Summary of the guest lecture:

We are pleased to announce that we have secured a guest lecture speaker, Professor B Mairéad Pratschke, who is an internationally renowned expert in AI and Education and we invite you to attend this talk on Tuesday 22 July 2025 11:00 -12:00. The event is hybrid and will be recorded for colleagues who cannot join us, but we highly recommend attending in person where possible.

Generative AI’s unique capabilities enable the development of new hybrid human-AI models of education, in which educators interact and collaborate with AI to design and deliver learning that is personalised and adaptive but still grounded in the educator’s domain expertise. In this talk, Mairéad Pratschke will present key ideas from her book, Generative AI and Education: Digital Pedagogies, Teaching Innovation and Learning Design (Springer, 2024).

Mairéad will introduce the learning theories and digital frameworks that educators can use to design learning using generative AI, as well as the key concepts that guide her work, including the new hybrid, generativism and intelligent communities. She will provide insights from recent research that shed light on the approaches and techniques that make the critical difference between efficacy and inefficacy when it comes to the use of generative AI in education. Finally, looking beyond formal education to employability, Mairéad will offer a glimpse at some of the cutting-edge applications of AI in industry, and consider the implications for the future-focused design of learning.

In preparation for this event we would recommend that you review the resources which Professor Kate Borthwick has developed with the Generative AI Working group, which can be found here.

About our speaker:

Professor B. Mairéad Pratschke is an AI Strategist and Advisor in Digital Education, helping institutions prepare for a world shaped by artificial intelligence. She works with governments, universities, research bodies and organisations to rethink education and align programmes and pedagogy with the future of work, learning and society. Mairéad has been working at the intersection of digital technology and education for 25 years. She is currently focused on the future of learning and work, and how to meet the challenges and opportunities that this wave of technological change presents. She has given keynote talks on generative AI at educational institutions around the world, including Brazil, Canada, Lebanon, the Netherlands, Portugal, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, the UK, and the USA.

Mairéad is a Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) Data Science Institute and at Abertay University in Scotland, and a Research Fellow at the USA’s NSF-funded AI Institute for Adult Education and Online Learning (AI-ALOE). She sits on the External Advisory Board of AI-ALOE; the Advisory Board at Eblana Learning; the Industry Advisory Council of Ireland’s Digital Learning Institute; and on the Government of Portugal’s National Council on Pedagogical Innovation in Higher Education. She holds a Ph.D. from McMaster University in Canada and a master’s degree from KU Leuven in Belgium. She is multi-lingual, a citizen of Ireland, the European Union and Canada.

Notes for the event:

Please choose either an in-person ticket or online ticket which will help us with logisitcs on the day.

The room and online link will be sent nearer the event time to your University email account.

This is only for staff at the University of Southampton and the invitations/links should not be forwarded onto others who have not registered. The use of any AI Bots are not allowed.

The event will be recorded and shared via the Advancing Assessment Sharepoint pages and the Assessment Consultancy CHEP pages for any colleagues who wish to watch it back again or for those that could not attend. The link to this will be distributed across University channels post the event.

This event was organised by the Assessment Consultancy as part of the Advancing Assessment SMP.

AI and Education - Guest Lecture by Professor B Mairéad Pratschke