The report on Ireland's universities and their adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) reveals a cautious approach, with three standout institutions: Dublin City University, University College Dublin, and University of Galway, each employing different strategies.
This report analyzes Manus, an autonomous AI agent launched in March 2025 by Butterfly Effect. Despite interest from institutions, searches reveal no campus-wide deployments, yet it has a strong focus on students. Its turbulent ownership remains unresolved at the time the research was concluded (late April 2026).
This report introduces a series on the deployment of institution-wide LLM agreements in higher education across OECD, EU and similar high-performing economies. It highlights the global adoption of OpenAI's ChatGPT Edu, noting significant national agreements in countries like Italy and Estonia, while emphasizing decentralized U.S. adoption at major universities. Future reports will cover additional countries and LLM SaaS systems.
Below is the AI wishy-washy rewrite of my deliberately raw post on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bacsich_a-weekend-ago-i-was-travelling-back-home-activity-7394477618529533952-WQC0?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAABVpRwBndzgy_gXa77UFNt_ZXmJovKbFf8 Talk about muting the message to make it more palatable to scholars and researchers and managers! A thought-provoking encounter on a train journey sparked reflections on the authenticity of student assessments. As I made my way from Manchester to Sheffield, … Continue reading A thought-provoking encounter on a train
Summary I am delighted to be attending and speaking at the ALT-C 2025 Conference taking place in Glasgow on 23-24 October 2025. I will be leading a workshop on my current favourite topic: how to reduce the cost of teaching in higher and further education, particularly in the context of digital, online and blended learning. … Continue reading Ways of reducing the cost of online and blended courses in post-secondary education
A Counterfactual Response to COVID-19 School Closures in Scotland (2020–2022): universal online provision at school level Introduction and Context When Scottish schools closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, education officials faced an unprecedented challenge: how to ensure continuity of learning for over 700,000 pupils across Scotland (en.wikipedia.org, en.wikipedia.org). In reality, Scotland relied on ad-hoc remote teaching … Continue reading Lessons from COVID-19: Scotland’s Educational Response Reimagined, by ChatGPT 4.5 Deep Research using a prompt from Paul Bacsich
As one of the pair of judges of the "Online School of the Year" award for The Tutors' Association I am looking forward to the National Tutoring Awards tomorrow evening (Friday 21 June) at the Leonardo Royal Hotel London City. Looking forward to meeting virtual schools and tutoring providers.
On behalf of the joint authors Paul Bacsich presented the team's report What schools can learn from virtual schools (and online universities) and sought feedback from the research community. He also invited further experts to contribute papers to the Education Sciences journal Special Issue on Virtual Schools for K-12 Education: Lessons Learned and Implications for … Continue reading What schools can learn from virtual schools – final presentation at EDEN 2024 Graz
Opening up learning 