Partnership supports University of Chester to stay ahead of technological advances

The University’s Centre for Academic Innovation and Development (CAID) at the University of Chester has deepened and strengthened its partnership with TeacherMatic, an award-winning AI tool.

TeacherMatic, part of the Avallain Group, offers personalised, adaptive planning tools that empower teachers by streamlining administrative tasks and enabling more focus on student interaction and innovation.

In 2024, TeacherMatic won gold in the category for ‘Most innovative new learning technologies product – UK’ at the Learning Technologies Awards. The University of Chester has been working closely with TeacherMatic since 2023 when CAID led the institutional bid to join a Jisc-funded pilot of the AI tool with eight higher education institutions. The relationship has gone from strength-to-strength and now all University of Chester teaching staff have access to the AI tool to support their work in curriculum development and teaching delivery.

Jisc leads the UK tertiary education, research and innovation sectors to be pioneers in the use of digital technology and data. Its purpose is to harness the power of technology and data to transform how knowledge is created, shared and applied.

The University has taken a responsible approach of engaging with AI technologies in an ethical and sustainable way with humans kept firmly at the centre of developments.

Associate Professor of Academic Innovation, Katharine Welsh, said: “Through a series of staff workshops, it is clear that TeacherMatic has inspired the development of teaching practice through its wide range of generators, such as case study generator, rubric generator, multiple choice quiz generator and so on, which scaffold the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) by breaking down the prompts and guiding users through a series of steps to reach an output which can be further refined if necessary.

“TeacherMatic has been a welcome and important tool to help build staff confidence with AI and support colleagues to develop and refresh teaching materials and practice.”

Professor Jackie Potter, Dean of Academic Innovation, explained: “It is fantastic to build our relationship with TeacherMatic a step further. Following a successful pilot of the AI tool with about 50 academic teaching staff supported by Jisc, TeacherMatic became one of our approved tools for staff to use to support their development of AI-enhanced workflows.

“We are now expanding the use and availability of the tool to all teaching staff and we will continue to work closely with TeacherMatic to shape their development priorities and the tool’s capabilities to meet the needs of the diverse subjects and teaching contexts that exist in higher education.”

Peter Kilcoyne, TeacherMatic Managing Director, said: “We are delighted to be partnering with the University of Chester and to be supporting their journey in ensuring that their staff can benefit from using AI for a wide range of tasks in planning, teaching, learning and assessment.”