Unlearning Certainty, Relearning Curiosity with AI
- FHS Communications
CHSE Focus Day 2025
The Centre for Health Science Education (CHSE) in the Faculty of Health Sciences hosted its annual Focus Day on Teaching and Learning. With the theme “Unlearning Certainty, Relearning Curiosity,” the event tackled one of the most pressing issues in higher education today: how artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping the academic environment.
CHSE brought together thought leaders who not only advise their own universities but also contribute to national policies on the appropriate use of AI in health professions education. Through plenaries, interactive sessions, and collaborative discussions, participants were invited to let go of old certainties and rethink their role as educators in a world where students—and teachers—must learn alongside intelligent technologies.
Embedding AI in Health Professions Education
The day opened with a keynote by Professor Margaret Bearman, Research Professor at the Centre for Research in Assessment and Digital Learning (CRADLE) at Deakin University. In her talk, Artificial intelligence in health professional education: more than a tool, Bearman urged educators to see AI as more than a convenient add-on. She says that AI should be defined within a social context for a particular purpose. “People, their contexts and technologies are all interrelated,” she explained, further arguing that technology must be understood as part of an evolving ecosystem as it shapes people as much as they shape it”.
Her talk highlighted the importance of developing evaluative judgement—the capacity to recognise what “good” looks like and to know why. She suggests that by integrating generative AI into clinical training, it will "teach students how to deal with situations where AI recommends one course of action and clinical expertise might recommend another”. This, she added, is part of the complexities of the use of AI in clinical decision support as it creates less and more work at the same time.
Bearman’s current research programmes focus on learning to work with AI and on feedback cultures in clinical education, where there is a struggle in balancing theory and practice, which is addressed by highly regulated clinical processes. She was part of the team behind Australia’s 2023 national guidelines on assessment reform in the age of AI.
Rethinking assessment in an age of GenAI
The programme then shifted into an engaging workshop that re-examined the relevance of traditional assessments in the context of accessible generative AI. Co-facilitated by Professor Francois Cilliers, Professor of Health Science Education at the University of Cape Town and consultant to the Centre for Higher Education Development) and Sukaina Walji, Director of the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching at UCT, the session challenged participants to reconsider what student learning objectives should look like in the era of AI. The facilitators asked provocative questions: What knowledge has become obsolete in healthcare education (because of AI)? How must objectives shift so that assessments remain relevant?
Using case-based activities, participants explored how aligning assessments with carefully considered purposes can create more authentic and future-facing evaluations of student learning. They overwhelmingly cited research ethical concerns, efficiency, credibility and the quality of students’ teaching outcomes when they think about the implications of the use of AI in education.
This, Walji says, turns educators’ focus to intentionally designing pedagogy that is relevant to the age of generative machine learning rather than imposing the application of incompatible traditional methods.
The day concluded with an expert-led discussion by Professor Kevin Behrens, Director of the Steve Biko Centre for Bioethics, titled Disrupting GenAI’s Halo Effect: Ethical Responsibilities of Health Science Educators. Behrens highlighted the ethical complexities of AI use, stressing the need for lecturers to be intentional in assigning AI-assisted tasks. He argued that such exercises should focus on developing student learning—critical thinking, analysis, and synthesis—rather than simply arriving at a “correct answer”.
He also cautioned that phenomena such as AI stupidity — the lack of common sense and contextual understanding, hallucinations — the generation of false or misleading “facts,” and automation bias — the human tendency to over-reliance on AI systems, pose significant risks to decision-making and information integrity.
Like Bearman, he noted that this challenge spans undergraduate and postgraduate levels, where AI may increasingly craft research outputs in ways that risk displacing students’ own scholarly work.
By the end of the day, participants had gained practical strategies for integrating AI and reinforced the network nodes within our community of practice. This strengthened connections among education-interested staff members committed to developing reflexive teaching, scholarly innovation and meaningful transformation in health sciences education.
Watch the highlights of the 2025 CHSE Focus Day: