Editorial: Ireland’s Online Learning Call

Abstract

The editorial board of the Irish Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning (IJTEL) would like to use this opportunity to thank each and every one of you working through a very challenging time over the past twelve months of the pandemic. It is a significant event, a critical incident, that will take some time to document and reflect upon in future journal editions. 
 So many words have already been written about this past year that try to capture the disruption and change. However, to summarise even a scintilla of what has happened across Irish higher education is a slightly daunting prospect. We have seen various terms used to describe the rapid shift to teaching and learning online, such as milestone, pivot, emergency remote teaching. None of these fully encompass the myriad of ways that those of us working in education have had to become resilient, responsive and supportive of colleagues during this period. 
 Considering the response from members of the educational technology community within Ireland, one could argue that the term overwhelming is a good starting point. For a start, a tsunami of work ensued, that at times threatened to engulf individuals. Education ‘pivoted’ from a position where online was generally a supplementary or complementary activity to one where in an online mode, we became the campus. Systems and processes were hastily altered, modified or expanded far beyond anybody’s expectations. While some of those have creaked and groaned, we have managed to teach classes, run meetings and carry out assessments; run on-campus labs and social distanced teaching; in short, we have kept going. People have been inventive, innovative and extremely hard working. But above all else, they have been generous; generous with their time, their expertise and generous in spirit.

Chatbots and Citations: An Experiment in Academic Writing with Generative AI

“…As we come to the end of this academic experiment, we are struck by a number of implications for scholarship and academic writing. Certainly we have found this to be an illuminating process with regard to why AI is the subject of such attention in academia (Bozkurt et al, 2023;Concannon et al, 2023). In particular we were struck by its potential for certain individual components of an academic paper, such as the introduction and conclusion, and the title.…”

“…Beyond a somewhat serendipitous symmetry, this combination attracted us for several reasons. First, as the domain of higher education is currently in a state of heightened alert and attentiveness regarding the use of AI (Concannon et al, 2023;Rudolph et al, 2023), our own professional context of Initial Teacher Education (ITE) finds itself no less immune to this (Jamal, 2023;Trust, Whalen, & Mouza, 2023). Related to this is that we as teacher educators who work primarily in the area of digital learning find ourselves often confronted with the concept of Digital Natives with regard to the level of academic development (if indeed, any at all) that is warranted regarding pre-service teachers' use of digital technologies for teaching and learning (Wang & Ko, 2022;Wilson, Hall, & Mulder, 2022) and thus we were particularly interested to see what an AI engine would produce on this topic.…”