A discussion on where we are today and where we are headed in the world of AI and using it for learning & education - September 2025. This material is from Asst. Professor Joe Houghton

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Joe Houghton is an advisor on AI to University College Dublin, The Institute of Bankers and the Royal Photographic Society. He is an Assistant Professor at UCD Smurfit Graduate School of Business where he created and has since 2005 run the MSc in Project Management programmes. Joe delivers AI & business talks and training to organisations, charities and educational institutions, and has to date authored 5 books on AI in Education and a Project Management textbook. He has trained multiple ETB’s in various aspects of AI and Education, and stays bang up to date on this fast moving space - no 2 training courses are the same!

Joe writes the AI in Education newsletter on Linkedin each week - join over 3,000 readers for a regular 5-10 minute read on updates in the AI space!

All Joe Houghton’s contact details, links and books:

Joe Houghton

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• Table of Contents

Let’s start with Ethics

AI is an amazing technology, but the fundamental rules around use of information - especially in an academic environment - haven’t changed.

Citing the work of others includes doing this with AI generated work.

In ALL assignments where AI is used you should:

• Include a section outlining the tools you used and how these were employed in the research, structuring & writing of your submission - I would expect this to be around a page long in most cases giving some detail on your use of AI tools. Use of AI tools is encouraged in my modules but you do need to declare their use.
• If directly citing from material generated by an AI tool, you should:
  • Put the cited text in italics to clearly show that this is not your own material - this is emerging as an accepted standard in referencing
  • Reference this just as if you were referencing a passage from an academic paper - e.g.
    • ChatGPT, Model GPT5, Accessed 21st Sept 2025, Prompt “Tell me about risk management in the construction industry”

Assessment

A big issue for many educators is assessment now that AI can write papers for students.

AI is here to stay, and rapidly being incorporated into all the tools we routinely use - last week Microsoft announced that Copilot was now available in all the 365 apps for instance.

So there’s simply no point in trying to ban AI use - students ARE using it, will continue to use it, so don’t be like Canute trying to stop the sea pouring in - here’s an image Gemini’s nano-banana created based on the prompt “Create me an image of King Canute trying to stop the sea pouring in”