AI in Higher Education
AI is not the threat. Intellectual passivity is.
Much of the conversation about generative AI in education has been driven by anxiety about cheating, detection and bans. We think the more useful question is what AI makes more important, not less. The answer is critical thinking, professional judgement, ethical reasoning and the capacity to sit with ambiguity and make a defensible decision. These are exactly the capabilities this centre exists to develop.
Seen through Perry's scheme, AI works well in the dualistic space. It can produce a technically competent answer to almost any question and can even set out several viewpoints. What it cannot do is exercise contextual judgement, weigh evidence against values, or commit to a position while staying open to being wrong. If an assessment can be answered from Perry's earliest positions, AI exposes the fact that it was never really developing students' thinking in the first place.
Not harder, more authentically human
AI-resistant pedagogy is not about making cheating harder. It is about designing learning where the developmental benefit comes from students doing the thinking themselves.
In self-feedback, students practise evaluative judgement. AI can give feedback, but students do not grow from receiving it. Read more
In game playing, physical cards, Monopoly, dice games and bingo all require presence. Read more
In creativity, nobody can outsource a model of their vision, whether it's built in LEGO or shown as an infographic.
In simulation and role-play, students make real-time decisions under uncertainty and work through competing stakeholder demands and ethical dilemmas in context.
When MBA students began treating ChatGPT as the source of correct answers, the response was to redesign the assessment rather than police it. Students produced an infographic analysing a company from an unusual employee perspective, and they had to build and justify their own analytical framework. See how TEACHER shaped the redesign
Using AI to develop intellectually
As early as February 2023, Jenni argued in Times Higher Education that ChatGPT should be a teaching tool, not a cheating tool. One example is asking students to compare their own answers with AI-generated ones, so that the AI output becomes a comparator for self-feedback rather than a substitute for thinking. Our free GenAI prompts build on this idea and generate self-feedback worksheets for teachers and students. Find the prompts
Read "ChatGPT as a teaching tool, not a cheating tool" (THE Campus, 2023)
Research on how educators responded
Let's chat about ChatGPT
What happened when ChatGPT landed in accounting classrooms? Karen McBride and Jenni Rose analysed reflections from 25 accounting academics across the UK, Ireland, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, along with five focus groups, captured as the technology first arrived. Educators described fears about academic integrity and a retreat to invigilated exams, uncertainty about ethics and very uneven institutional support. Many also saw a real opportunity to rethink assessment, through oral examinations, scaffolded tasks and asking students to critique and build on AI-generated content, approaches that develop the judgement future accountants will need. The paper is free to read.
McBride, K. and Rose, J. (2026) Let's chat about ChatGPT: exploring accounting educators' perceptions of nascent generative AI. Accounting Education.
https://doi.org/10.1080/09639284.2026.2657407
Read the paper, open access
Crafting your role in the age of GenAI
Estimates suggest that around two-thirds of current jobs are exposed to some degree of AI automation. In her keynote Crafting your role in the age of GenAI, Jenni asks what AI does, what it cannot do, and how people can shape their work so that AI enhances it rather than replaces it. AI can speed up outputs, but it cannot give us the growth that comes from struggle. We evolve through effort, not ease. Drawing on Wrzesniewski and Dutton's research on job crafting, participants look at three levers. Task crafting changes what you do, relational crafting changes who you do it with, and cognitive crafting changes how you see the purpose of your work. Each participant leaves with their own job crafting plan. Read more about job crafting
In the media
In November 2024, Jenni joined Good Morning Britain on ITV to discuss AI in education, reaching an audience of around half a million.