Bridgend College explores how AI is shaping the way its students are learning
24/10/2024On Friday 18 October, Dr Scott Morgan, Head of Digital Innovation and IT Services at Bridgend College attended the Google for Education and FE Tech’s Further Education Leadership Summit as a guest speaker. Held in London, the Summit offered a unique blend of strategic insights, knowledge and inspiration, as well as the opportunity to share experiences and best practices with colleagues from other educational institutions.
The Summit included sessions on strategic insights on using cloud technology and AI to improve teaching and learning, student outcomes, and organisational efficiency, as well as learning how technology shapes student learning in Further Education.
Scott’s session, titled ‘Revolutionising Student Access to Information with AI’, gave insight into how the College is using technology to solve some of its biggest challenges. This was followed by a panel discussion with other FE leaders.
For the past 12 months, Scott and his team have been working on a brand new portal experience for students at the College. Designed from the ground up and integrated with Tribal EBS and Google Workspace, the new dashboard features key information for students, such as their timetable, targets, attendance and praise or concern notes. If they can’t find the information they need from the dashboard, students can ask the portal’s built-in AI assistant free-text questions. Google Gemini powers the responses, which are contextualised to the student’s activity in College.
The mobile-first interface has been developed in-house by members of the IT Services Team and students have been at the forefront of design through focus groups and alpha testing. The aim was simply to create a one-stop-shop for students which was accessible, integrated with the College’s key systems and perhaps most importantly, user-friendly.
The College has been supported with funding from Medr, the Commission for Tertiary Education and Research, as a trailblazer institution to develop the project during the 2023/24 academic year. Its next steps are to integrate Google Classroom and assessment data, explore the portal’s capabilities in other languages (including Welsh) and share the lessons learnt as widely as possible.
“This project has changed the way students interact with their data. We are excited about the next steps and where this might end up taking us. In the short term though, a competition for learners to name the portal’s AI assistant is now live – and the winner will receive a Chromebook.”
Dr Scott Morgan, Head of Digital Innovation and IT Services
