Gary C Wood

Last week, I attended a symposium on AI-assisted feedback at Imperial College London. I was particularly inspired by an opening panel presentation by Professor Naomi Winstone on the care-full craft of feedback in the age of generative AI. One question in particular stayed with me: what if the problem isn’t that we’re doing too little feedback, but that we’re doing too much of the wrong thing?

Reflecting on that question since, I realise that in UK higher education, we have become somewhat obsessed with feedback volume. More comments, we assume, signals more care. Yet the National Student Survey continues to tell a familiar story: feedback remains one of the lowest rated aspects of the student experience. If our carefully crafted comments aren’t landing – if students aren’t using them to change what they do – then we haven’t really provided feedback at all. We’ve provided inputs.

Efficiency versus utility

Much of the current focus on generative AI in feedback is driven by staff workload. AI promises quicker turnaround, greater consistency, and more manageable marking. Timeliness does matter – but efficiency alone is a staff facing driver.

As the Manifesto for Feedback in the Age of Generative Artificial Intelligence argues, feedback is not a product but a relational, developmental process; comments only become feedback when students engage with them and something meaningful changes as a result (Winstone et al, 2025). That distinction matters now because generative AI makes it trivially easy to scale feedback production. If we automate poorly designed feedback processes, we risk amplifying – at scale – the very practices students already find least useful.

If we simply use AI to produce the same kinds of comments more quickly, we are doing the same things differently, but not doing different things.

From fixing the work to developing the learner

In my work with Beverley Gibbs on Students as Partners, we found that students conceptualise feedback in a fundamentally different way from academics. They expect feedback to help them adjust course while they are in flight, not simply to explain why they missed the destination once they’ve landed (Wood & Gibbs, 2019).

To make sense of this difference (and other gaps between staff and student conceptualisations of the learning experience), we drew on the distinction between single loop and double loop learning, originally articulated by Argyris & Schön (1978), and later applied to learning and feedback in higher education contexts (Gibbs & Wood, 2021).

Most feedback students receive operates in what Argyris & Schön describe as single loop learning. It is a tactical correction designed to help a student fix a specific error in a specific task: improve the structure, strengthen the argument, engage more critically with the literature, etc. Such feedback can improve this piece of work, but it rarely changes how the student approaches learning more fundamentally.

Double loop learning works at a different level. Rather than simply asking how do I fix this?, it prompts the learner to reflect on why this kind of issue is occurring. In feedback terms, this might involve helping a student recognise that difficulties with critical analysis, academic voice, or synthesis appear across multiple modules – not as isolated mistakes, but as patterns in how they approach their learning.

The challenge is not that this kind of reflection lacks value. It’s that our feedback systems are rarely designed to support it. Feedback is fragmented across modules, markers, and assessment points. Individual tutors are constrained by what they can see, and students are left to do the hard work of synthesis themselves – often without the support, confidence, or feedback literacy to do so effectively.

The “all knowing” digital tutor

This is where generative AI opens up a genuinely new possibility.

Imagine a student owned feedback repository that captures feedback across modules and across time. A generative AI system could help students identify recurring strengths, persistent challenges, and priorities for development – connections that human tutors, constrained by module and programme boundaries, simply cannot see.

Now imagine that same system sitting alongside a new assessment brief. It could prompt students to ask: What have I previously been told to do less of? Where does this task give me an opportunity to practise something I struggled with before? What examples of good practice from earlier work should I carry forward?

Here, AI is not generating more feedback. It is helping feedback do more work. It enables feedback to function in exactly the way many students already expect it to: as guidance for future action, not post hoc justification.

A provocation for the sector

The COVID 19 pandemic forced us to do things differently, and in doing so we discovered that some forms of disruption led to better practice. AI is a similar inflection point. The risk now is that we use it merely to formalise existing institutional desire lines – automating and entrenching feedback processes that already fail to meet students’ needs – rather than redesigning the landscape around how students actually want to use feedback.

If AI becomes little more than a faster way of producing comments, we will have missed a significant opportunity. The real challenge for the sector is to stop asking how AI can help us do the same things more efficiently, and start exploring how it allows us to design feedback differently – around use, patterns, and future learning.

AI is not just a faster pen. It’s an opportunity to reimagine what feedback could be. Are we brave enough to design for it?

References

Argyris, C. and Schön, D.A. (1978) Organizational learning: A theory of action perspective. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley.

Gibbs, B. and Wood, G.C. (2021) ‘How can student partnerships stimulate organisational learning in higher education institutions?’, Teaching in Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2021.1913722

Winstone, N., Gravett, K., Noble, C., Nicola Richmond, K., Bearman, M., Jensen, L.X., Jones, A., Corbin, T., de Kleijn, R., Gabelica, C., Kainth, R., Poobalan, A. and Reedy, G. (2025) Manifesto for feedback in the age of generative artificial intelligence. Figshare. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.30195568

Wood, G.C. and Gibbs, B. (2019) ‘Students as partners in the design and practice of engineering education: Understanding and enabling development of intellectual abilities’, in Malik, M., Andrews, J., Clark, R. and Broadbent, R. (eds) Realising Ambitions: 6th Annual Symposium of the UK & Ireland Engineering Education Research Network. Portsmouth: University of Portsmouth.

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Today, we are delighted to publish a working paper, the literature review and first output from our QAA-funded Collaborative Enhancement Project focused on how institutions develop and support dynamic quality assurance processes.

Download the Literature Review

Download the literature review: When Quality Assurance Meets Innovation in Higher Education

The project

UK HE providers face sustained and competing pressures that underpin the need to evaluate and enhance teaching and learning, course design, and portfolio in a timely manner. In addition, providers are constantly evolving whilst operating within a complex architecture of external regulation – this often results in QA processes which seem to suppress innovation and inhibit improvement. How providers balance these priorities is a relevant and timely question, and this project argues that the differences and commonalities between new and existing providers present an opportunity for timely comparative and evaluation work.

This project aims to identify the quality assurance domains that have the greatest impact on innovation. These may include:

institutional learning and teaching strategies
transformation strategies
new programme approval
programme amendment
module amendment
PSRB accreditation
validation and review
external examining systems
assessment policies
academic governance processes.

Methodology

The project team will conduct a survey and focus groups to capture the relative impact of these quality assurance domains, and explore how they constrain and facilitate when institutions seek to innovate.

Outcomes

The project will lead to the development of practical outputs to support the sector to adopt innovative and dynamic quality assurance processes including:

a concise summary of the current UK context in which the juncture of innovation in HE and quality assurance sits
discursive events to share initial findings and tentative conclusions from the datasets
case studies and exemplars of good practice that illustrate the range of procedures, relationships, ways of working and mindsets that facilitate different kinds of excellence in facilitating incremental and disruptive innovation
a summary of potential mitigation strategies to overcome barriers to innovation.

Project Team

Lead

Partners

Funded by

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Today, I’ve been attending and presenting at the Advance HE Employability Symposium, 3Es for Wicked Problems. Several speakers have talked about challenges of engagement with enterprise, and misunderstandings of this term as having a focus solely on business. These discussions reminded me of the following opening provocation I presented as part of the plenary debate: ‘We need to stop using the ‘E’ words (enterprise and entrepreneurship) with our students’ at the International Entrepreneurship Educators’ Conference 2017. Today’s conference shows it’s as relevant and important today as it was almost four years ago…

What is a word? From the early days of linguistics, Saussure (1959) identified that words are signs: they map a particular written representation or spoken sound (‘signifier’) to a meaning in the mind of the listener (‘signified’). This relationship breaks down for us as enterprise educators when we use the words ‘enterprise’ and ‘entrepreneurship’. Our audiences relate those terms to business and start-up, and so define them much more narrowly than we would as enterprise educators. As a result, they rightly challenge the relevance of our offer when most students don’t want to start their own venture.

To overcome this challenge, we need to step back. Linguistic signs need to form a meaningful message in the mind of our audience. So, our real challenge is to ensure that our audiences get our intended meaning.

Thus far, enterprise educators have tackled this challenge by trying to re-educate audiences to appreciate the broader meanings of ‘enterprise’ and ‘entrepreneurship’, as they are defined by the QAA. But it’s not working. At least, it’s not working quickly enough. It’s time we recognised that these terms are occupational language, understood by us as enterprise education professionals, but not by a broader audience. It’s time we practised what we preach, and package our offer as a solution to the challenges our academics and students face. In short, it’s time we took a new approach.

You may be familiar with Simon Sinek’s work, Start With Why, made famous by his TED talk entitled ‘How Great Leaders Inspire Action’. His suggestion is that successful communicators start by getting people bought into their cause or belief. Let’s think about that. Why do we want to deliver enterprise and entrepreneurship education within our institutions in the first place? The answer is that we want to create students and graduates who are able to get things done and make things happen; individuals who can apply their skills and knowledge creatively, and have the ambition to be agents for positive action and change.

Communicating that ‘why’ means we align much more closely with the aspirations of academics and students. You can’t be a researcher without being enterprising. So if our academics want to deliver research-led learning experiences for students, let’s help them do that. And by the way, we’ll help students become enterprising. Our students are attracted to the idea of making a difference, of doing something worthwhile whilst they’re studying. Let’s help them do that through setting up authentic projects, that engage them with real-world problems, external partners and communities. And by the way, we’ll help them become enterprising. Our students want to engage in extra-curricular activities, as volunteers, members and leaders of societies. Let’s help them do that, and support them with the difficulties they face. And by the way, we’ll help them become enterprising.

We need to ask ourselves what the problem is that we’re trying to solve. Is it that academics and students don’t understand the words enterprise and entrepreneurship? Or is it that we want students and graduates – indeed, colleagues – with the characteristic of being enterprising? Of course, it’s the latter, but in fighting for our ‘enterprise’ name we’ve lost sight of that. If we can create ambitious, creative, can-do graduates, who cares if they list enterprise among their capabilities? Employers don’t use that term. Academics don’t like it. Students don’t understand it. It works for nobody but us.

References

Saussure, F. de (1959) Course in General Linguistics. The Philosophical Library, New York City.

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Emerging Stronger: Lasting Impact from Crisis Innovation was published by the Engineering Professors’ Council in August 2020 and captures our community’s early thoughts, challenges and strategies as we navigated HE during a pandemic. Five months on, we are returning to the conversation. What more have we learned? What best practices are emerging?

We kick off this work with a webcast on 27 January 2021 including a keynote by Sir Michael Barber, Chair of the Office for Students, and we invite exemplars of good practice that address Emerging Stronger’s calls to action. A selection of these will be invited for presentation at the event. A larger range of case studies will be included in the next Emerging Stronger publication, and/or published in multimedia formats on the EPC website.

Our calls to action in Emerging Stronger were:

Assessment

Have you pivoted to more diversified assessment methods that are better suited to producing work-ready graduates than exams would have? Have you ditched exams for good? What have been the challenges in changing assessment strategy, and how have you tackled these? How are your assessment changes affecting student capabilities?

Students’ Collaboration Skills

Have you made great in-roads into supporting team dynamics in an online context? Have you cracked the thorny question of balancing synchronous, asynchronous, and informal ways of supporting students’ collaboration? Which phases of collaboration have improved online, and which have been particularly challenging?

Practical Work

Have you evaluated alternative learning activities that have replaced traditional practical work? What have you learned? Which learning outcomes have been easier to substitute? Which have remained challenging?

Employability

Have you developed imaginative ways of supporting student employability during the pandemic? Perhaps you’ve leveraging virtual locations, enriched assessment, helped students map their skills, built stronger relationships with support services. How have you innovated to support employability, and how have these innovations been received by students/employers?

Student Partnerships

Have you involved students in designing how you’ll be teaching during – or after – the pandemic? What mechanisms have you used, and what benefits have you seen?

To these, we add a sixth theme:

Student Experience

What has the pandemic allowed us learn about student experience that we can build on when we return to face-to-face teaching?

We welcome reflections and contributions from engineering students – please use the form link or feel free to contact us direct if you’d like to discuss possible involvement.

To share your own practice/propose a case study, please complete this form. To speak at the event, submit by 20th January. For the publication, please submit any time before 31st March 2021.

Beverley Gibbs (NMITE) & Gary Wood (University of Sheffield)

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I am delighted today to share Emerging Stronger: Lasting Impact from Crisis Innovation a new ebook Beverley Gibbs and I co-edited for publication by the Engineering Professors’ Council. The following blog post was originally published on its website on 13 August 2020.

At the start of 2020, no-one could have known what major changes lay just three months ahead for HE. Yet, here we are living through a pandemic, and in the midst of one of the most significant, challenging, and disruptive periods imaginable.

As COVID-19 hit, we all saw and delivered innovation, change, and resilience in colleagues and students of unprecedented scope, on an unprecedented scale, and at unprecedented speed. What was striking about these changes was the apparent loss of perceived barriers that had previously hindered innovation. COVID-19 provided a new freedom for us all to try new ideas and do things differently, and a catalyst for everyone to do so: the status quo no longer existed to be maintained.

An obvious question quickly arose: what value might there be in the longer term retention of some of these new approaches, beyond the immediate crisis? Some benefits seemed immediately apparent – for example, open-book assessment prompted a shift to more authentic questions of application rather than simple recall of knowledge; digital delivery of lectures enabled students to choose the pace and place of their learning with greater flexibility; and students’ employability was enhanced through developing skills in collaboration across space and time. There were, of course, challenges, too: How do we develop practical skills in students at a distance? How can students gain workplace experience in the absence of internships? How do we maintain academic standards in remote assessments?

To explore these questions, we launched a series of webinars – Engineering Education: Lasting Impact from Crisis Innovation – through our Pioneering Programmes and Practice in Engineering Education Advance HE Connect network. Across six weeks, we brought together over 250 educators and practitioners to share ideas and discover how the sector was responding. We explored assessment; collaboration and professional skills; remote laboratory work and practical skill development; employability; and student partnership in learning design. In the sixth week, eight invited contributions from across the sector showcased emerging good practice.

We were encouraged to see so many positive innovations, and the creativity of our community in keeping the show on the road, with determination to deliver positive learning outcomes for students. Emerging Stronger: Lasting Impact from Crisis Innovation – published today by the EPC – celebrates this work, sharing the thinking and discussion that we explored together. It adds further examples of emerging good practice in case studies from colleagues across the sector, and students’ perspectives on the changes to their learning experience.

We hope that Emerging Stronger will provide inspiration, guidance – indeed, reassurance – to colleagues as we now face the challenge, over summer 2020, of planning for the start of the new academic year with online or blended approaches to learning and teaching. We encourage you to capture your own stories of innovation, and to reflect on the benefits and challenges that arise. The EPC has created a new set of webpages to share your innovations with the wider community, and we encourage you to tell us what you’ve been doing. A form to do this on the EPC website at the end of the post here.

Downloads

Emerging Stronger is available as an ebook from the EPC website.

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As we start to think ahead to the new academic year, and plan to teach and facilitate learning using online, hybrid or blended approaches, we need to find new ways to get our students working together. This might mean students meeting each other for the first time, and that’s a different experience online than in person. We’ve all had experiences of cringe-worthy ice-breakers that make everyone feel more awkward than encouraged, but here are four that I think work well and are conducive to students getting to know each other.

1. Where are you joining from?*

Help your students appreciate the diversity in the class, and raise a talking point, by asking them to share either where they are joining the session from, or where their home town is by marking it on a shared map. Here’s how to do this with Blackboard Collaborate Ultra, but similar functionality is available on other platforms:

Add a Map of the UK or the world to your slides (see downloads below), then save your slides as a PDF file.
In Blackboard Collaborate Ultra, use the Share Files option (Collaborate Panel > Share Content > Share Files) to share your PDF slides with your students.
Turn on the whiteboard tools for participants (Collaborate Panel > Settings > Session Settings, check ‘Draw on whiteboard and files’). Your participants will then see a pencil tool at the top of their screen, above the slides.
Ask your participants to use the pencil to mark either their home town, or the location where they are joining the session from on the map.

If you are going to continue presenting slides after this activity, remember to turn off the ‘Draw on whiteboard and files open’ for your students, to prevent unwanted/accidental additions to your slides!

2. Picture Yourself

Help your students to introduce themselves in a breakout session, by choosing photos as a prompt. This helps to shift the focus away from the student themselves, and so brings shyer students into the conversation more naturally.

Share a Google Jamboard with your students – either one Jamboard per group, or, if you have fewer than 20 groups, one Jamboard with 20 frames and ask each group to use the frame corresponding to their group number. (If you don’t have access to Jamboard, you could use Google Slides or PowerPoint 365 set to allow anyone with the link to edit it).
Ask each student to copy and paste a photo that represents them onto their group’s board/slide. This could be a picture of a hobby, sport they enjoy, place they are from, somewhere they have visited, their pet, family, etc. Let the students choose, so that they share something they are comfortable with. They don’t need to upload a personal photo – a quick Internet search to find something is fine.
Once they have pasted in their image, the group should take it in turns to introduce themselves to their group, explaining why they chose their image.

3. Virtual Selfies!

Get your students working together and being creative by challenging them to take a team selfie in which they are interacting with each other in some way. Creative options might include linking hands across frames, a team pose, holding an object from their desk, showing something from a country they've visited, etc – but I leave this up to the students.

Tell the students to turn on their webcam in their breakout rooms
In the ‘Gallery’ view, where all the cameras are shown side-by-side, challenge the students should think of a creative composition where they are interacting with each other, and then take a selfie!
To capture the selfie, use the ‘Print Screen’ key on Microsoft Windows, or Command+3 on a Mac.
You could ask the students to paste their screenshots into a collaborative space so that you can share them with the whole group after the breakout rooms, let them use the shot to personalise their project submission, or even offer a prize for the most creative group.

4. Thinking Logically

Give your students a logic puzzle to solve, working collaboratively with each other. There are lots of puzzles freely available online, but make sure that it is possible for the students to solve it in the time available, and not so easy that every group will finish really quickly (and make sure you’ve solved it yourself, so you’ve got the solution!).

Here’s one example that works well:

I hope you find these ideas useful in your own practice – do let me know in the comments. And if you have a creative idea for an ice-breaker for use in a virtual context, please share it in the comments below.

Downloads

Map slides (World Map and UK/Ireland)

*My use of this task was inspired by an excellent webinar on resilience with Heather Wright, Advance Performance, who used it to highlight the global spread of participants.

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Last week, I shared some guidance for students facing take-home or online open book exams, focused on how to revise and prepare effectively. In today’s post, I offer you some advice for the day of your assessment itself, with seven tips to help you do your best.

1. Eat something!

Your normal routine when you’re working at home might not be to eat breakfast, or to have meals at different times than you would during a day working on campus. But your exam is going to require you to think hard, and that uses more energy than many physical activities. Making sure you’ve had something nutritious to eat will help you maintain concentration without feeling tired as you’re working.

2. Trust yourself

You won’t have time in the assessment to look everything up, and to learn about topics that you have not revised. That’s why I recommended making sure you have a good overview of the material, have thought about the connections within the material, and have prepared a prompt sheet with key equations and details.

In the exam itself, resist the temptation to start checking your notes as soon as you see the questions. Instead, trust what you’ve learnt, as if you were in an invigilated exam and didn’t have your notes, and map out your answer using that knowledge. Use your notes only to check facts or details that you really can’t remember. If you do need to consult your notes, use the indexing you’ve created (see last week’s post), and pull out what you need, then focus on writing your answer. Don’t keep going back to your notes to look things up – it’ll interrupt the flow of you writing a well-structured answer.

If you find that there’s a question that you really don’t know how to answer, leave it to the end, and come back to it. Do all of the other questions, and then you can use any remaining time to revisit the question you couldn’t answer, and consult your notes and books.

3. Don’t turn the exam into coursework

If you’re sitting a take-home paper with a submission window of, say, 24 hours, you are not expected to spend all of the time working on your answers. Your tutor may indicate how long they expect the paper to take you, but as a guide, it’s unlikely to be much longer than your originally scheduled invigilated exam. So, don’t spend a lot longer and end up turning your exam into coursework. Bear two things in mind to help with this.

First, your tutors are expecting you to submit exam answers, not polished pieces of coursework. You need to present your ideas clearly, using the right content and with logical structure. But spending hours redrafting the text so it says the same things more eloquently, or finessing presentation, will not lead to higher marks.

Second, you are not expected to undertake literature research in the exam. You are being tested on what you’ve learnt during the course, not on what additional learning you can cram into the assessment period. Doing loads of additional reading may decrease the clarity of your answer, as you squeeze more in, and bury the key points from the core learning material that your tutor is looking for. Stick with what you know, and use that competently to demonstrate your learning. Good marks will follow this, not masses of extra detail.

4. Beware of plagiarism

You’ve probably had the seriousness of plagiarism drilled into you, and know how to avoid it in coursework. But under the pressure of a timed exam where you have your notes, books and even the Internet as reference material, it can be easy to commit accidental plagiarism. Take special care of copying and pasting material, or reading and then using material in your own work. If you copy and paste or paraphrase text, use a different colour type, so that you remember to reference it properly before you submit.

5. Create your own exam conditions

One of the benefits of doing your assessments in a traditional exam hall is that distractions are minimised. Give yourself the best chance in the assessments you are completing at home by establishing conditions that will allow you to be highly focused.

Turn off your phone, and close any social media applications and your email on your computer. If you think you’ll struggle to avoid accessing these whilst you are doing the exam, you might benefit from downloading an app that will block them – see this website for some suggestions and reviews.

Also think about distractions at home. Tell other people in your household that you are doing an assessment, let them know when, and ask them not to disturb you. Consider making a polite notice for your door to remind your family or housemates – putting up the notice can also be a good cue to yourself that you are entering exam mode, and need to focus.

6. Submit on time

It probably sounds obvious, but it’s important to make sure you submit your work on time. So, don’t leave it too late in your allotted time to start scanning or capturing your work, saving your file, and uploading it, to ensure that you don’t go over time.

7. Think about the social aspect

Exams under any circumstances can be stressful. On campus, you’d probably manage this by meeting up with friends afterwards, so that you can reassure each other by discovering that you all found particular questions difficult, and by comparing what you wrote for different answers. Don’t underestimate the importance of doing this, and of maintaining a social connection, even though you’ll be isolated from your friends as you sit the exams.

Plan ahead, and think about when you might check in with each other afterwards. Schedule this in advance, so that you know you won’t be disrupting each other trying to work, and then meet online to debrief and decompress as you usually would face to face.

And finally…

Although the style of assessment you are facing during the COVID-19 pandemic is probably different from usual, remember that it remains simply an opportunity for you to demonstrate your learning. Keep calm, and read the questions carefully. Once you think you understand what to do, read the question again to check that’s what it’s asking for. And then do your best – that’s all you can ask of yourself. You can do this, and by the time you come out the other side, you’ll have a great example of your resilience and ability to cope under pressure with short deadlines for your next interview! Good luck!

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Gary C Wood

Efficiency versus utility

From fixing the work to developing the learner

The “all knowing” digital tutor

A provocation for the sector

References

Download the Literature Review

The project

Methodology

Outcomes

Project Team

Lead

Partners

Funded by

References

Assessment

Students’ Collaboration Skills

Practical Work

Employability

Student Partnerships

Student Experience

Downloads

1. Where are you joining from?*

2. Picture Yourself

3. Virtual Selfies!

4. Thinking Logically

Downloads

1. Eat something!

2. Trust yourself

3. Don’t turn the exam into coursework

4. Beware of plagiarism

5. Create your own exam conditions

6. Submit on time

7. Think about the social aspect

And finally…

Professor Gary C Wood

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