Challenge
NWU's School of Accounting has a strong commitment to empowering students using AI for individualised support and feedback, but faced the challenge of getting a team of lecturers, teaching assistants and administrators up to speed with AI technology and its best pedagogical applications. With a team separated over multiple campuses and a large student body, they needed to ensure consistency, build excitement and get into a workable student-facing solution as quickly as possible and ensure that students were able to access personalised 24/7 learning and support.
How Mindjoy's Professional Development partners with NWU
Together we've looked at tailored ways to build professional development based on NWU's focus on lecturers working in sync with the specific needs of their campuses in mind and goals:
- Lecturers needed to be introduced to AI en masse
- They needed to be able to build experiences based on best practice immediately
- They have limited time before the kick-off of student-facing sessions
- A need to consider AI for low-stakes assessments
- Be able to build AI experiences that focus on empowering students
Impact
Through strategic partnership with Mindjoy's Professional Development, NWU has transformed their professional development offering for its lecturers:
- All lecturers onboarded and comfortably building AI experiences with Assistants by the end of the first session
- Three campuses working in sync and able to discuss and share best practices and ideas
- Aligning on pedagogy before building student-facing experienced
- Were able to hit the ground running with a consistent set of AI Assistant Tutors and Pathway units that were consistent across all campuses
- Multiple low stakes assessments were built, with human-like assessment requirements and detailed feedback
- Built a community of practice with regular check-ins and sharing of best practices
- Working on developing a high-stakes assessment for early in the year which will be able to give students a better idea of their own understanding at an early key point in their learning
Based on these results, NWU is expanding Professional Development, with plans to implement comprehensive AI integration across all accounting courses and develop specialized AI-powered assessment tools for improved student outcomes.
