Session 1 - Strand 3

Abstract:

In late 2022, generative AI arrived in higher education as a crisis. Three years on, it is part of the everyday landscape of teaching and learning. But the shift from panic to practice has not been simple or evenly distributed, and it is most visible not in policy documents but in the rooms where staff development actually happens. This session offers a practitioner’s-eye view of that journey. Drawing on one year of designing and delivering a five-session AI CPD programme at the University of Portsmouth’s Centre for Academic and Digital Innovation, it maps the key shifts in the sector from 2022 to now: from detection and prohibition to transparency and policy, from emergency response to considered institutional frameworks, and from a conversation dominated by academic integrity to one that increasingly centres on staff confidence, student dialogue, and the question of what learning is actually for. The heart of the session is an honest account of how the CPD room itself has changed. How the questions staff bring have changed over the past year. The anxiety about catching students has largely given way to something more generative: curiosity about how to model good practice, uncertainty about how to have honest conversations with students, and a growing appetite for assessment approaches that make thinking visible. These are different conversations, and understanding that shift matters for anyone designing or delivering staff development in this space. The session closes with an honest reflection on what the CPD programme has developed in response, what still needs to change, and what remains difficult