Health professions students occupy a distinctive position in relation to generative AI (GAI): they encounter it as learners navigating its growing presence in higher education, and as future practitioners who will work alongside AI systems in clinical settings where errors carry significant consequences. Despite this, few structured opportunities exist for students to examine GAI critically – interrogating not just how to use GAI tools, but what assumptions they embed, whose interests they serve, and what harms they may cause (Bearman, 2025).

This presentation reports on the development of a critical AI literacy workshop currently being co-designed with undergraduate and postgraduate health professions students (Ambrosetti et al, 2025). Student involvement shapes both the content priorities and the pedagogical approach, ensuring the workshop addresses concerns that are relevant to learners at different stages of training.

The workshop engages participants directly with datasets and case studies to examine specific issues including algorithmic bias in clinical AI, the environmental costs of large language models, cognitive offloading and its implications for clinical reasoning, and the dynamics of human-chatbot interaction. Activities are designed in accordance with Universal Design for Learning principles to support both individual reflection and group discussion, with digital tools used to enable flexible modes of participation (Doyle et al, 2025).

Pre- and post-workshop surveys are being developed to capture shifts in participants' perspectives and self-reported literacy. Findings from the co-design process will be shared, along with practical implications for health professions education.

References

Ambrosetti, É., Gaudin, C., Flandin, S., & Poizat, G. (2025). Students as co-designers in health professional education: a scoping review. BMC Medical Education, 25(1), 645.

Bearman, M. (2025). Learning to Work With Artificial Intelligence as Part of Clinical Education. The Clinical Teacher, 22, e70260.

Doyle, A. J., O’Toole, M., Cassidy, D., & Condron, C. M. (2025). Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in simulation-based health professions education. Advances in Simulation, 10(1), 33.

This paper will present the MySkills platform, a unique digital platform launched by Dublin City University (DCU), which enables students to capture and evidence their transversal skills in a rigorous and tranparent way, helping them to identify, articulate and showcase their skills, while simultaneously helping employers to make more informed, evidence-based recuitment decisions. MySkills is integrated with DCU's learning management system and underpinned by a proprietary transversal skills framework that has been designed, developed and implemented over a five year period.

The MySkills platofrm not only captures the results of the formal assessment of students' transversal skills within their programme of study, it also recognises the value of extracurricular learning by allowing students to create and record experiences and then link these with the development of specific skills. Each skill in operationalised into component parts and has a universal four-level rubric to optimise for consistency and transparecny across the university. This in turn means that students' specific level of competence in any skill they choose to evidence is clearly shown, including whether or not the attached rating is DCU-verified or self-reported.

The paper will also explore the multiple internal and external stakeholders involved in their process and the importance of creating a culture of authentic collaboration in order to implement major innovations in teaching and learning within any higher education institution.

Many forces in higher education claim digital competence is a priority - policy frameworks, institutional strategies, educators and staff, employers, and students themselves. But they often don’t mean the same thing by it. Why it matters, who it matters to, who should develop it, and how seriously it should be treated differ depending on who you ask. The institutional infrastructure built to develop it has to hold all these competing purposes at once.

This paper reflects that tension from the inside. The LevUL Up Digital Skills Hub (DSH), established in 2023 and hosted on UL’s Brightspace VLE, supports the development of core digital skills and competencies, primarily of students. It is open to the UL community for self-directed exploration and is intentionally designed to be collaboratively embedded into academic curricula with educators. The self-assessment opportunities, self-study resources, and GenAI literacy activities it provides can be assessed as coursework. 3,750 people are currently enrolled in it, and it is embedded in 14 modules.

No institutional mechanism triggers embedding. Instead, each embed emerges through conversation, shaped by disciplinary context, module design, and individual advocacy. Those conversations surface something strategic documents rarely capture. Some module leads who embrace embedding do so for different reasons than those who comply. They see digital competence as intrinsic to their discipline and their graduates, while the others are directed to include it. Enthusiastic module leads want critically literate graduates; others are responding to employability pressures. The question “Who is this for?” receives different answers depending on who you ask - and those answers shape what gets built.

Students hold competing expectations too. Emerging findings from a HEA Pathfinder funded student co-design study on GenAI literacy and academic integrity (AI-LIT), grounded in Students as Partners principles (Ní Bheoláin, Lowney & O'Riordan, 2020), reveal that learners simultaneously want clear institutional guidance and direction alongside personal agency to chart their own path in this area. Their motivations span academic need, professional anxiety around future prospects, and genuine curiosity.

This paper offers a practitioner perspective on navigating these competing purposes and argues that spotlighting them is a precondition for digital competence provision that effectively serves students.

Attendees will take away an honest account of navigating these tensions and a question worth asking: before asking how to develop digital competence, might we first ask who it is for and why.

References

Ní Bheoláin, Ruth, Lowney, Rob, & O’Riordan, Fiona. (2020). Students as Partners in Assessment (SaPiA): A Literature Scoping Review. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4270579