Session 66: Preparing students for a world with AI: scaffolding AI literacy into our teaching

Abstract

Session overview:

The world of AI is advancing rapidly. It has been said that 'AI won't necessarily take our jobs, but an AI literate person just might!'. Our students need to embrace these new technologies to further improve their employability. AI literacy is now an extremely important topic that we should integrate into all disciplines of undergraduate education. However, the levels of AI literacy amongst academic staff members in UK Universities is worryingly low and numerous initiatives are afoot to try to address this going forward through staff development and training. Students will require scaffolded learning to guide them through the range of AI technologies currently in use, how these are constructed and trained, the weaknesses they exhibit via bias and how to use them effectively through prompt engineering approaches.

In this session, we will discuss how this is being addressed for the re-validation of the Computing suite of programmes at LJMU (encompassing seven undergraduate degree routes). We will walk through how we integrated AI literacy into a core Level 4 module that then encourages students to build on these skills in later modules at Level 5 and Level 6.

Key learning points from this session:

An outline syllabus for scaffolding AI literacy within a core programme module is provided. This is based on a current module being devised for re-validation of all computing programmes at LJMU in Semester 1 of 2025. This should hopefully help academic colleagues identify gaps in their own AI literacy and help plan future staff development opportunities in this area.

Preparing students for a world with AI: scaffolding AI literacy into our teaching PowerPoint. Only LJMU staff and students have access to this resource.