moodle. You've no doubt heard of Chat GPT. Dali is the sister project from OpenAI. Essentially, it uses natural language descriptions or text-based prompts to create original art. And it does that in a matter of seconds. So the prompt here given to Dali is a cute tropical fish in an aquarium on a dark blue background. We get this and we could use any role of those images potentially in our course to heighten the engagement of our learners. Another tool, this is called MERF, M-U-R-F. It's a text-to-speech AI speech generator. Great for presentations, podcasts, e-learning as well. So there's just a few screen grabs there just to talk you through the interface and how it works. In essence, you choose from a library of AI voices, control how the voice sounds, preview that output, and then you can layer the audio with other media elements in a learning object. So the other elements, of course, it may be an image, a video, an animation. Export the file, upload it to Moodle for use. This is my favorite tool. It's called Synthesia. Does anyone use this to come across it? Great for creating really professional videos for learning and you don't need to be a professional video producer. That's got, I would say, a PowerPoint or like a storyline sort of interface about it. Very intuitive, very graphical. You select your template. You choose your avatar from its library. So that includes obviously, the avatar will include the person, the video, the voice to go with it. Choose your gender, nationality, age, even what they wear can be varied by industry sector, et cetera. It's got a GPT style prompter. So you put in a bit of a story or some sort of background for machine and it will help you craft the narrative which is converted from text to speech. So you can download, I'll say one other thing, it supports over 100 languages and accents as well. But you export the video which can be uploaded of course straight into Moodle or you can link or embed via LTI or H5P. So there's options with this tool. That's excellent. Now with all of these tools, there's more than a few things to contemplate. With chat GPT, we need to recognize that it's not 100% accurate. In fact, it's known to hallucinate, it's known to lie and misinform us. It prefers to just serve up something, anything that's close enough than to not respond to our prompts or our queries, our questions. So we need to recognize that and you've probably seen it hallucinate or try to lie or trick you. And in fact, when you launch the application, there's a warning to that effect. As I mentioned, by virtue of algorithmic bias, there will be inbuilt biases and stereotypes that are really just a mirror of the web and society. And I question whether we can use it as a source of truth. I mean, humans have a habit in a history of deferring to new technologies. I mean, use Wikipedia, use Google search as examples where over time we learn on them heavily as the source of the information we reference and call upon. I'd be concerned if we fall into a similar trap with chat GPT. It can't be the source of truth. We need to go beyond the surface and dig a bit deeper here. And on the same token, is it dumbing us down as educators and as learners where, you know, we're not thinking deep or critical and we defer to the AI. This tool and the others, the media creation tools will require, you know, a smart device and internet connection, digital literacy skills and a range of other skills to, you know, be adopted and used effectively. Right, so what about AI and Moodle? There's not a lot going on just yet and you may realize that and appreciate it. However, that means there's just so much opportunity here for us to build. You would recognize this as learning analytics has been around in Moodle core for more than a few versions, many versions actually. And it uses machine learning predictive models to assist educators to make informed decisions and intervene in a timely manner. What we're looking at there in case you haven't used learning analytics in Moodle, that's a learning insight that's referred to us. And it's a report that goes to educators and this particular predictive model is students at risk of dropping out. So the educator is able to action in one of a few ways. Obviously send a private text-based message to any one of these students to say perhaps, hey, notice you haven't logged in for a while or haven't posted that forum, submitted that assignment. Is everything okay? Can I offer a bit more assistance to help you re-engage with the course? Because in our mind as educators, this is the worst possible outcome would be a student dropping out and disengaging. Educators can also feed back to the machine and say, you know, that insight was especially helpful or no, it wasn't. It was not useful. And what that feedback does, it trains the machine to become more intelligent and offer better insights in the future. Look, beyond standard Moodle, there's a few AI plugins already in the Moodle plugins directory. So we've got here an AI chat block. Like any block, you could position this on your site home, your dashboard, in a course or anywhere else you could locate a block. The idea is, of course, that users of your Moodle site could receive support, AI support 24.7.365. There's options to customize the persona of the AI agent and the prompts that you give it will influence the text that it outputs. A bit like you do with chat GPT where you can assign a role and a context and it helps in the quality of the response given by the agent. So you might say something with the setup along the lines of imagine, you are an expert Moodle support agent assisting educators and administrators and learners in a school or university or workplace setting. In your responses to their queries, reference Moodle docs and you'd provide the URL to that. So that would be maybe something you would configure. This one here is the text to image plugin. And it does what it says. This would be made available via Moodle's file picker. So just imagine anywhere you would browse to pick a file via Moodle's file picker, you could do the same here via AI. You put in the text place prompt. It will do the AI magic to generate the images on the fly, select the one you want to use and put that in your course. I mean, that could be a file resource. That could be, Jesus, it could be a label. It could be part of a section heading. You could attach it to a forum post or a quiz. And this one here does what it says as well. Text to questions generator. You use this with the quiz activity. So the idea is you tell a bit of a story to the AI. Tell it how many questions to generate and click the button. It goes away and does the magic. It comes back with the questions. It will locate those in your course question bank and you pick the ones you want to use as party quiz activity. Right, these next couple of slides here aren't third party plugins. They're not in Moodle standard open source LMS. They're part of the premium learning solution Moodle Workplace, which you might be using you may have heard of. This is a dynamic rule. And without going into the actual details of it, I appreciate that may be a little bit small for some of you. Dynamic rules can be manually created by administrator to automate system workflows. So that may include the allocation of training, notifications and reminders, and the issuance of certifications and badges among maybe hundreds of thousands of rules that could be configured. But it needs to be manually set up by a human. So I imagine if AI could help things along here and give Moodle the intelligence to just know what rules to create or to suggest them and recommend them to speed things up and make the magic happen. It'd be a big time saver for admins. On the same token, this one's from Moodle Workplace. This we're looking at is the report builder or we're in the process of building a report. But again, this needs to be manually created via an administrator. It uses a graphical interface, but it does take some skill and knowledge and some time to build these reports. The reports can be assigned to an audience and then scheduled to report via email. But again, that takes time and maybe complex for some administrators. So this could be a big time saver. And overall, if we could have some help from AI, it would simplify and improve the user experience certainly for report building and dynamic rules. Moving right along. This feature doesn't exist anywhere yet in Moodle. As far as I know, not in core anyway, but we know that every good web application now has an AI chat bot. So I reckon Moodle needs one as well. This is a mock-up of how it might look for an educator. So I see the AI assistant for educators acting a bit like a mentor. It could assist us on a little scale or a big scale. Anything as small as content or ideas for a learning experience or resource to a subject, a topic, a course, geez, a program, a curriculum, a syllabus from the big to the small. And on the same token, learners deserve their own AI assistant. It'd have a different role in a different context, of course. I think it would be more like a tutor. But use your imagination. It could be on a range of topics here from creative writing to mathematics to computer coding, languages, et cetera. This doesn't exist yet either, but I reckon we need it. It's called adaptive learning. And we see it beyond education, to be honest, in many places and contexts. Actually, we're familiar with it on internet and entertainment streaming services such as Netflix and Spotify. Because you've watched or listened to A or B or C, we recommend XYZ. So imagine if AI could give Moodle the intelligence and Moodle knew a learner's interests and needs and learning history. It could offer future course recommendations. And they'd serve up on a screen a little bit like this. They'd be personalized, individualized just in time and overall that represents a more impactful learner experience. That's adaptive learning. Okay, so what does the future hold? Well, according to that OECD report I mentioned a little while earlier, recent developments in artificial intelligence have increased the demand for two broad skill sets. Firstly, the skills to develop the AI applications and then secondly, the skills required to adopt and use those systems. This is the first skill set. So really deep technical knowledge skills and understandings. And again, it may be a small percentage, maybe a fraction of us that will need these skills. Many of us fall into this second category of skill set. Okay, we're going to be at the cold face having to adopt, effectively use and engage with the AI applications for the purpose of improving education. So here's the short list of the skills that we need or are going to need according to that report. So a basic knowledge of AI, what it is and how it works. Digital literacy skills, we've mentioned this already. And if we don't already, we're going to need skills of analysis, problem-solving, critical thinking and judgment, creativity, communication, teamwork and multitasking. So to pause for a moment and perhaps just self-evaluate your skills versus what you see here on the slide. How do you go? Can you tick each of these skills off at this point in time or not? Well, if you can, that's great. If you've done that sort of critical skills gap analysis on yourself, if you possess those attributes, you're in a really strong position to adopt AI for the betterment of education in your job and your organization. If, however, there's a few gaps there in what you currently possess, that's okay as well. Recognize that and perhaps that presents an opportunity for some upskilling. So artificial intelligence, there's no doubt it's transforming the way we teach and learn, live and work. It presents an opportunity for each of us to embrace lifelong learning. There's three things we can do right away. Firstly, would be to re-skill if need be. Based on, I suppose, that preceding slide there, there's any gaps in your knowledge and skills that may mean reading a book, attending a course or participating in a conference such as Global Moot. As far as books and courses go, if you're stuck for ideas, a good place to start would be prompt engineering. Check that out. Secondly, we need to adopt artificial intelligence in our jobs and organizations with the intention of improving the quality of education. And thirdly, we need to encourage and support our learners so that they are positively able to engage with AI. That's the challenge. Thank you for listening.