UCAE and Jisc Collaboration Reveals Student Perspectives on AI and Pre-sessionals
UCAE have collaborated with JISC to find out what Pre-sessional students think about intensive summer English courses in the context of the rapidly changing world influenced by GenAI.
UCAE have to find out what Pre-sessional students think about intensive summer English courses in the context of the rapidly changing world influenced by GenAI.
As a Centre, we have a lot of thoughts about what the content and goals should be of our courses, and we get input from all areas of the University on how these should evolve and develop.
However, getting international student (and looking at our courses demographics, Chinese student) input can be tricky for a variety of reasons, not least the sometimes shorter periods students are with us, and the obvious challenges of those teaching / assessing also asking their classes for honest feedback and critique.
It was with this in mind that we approached JISC to collaborate on the focus group in the hope that we could get more genuine insights that would help us in the future.
Some of the resulting views in the report one could guess (e.g. student requests for guidance over punishment), but the thoughts on how GenAI could be a potential equaliser, and detection tools could further bias with 鈥榝alse positives鈥� gave food for thought.
The JISC piece was followed with a University Language Centre Directors鈥� Network meeting on 鈥榯he future of Pre-sessionals in a world of GenAI (November 2025) 鈥� with both these events contributing to a more rethink of the University鈥檚 Pre-sessional for Summer 2027.