BPER: What is the work? Rethinking learning and assessment in an age of AI
Generative AI has disrupted the assumption that producing academic artifacts reflects learner engagement. This presentation argues that the integrity conversation, while understandable, is the least generative response available to us. The more important question — one that AI has finally made impossible to defer — is what the developmental activities of health professions education actually are.
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Description
When colleagues say they do not want students using AI to do "the work," what they mean is remarkably consistent: the work is producing an artifact. The essay, the care plan, the reflective portfolio. That assumption has been load-bearing for decades; holding up an assessment system built on the reasonable inference that producing a quality artifact required the engagement it was meant to evidence. Producing these outputs required engagement, and engagement was what we were trying to promote. Generative AI has severed that connection; a student can now produce a polished, well-referenced output without any of the intellectual engagement it was supposed to represent. Our instruments have lost the construct validity they were depending on, and no institutional policy update restores it.
This presentation argues that the integrity conversation, while understandable, is the least generative response available to us. The more important question — one that AI has finally made impossible to defer — is what the developmental activities of health professions education actually are. Not the outcomes, and not the artifacts, but the activities that produce clinical judgement, ethical reasoning, and professional identity. Answering that question honestly, and adapting our response, are the challenges we face in this AI moment.
Presenter
Dr Michael Rowe is the Director of Teaching and Learning in the School of Health and Care Sciences at the University of Lincoln in the United Kingdom. Michael's scholarship focuses on the transformative potential of digital technologies in professional education, with an emphasis on how they mediate relationships between teachers and students in learning environments. More recently, he has concentrated on the implications of generative AI in higher and professional education, and clinical practice.
Rounds Details
Best Practices in Education Rounds (BPER) are co-hosted by the Centre for Faculty Development, The Wilson Centre and the Centre for Advancing Collaborative Healthcare & Education.
Accreditation Details
Each BPER has been accredited for up to:
- 1 College of Family Physicians of Canada – Mainpro+ credits
- 1 Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada – Section 1 hours
Review complete accreditation details.
For more information about BPER, please click here.
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