After the furore surrounding my last blog, I thought I’d continue the discussion with a HE case study featured in my forthcoming book Advertising: A Practitioner Perspective.
Continue readingTag Archives: Higher Education
Why are universities so bad at marketing?
It’s Welcome Week at my university. Also known as ‘Freshers’ Week’ in some parts of the world, this is the week in which we welcome new students onto campus, to register for their course and take part in events that introduce them to university life.
As I arrive on campus ready to start a day of teaching, I expect to find walls plastered with posters for student societies and events for our new students. After all, this is Welcome Week – the most exciting and vibrant time of the year.
But instead of posters for our students, instead I find campus overflowing with advertisements for… a postgraduate open day.
Continue readingPutting a price on research
Research is far more expensive than many people may think. The reason for this is the huge overheads universities charge to cover the cost of their buildings and pay the wages of the many managers and admin staff that they employ.
Continue readingOnline grammar checkers – Grammarly revisited
Way back in 2013, I was invited to write a review of the online grammar checker, Grammarly. I was paid by Grammarly directly to write this blog, with the only requirement being that I had to open with the phrase ‘I use Grammarly’s free online grammar check because…’ At the time, I found Grammarly to be a fairly useful tool, though I did raise several concerns including the academic implications of plagiarism checkers, and the danger of Grammarly becoming a crutch for weaker writers.
Now, six years on, I find cause to revisit my original review of Grammarly, and reiterate many of my original concerns as Grammarly continues to expand its reach.
Continue readingIf AI can write news items, they can write essays too
There is a crisis coming in academia. It’s been looming on the horizon for quite some time, and now threatens to bring the profession into disrepute.
That problem is AI.
For many years now, AI have been used to power chat bots and digital assistants such as Cortana, Siri and Alexa. Over the years, these bots have become far more nuanced and complex. While these systems aren’t intelligent in the same way as a human being, they do a fairly good job at mimicking human behaviour, and convincing us that they are ‘real’.
Indeed, these technologies are now so convincing that it won’t be long before they are put to nefarious use. It’s already been shown that AI can write convincing news articles, and it won’t be long before they are used to write academic essays, even more complex works such as research papers and even full-length publications.
Make no mistake, this is a serious issue, and one that needs to be taken seriously. In the next few years, AI-powered essay mills have the potential to shake academia right to the very core.
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