The Project
This project is developing and evaluating a prototype AI system designed to support and enhance the most important feature of the collegiate university: interdisciplinary discussion.
While more typical examples of AI for education tend to focus on individual experience – personalised assessments, customised feedback, or one-to-one conversations with a chatbot – this project will explore the potential for AI to cultivate the kind of human-to-human relationships and networks that are vital to university learning. The collegiate university has a long history of providing the space for multidisciplinary communities and the exchange of diverse ideas, however, postgraduate students often have less opportunities to benefit from such discussions, and researchers are often under pressure to prioritise project targets.
This project will therefore develop a proof-of-concept AI that can support both postgraduate students and researchers to engage in interdisciplinary conversations about their work, therefore enriching the student experience and deepening exchange and understanding across disciplinary boundaries. It will produce a functioning prototype AI platform that can identify key themes from examples of writing, distinguish connections between themes, and produce a series of prompts that support users to discuss, debate, and connect their studies across diverse topics and themes.
The project is led by the Department of Education and supported by the AI and Machine Learning Competency Centre and the Centre for Teaching and Learning.
