Support for Neurodiverse Humanities Students

The AI Teaching and Learning project, ‘Support for Neurodiverse Humanities Students’, aimed to enhance student learning experience, particularly neurodivergent students, without generating significant additional workload for staff. This was done by creating a platform for academic staff with the right resources, guidelines, and tools for them to convert their own learning materials into a variety of formats. This was a collaborative project between the AI Competency Centre, the Centre for Teaching and Learning, and the Humanities Division.

Anders Reagan, Lead Business Technologist at the AI Competency Centre, built a comprehensive toolkit in Notion to enable academic staff to convert existing teaching materials into written, auditory, visual and interactive formats so that students with diverse cognitive profiles can engage with core concepts on equal terms. The platform integrates scholarship on inclusive education, aligns with Uni data-governance policy and offers practical workflows that can be embedded in a standard teaching timetable with adding undue workload. With this toolkit, lecturers or educators are enabled to convey teaching materials to students in a multi-modal buffet of content ranging from lecture summaries to audio overviews, diagrams, and mind maps.

This platform was provided to lecturers in the Medieval and Modern Languages faculty who in using these AI tools were able to provide their students for some of their seminars with a variety of different options for learning. The students themselves reported overwhelming satisfaction with the new materials and requested that all lectures feature a similar variety of teaching materials to make education even more accessible.

This project was designed in such a way that educators would be able to provide this variety of teaching materials to their students without having to necessarily do even more work which would make this accessibility measure untenable in the long run and unable to scale up.

Critically, these tools were provided to the educators themselves, who were in a position to evaluate the faithfulness of the outputs against their own expertise. This was as opposed to simply providing these tools to the students, who may or may not be able to tell the extent to which these various AI products were hallucinating information. It's the intention of all teams involved now to scale up access to this portal and provide everyone at the University with detailed training on how to use these tools to help all students, not just neurodivergent students, to engage with course materials and to make learning more accessible, enjoyable, and impactful.