Getting Our Feet Wet: AI in Higher Education
A keynote exploring how institutions can navigate AI's transformation of teaching, learning, and quality assurance.
Keynote delivered at QQI’s Annual Showcase in Dublin, December 2025, exploring how higher education can strategically adopt AI while maintaining quality and integrity.
Key themes
AI’s current state — Tracing the evolution from 1956 to ChatGPT’s explosive growth, and where AI now matches (or exceeds) human performance.
Opportunities — Personalized tutoring, adaptive learning paths, instant feedback at scale. AI as a tool for meeting learners where they are.
Challenges — Hallucinations, bias, energy consumption. The risks we need to design around, not ignore.
Faculty roles — Augmented, not replaced. What new pedagogical competencies look like.
Quality assurance — How do we evaluate dynamic, AI-generated curriculum? Moving beyond product-based assessment.
The central question: how do we build institutional capacity for a technology that’s still finding its shape?