Editorial: oSoTL 5(2)

Matthew Barr¹, Vicki Dale¹, Mark Charters² and Nathalie Tasler¹

¹ University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK
² Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow, UK

In this bumper issue, we bring together eleven articles by authors from across the UK, Europe, and the USA. Six of these articles fall under two broad themes. The first is generative AI (GenAI): two articles consider what GenAI means for assessment, while two others put it to work, reimagining the course syllabus and auditing the curriculum. The second is mathematics and statistics anxiety, explored by two articles from psychology and the wider social sciences. The issue is rounded off by five articles on a broader range of topics, from professional services scholarship and shared reading to collaborative learning, open pedagogy, and the dual identity of artist and teacher-educator.

Nerantzi and colleagues open the issue with a reflective staff-student conversation about the University of Leeds’ “traffic light” framework for AI use in assessment. They find that the framework brings clarity but is open to interpretation, particularly at Amber, and attends to assessment rather than learning; arguing that it is now outdated, they call for a more flexible approach that connects the two.

Wu puts AI to creative use, tackling the perennial problem of the unread syllabus. The article presents a reproducible workflow that turns a written syllabus into a music video sung by a virtual avatar, designed to supplement rather than replace the formal document, with the implementation openly available for others to adapt.

Rodafinos also harnesses large language models, presenting the Prompt Playbook, a workflow for auditing psychology programmes and mapping them against competencies. It culminates in curriculum integration, with paired tasks in which AI use is either supported or restricted, and it includes safeguards for ethics, data protection, equity, and validation.

Returning to assessment, McDonald and colleagues held focus groups with undergraduate and taught postgraduate science students at a UK Russell Group university. Students valued assessment centred on human judgement, authenticity, and critical thinking, but worried about deskilling and unequal access to GenAI. Arguing that GenAI is more than a threat to academic integrity, the authors call for clear guidance and inclusive assessment design, developed in partnership with students.

Our second theme, mathematics and statistics anxiety, will be familiar to many who teach quantitative methods. Interviewing twelve psychology students at Scottish universities, Hamilton and March show how early struggles with mathematics and misconceptions about what studying psychology involves can leave confidence a little fragile, with tutor communication, class size, and assumptions about prior competence all heightening anxiety.

Ralston and colleagues, meanwhile, ask whether statistics anxiety is holding women social scientists back. Analysing data from 331 social science undergraduates at ten UK universities, they find that while women report higher statistics anxiety, this is not associated with poorer course performance. Reassuringly, they conclude that those teaching introductory methods courses need not be overly anxious about their students’ anxiety.

The remaining five articles range more widely, although a shared interest in community and collaboration runs throughout. Miroshnikov offers an autoethnographic account of the Research Guild, a mentored community of practice that helps professional services staff at King’s College London engage with educational research. Through a systems thinking lens, Miroshnikov argues that staff development works best as a deliberately designed ecosystem rather than a series of isolated activities.

Carlstrom considers what university teaching might learn from Shared Reading, a group wellbeing practice in which a literary text is read aloud and discussed. Framed as a thought experiment, the essay draws on engaged, relational and critical pedagogies to explore how Shared Reading might be adapted for humanities and social science classes, with potential benefits for students’ wellbeing and academic performance.

Van Kuppeveld and colleagues followed 17 students from eleven disciplines through a 20-week transdisciplinary module. Differences in commitment and working style were the most common challenges, and students used socially shared regulation more readily for problems of progress and task distribution than for social issues such as unequal contribution. Here, the authors recommend helping students to tackle such challenges together.

Kaur and Jarson describe a librarian-faculty partnership that uses open pedagogy to surface the hidden curriculum of the undergraduate research classroom, with its unspoken lessons about power, knowledge, and social norms. Their strategies, from a redesigned classroom to an open syllabus with guided journals, rest on transparency and student agency, and could be adapted to other teaching contexts.

Finally, Cairns presents an autoethnographic study of a professional identity spanning artist and teacher-educator, set in UK college-based higher education. Reflecting on a gallery opening and a gathering of teacher-educators, Cairns contrasts the quiet loss of withdrawing from one community with the warmth and legitimacy of joining another, showing how brokering knowledge across boundaries can sustain a coherent sense of self.

We would like to thank all our authors for sharing their work with oSoTL, and our reviewers, whose contributions are acknowledged separately in this issue. Whether readers are rethinking assessment in light of GenAI, supporting students who find statistics daunting, or fostering community and collaboration, we hope these articles offer both practical ideas and fresh perspectives.