All right, welcome everybody.
My name is Fred Dixon.
I will get each of the panelists here in the AI in the future of education roundtable.
This is Big Blue Button World 2023.
The purpose of this roundtable is to help guide folks in terms of understanding what's
going on in the industry with all the things I see in AI and maybe think a little
bit more critically about it and give you a good spirited discussion.
We may not always agree on everything.
In fact, I hope we don't.
Allison, over to yourself.
Please introduce.
Hi, everyone.
I'm Allison Powell.
I'm the Chief Academic Officer of Evergreen Education Group, which runs the
Digital Learning Collaborative and hosts the DLAC Digital Learning Annual Conference.
I've been in the field of online hybrid learning for the past 25 years, started
as a teacher and started some virtual and hybrid schools in Las Vegas, Nevada, and
then have been in the association world, supporting the field and schools
around the world for the last 20 plus years.
So excited to be here.
Thank you, Allison.
John.
Hi, I'm John Fela.
I primarily teach English to high schoolers in an online asynchronous setting.
I've been teaching online for about 15 years now.
I've been a teacher for 24, and I have been doing a lot of training around the
country on topics like OER accessibility, and now AI has become the major
focus of the work I do outside of my district.
And I'm just really interested in continuing the conversation about it.
Thank you, John.
And Stephen.
Hello, everyone.
My name is Stephen Lattick.
Many people know me as Lattick.
I work for a company called OpenLMS.
I'm the principal of eLearning Advocacy, and my job is kind of threefold.
I manage our blog at the eLearn magazine.
I host both in-person and virtual summits for us, and I run the eLearn podcast
as well.
I invite everybody to come check out that podcast.
But most recently, I think what you were interested in, Fred, was the fact I hosted
a summit called the AI and Learning Summit.
I've had the privilege of interviewing something like around 500 people over the
last four or five years around how do we do online education better?
And so AI and learning as a topic is sort of a very logical evolution in those
conversations. So I'm happy to bring those insights to this conversation.
Thank you, Stephen. And look, I want to also thank the audience that has
joined us. I can see everybody here in the list.
As we talk, please put questions in the chat.
Agree or disagree what we say.
We want to make it interactive.
And I think a lot of you are here because you probably, again, want to gain
a better insight in terms of how AI could be used to improve education.
Maybe not some of the things that we see today.
John, you are the educator.
You are the teacher.
You are the ultimate recipient, you and your students, of whatever we bequeath
as technologists, ideas, developers.
Why don't you start and give us a sense of what you've seen in the last six
months on the influx of AI tools in your teaching and learning and what you
believe will happen in the next six months.
Like sort of cast your crystal ball ahead.
And it can be a positive thing or negative thing.
And I think that will probably give us points of departure for the discussion.
Yeah, so, you know, last December, I started noticing something really odd
about my student submissions.
I teach about 200 students across the state of Minnesota.
And, you know, just trying to get a handle on what it was that was changing
and people who anywhere from never, never heard of something like chat GPT
to all the way to students who wanted to try to use it for everything.
You know, I think initially I made some mistakes about being a little bit more
accusatory in my language with with my learners, and especially in the
beginning of the class, it was a struggle to figure out what the right
response to those submissions were in a way that didn't harm the
relationship that I was trying to build with them.
So, you know, really started just trying to focus on what it was.
What's what was the appropriate use of these tools?
And then just experimenting with them myself.
You know, I think what has been the biggest challenge is just trying to
wrap the heads around this just as a staff, you know, so some people are
more comfortable using these tools, giving learners feedback about the use.
And I think in the next six months, the biggest struggle aside from just
having a consistent response across organizations is going to be one thing
I haven't really heard anybody talk about it in all of this new
development is what do we tell the public because there's a large segment
of the public that thinks AI has a liberal bias and doesn't want people
to use it at all.
You know, we've seen some pretty contentious school board meetings
across the United States.
And, you know, I think this is going to be the next phase of that where as
people start to find out these tools are being used to create lessons,
support assessments, build courses, and then students will be using it.
Teachers may use it to help support feedback.
I think we're going to see a lot of blowback from people who don't
understand what the tools are, how they were trained.
You know, there's just there's still a lot we don't know while I'm really
excited about utilizing these tools in my own work and helping students
navigate this world.
I think that's going to be a big challenge for me.
The other thing is we just don't we just don't have a great way to
distinguish the extent to which students want to use it.
You know, some I teach primarily seniors who are ready to graduate.
They want they just want to be done.
And if students are great at seeing hypocrisy, if they see teachers
using it to lighten their workload, they're going to wonder why they
can't do it as well.
So it's it's not as much the tool itself.
It's how we're going to talk about it, how we're going to all get on
the same page about it.
Good points.
And maybe, Allison, I see you nodding your head a bit.
Like, what are your thoughts on what John had just sort of described as
the the current almost sounds like educating the educators and
educating students before just giving the tool to them?
Yeah, I think.
Yeah, I totally agree.
I think that's been one of the biggest issues in education as we
get the nice next bright, shiny object and just say, here you go.
Good luck. And we buy all these tools and stuff, but we don't take the time
to actually figure out how do we use this to make education better
and help engage and help students learn.
And so it's it's this bright, new, shiny object.
But I think this is going to be the next big thing.
Like we talk about transforming education, but this could be
the actual next thing that transforms education, since probably the computer
or the Internet.
We've gotten lots of new technologies, but nothing's been this big.
I think that's really going to.
It's probably one of the biggest transformations we'll see in our
lifetimes, all of us on this call.
So how do we take that and use it for good?
Because there's going to be good and bad and all technologies that we use
once they're introduced to us.
So it's going to change.
We're going to have to be open because this is dynamic.
We're at the beginning stages of it.
So, like you said, in six months, this could be a totally different conversation.
So how do we use that?
How do we train teachers and let the kids experiment, too,
and help train and learn together?
I think it's going to be one of the most important things as we learn more
about AI and as it advances.
And there's just so many tools coming out.
So how do we pick the right ones to use?
But that's the thing. It's a tool.
We still need the humans in the classroom to create those relationships.
And the teachers are still going to be there to support the learning.
But how do we use this tool for teaching and learning now?
And I'm going to turn to Stephen, like the question that Alison said,
how do we use a tool?
It's another way of saying, how do we judge the success of using AI?
Like, how should we think about evaluating whether it's used successfully or not?
And there's a policy part to that.
And there's the actual use of it and the introduction of it.
Curious your thoughts, Stephen.
The thing that I find most interesting both in this conversation and the ones
I've had over the last, let's say, eight months now on this topic
specifically is the deer in headlights kind of, you know,
beginning of the conversations like, oh, my gosh, what are we going to do
about this AI that is now, you know, which at the end of the day,
we very happily forget that we've been using AI for, you know, decades now.
And, you know, if you were you or I were to, you know, go on a road trip
and the friend that we were going to go on that road trip with came
and, you know, they're all excited. They got their pack.
They put it in the back and then they opened up a paper map
like you have here on the screen right now is our thing.
We don't kind of scratch our heads because most of us would pull up maps
or Google Maps or some other, you know, AI driven technology
that would not only, you know, build our direction,
but tell us when there's traffic happening and, you know,
what other routes to do and those kinds of things.
So we've been, you know, and this is in cars.
This is in everything. And in education, it's been there for a long time.
I mean, the one of the biggest examples that we have is Duolingo.
They've been using AI forever.
And it's the most popular education app out there, right?
What I have seen, you know, and I'm going to try to talk about this.
I'm not trying to promote my own deal here.
But as I as we went through the summit, you know,
just a couple of months ago, that as we talked,
we looked at what are the tools of today?
And that was one of the tracks.
We then another track was what was the near and not so near future of,
you know, what's coming down the pipe in terms of technology
and thought processes. And then what are the challenges?
And ultimately, what I've taken away from that first
session that we had in June around this was.
The tools have already there are not only had they been there,
but this is an inevitability.
So it's not a matter of choosing whether or not we're going to participate.
We we are participating. It is it is happening.
It's an inevitability, right?
That what's coming in the near future, the not so it are.
There's some incredible things.
I'm thinking right now of a gentleman named Bodo Hohen, who is he's
the co-founder of a company called Knowledge.
And he talks about, you know, going from zero to becoming a complete expert
in, you know, biohacking infrastructure for his daughter who got a rare disease.
And then they had to figure out how do we, you know, work with this disease.
And he used all of these AI tools in order to do that.
So what is the future of learning look like?
It's absolutely incredible and fascinating.
The thing that we really are going to be confronted with is what I think, John,
you just you nailed it on the head in that we
really are going to need to think about what is it?
What are all the human pieces to this?
The easiest one or the most confident, not confrontational,
but the one that puts it on the table for anyone in K through 12
or even in higher ed right now is critical thinking skills.
How do we prove or how do we show that our learners are actually acquiring
knowledge and then, you know, how are we how are we making sure
that they're actually engaging with material?
But the second one is how do we assess that?
How do we actually assess that they've acquired that knowledge? Right.
But then I go to the to the even to the next level as well, where.
If I'm an educator, if I'm an instructional designer,
if I'm a professor, if I'm somebody who's building education,
let's just take this one example.
If we have all of these tools that create massive efficiencies,
what am I going to do with that 50, 60, 70 percent of my time
that I just got back and how do we do this?
So, I mean, I've talked too much already for my opening salvo here,
but I think it's those human pieces, right?
It's those human pieces that are the most interesting thing because
and if you want to be controversial, I'm very excited to talk about
the hard the hard questions around that.
So, OK, I want to take a moment and actually pull the audience
to get a sense of who our audience is in this session.
So I just put up a poll. Everybody can.
I don't think you guys are going to see it because you're moderators,
but I'm basically asking, oh, you see it? OK.
So let's get a little sample of who is listening in.
And I'll give a moment for it to respond back.
And see lots of educators,
lots of heads of online learning, some developers as well.
The the human side of it is incredibly important.
And I'll I'll I'll cue up the next sort of thoughts.
We just went through 14 years of an experiment
where we gave everybody who had access to computers and phone
social media accounts or they gave them all access.
And it really was a let's do this and see what happens afterwards.
And it feels like we're in a similar case right now with AI,
where as much as open AI and chat GPT and others say,
we disclose this so that we want to get responsible feedback on it.
They disclosed it.
And I think it was Stephen, you mentioned that the chat GPT
actually went down a little bit recently because the school term has ended.
I'll find that article, put it in the chat.
But it was in Forbes where, yeah, in June,
for the first time ever, chat GPT's usage actually dropped.
And the ultimate analysis is it's like, hey,
because all the kids went on school on summer vacation.
So, you know, that that that's an incredible.
You know, right there, I'll put it in the chat right now.
All right. So just in terms of like what we see so far,
most of more people here, the educators,
I can see there's some heads of online learning,
some developers in that this experiment that we're doing right now is
it feels like both a capitalistic and an entrepreneur experiment
where we're making chat tools available for everybody.
Stephen, you pointed out chat GPT actually existed as GPT.
It wasn't until a chat interface became in front of it.
And what I think that tells us is that once you create a way
for a human to interact with something like another human,
there's this all this door opens up.
I didn't have to program anything.
I didn't have to figure out a user interface.
I could just start asking questions and getting responses back.
And, John, I want to I want to bring it back to yourself.
Like you saw this firsthand
what students were doing and you're living with the challenges
of trying to suss out is this plagiarism or not,
which I will say, I think it's just a it's a never ending battle.
I don't know that that's the focus.
The industry shouldn't be on detecting plagiarism.
It should be some results.
If you could wave a magic wand,
what do you think the focus should be on responsible uses of AI
and education in the next six to 12 months?
What would you like to see?
Well, I'll tie it back a little bit to your example
of giving people social media accounts because it started off
as this wonderful thing and ways to connect and then quickly fragmented us.
And now we have people living in these feedback loops
where they're only seeing the kinds of information that they
want to see. Right.
So that's creating quite a divide.
And what I worry is going to happen with this tool is that,
for instance, where I work,
I can try to account for the implicit bias of the tool,
of the programmers by integrating
items into my prompt that incorporate social emotional learning,
anti-racist responses,
you know, making sure that things are created
with universal design for learning in mind.
So I'm making things accessible.
So I have the ability to ask for and prompt these things
that aren't going to happen by default.
And we have a lot of people now that are just using it
to kind of recreate some of the broken practices that we've always had,
but just better and faster.
So what I you know, what I'd like to see
is having that discussion about
an implicit bias of what what does an appropriate prompt look like.
I think the kinds of ways that I'm using it are illegal
in other states right now.
And so because of that, we we aren't going to have
kind of a collective response to all of this
because of all the local control of these school districts around the country.
The differences between states in the US, it just doesn't
it just doesn't feel like we're we're going to have a singular approach.
It's going to be very organization specific.
I wish that wasn't the case.
It also makes me think that's why it probably won't
transform education the way it has the potential to.
But some some guidelines,
you know, maybe even legislative guidelines
around how to use it might be appropriate.
I think what you're trying to say is like, we can't just let it do everything.
Some constraints here will be very helpful
so that people focus their thoughts in terms of using AI
for education in certain ways and not in other ways.
And just kind of simplify the life for a little bit.
Again, it feels like a social experiment that we're just all going through.
If I may, one of the problems that John is talking about, I think
if we dialed back social media to the beginning
and started thinking about, you know, if there would have been
or would have been some way to verify or.
Yeah, I guess verify is the right word.
Any message that was sent by any one person, right?
It would have been very interesting
because ultimately we would have moved from the Internet of anonymity
to the Internet of OK, I'm posting this and this is me.
And this is what I'm doing.
We have the same problem in AI in the black box problem
that we don't know where answers are coming from, right?
In that, you know, you put something in a chat, GBT or BART
or one of the other tools that are out there and you're not quite sure.
Even we can't even a person who created it can't quite tell you
how did that, you know, how did that answer get generated?
And we're, you know, we're starting to now see attempts
at finding citations and those kinds of things.
Like at least they can say, hey, this these are the places
where I drew the information from.
That's what the AI is telling you, but it can't quite get that right.
And so that particular piece right there is, you know,
where did it come from?
All cascades down to John again, you put this on the table,
I think correctly in the beginning is that, you know,
all of these tools are built on piles of data, right?
They're built on data sets.
And so those data sets can be organizational specific,
personally specific, statewide specific.
Again, you know, in the in the summit,
one of the presentations we had was from Guanajuato, Mexico,
where a group of people went down and actually were able to look at data
that was generated by AI tools in the state education system.
And they use a tool called the IBM three
IBM 360 Fairness tool to determine there's actually a significant
gender bias in that tool around reporting for at rest students
and, you know, education outcomes and whatnot.
It's very, very interesting stuff.
But it really all comes back to that.
These tools are built on these piles of data and data is super, super messy.
OK, so, Alison, I see you nod your head.
What are your thoughts?
Yeah, I'm like, I agree with all of this.
And it's it's just advancing so fast.
And so it is being built on this,
these different data sets, but creating those policies
is hard, too, as it's coming around so fast.
And it's I mean, people are making fake videos
and stuff that are really hard to tell.
But then there's software coming out to say like, OK, this has been edited
or fake, but like then the next thing comes out.
And so it takes a while. It's back and forth and back and forth.
And so it's really hard, especially here in the U.S.
It's district by district for policies or state by state.
But then you have the whole world.
This isn't just the U.S. issue.
Like Stephen said, it's in Mexico.
We've been working with several countries all over the world.
And some places they're banning it and others are open to it.
And like, it's a free for all.
So it's trying to find like what's that sweet spot in the middle.
But keeping the policies open and dynamic enough to keep up with the technology,
because there's always going to be those bad guys out there
that are going to try to find the worst way to use it.
Versus the positive ways to use it.
And so how do we keep that balance?
Because it's horrible to say the bad things are going to come out.
But we've got to we're going to learn from that and protect it
and create new policies around that.
So I think it is important, as John said to you,
I'm all over the place right now.
Just fascinated by all of this.
But the bias and stuff, it is a big topic.
Maybe what I can say is this,
I think the policy argument is very relevant right now,
especially the diversity approaches.
If I imagine back when calculators first came out in schools,
I'm imagining schools were not uniform in their policy towards calculators
and that some did and some didn't.
And eventually all got to a place where, OK, it's a tool.
If it's used in this way, you know,
you can have your calculator doing the exam or you can't.
And that changed a lot when calculators started to record things.
I believe there's going to be a tipping point.
So, John, this is sort of coming off of yours.
I'm imagining a school where it has some number of students
and the parents have a huge role and the some students
in the school have access to some AI that's not from the school.
But let's say they pay for something.
Someone's come up with a really good idea of using AI.
And those students are starting to do better in the school.
A parent comes in and the teacher says, you know,
and finds out that half the kids in the school,
half the kids in their son or daughter's class
are doing better than their son or daughter and asks why.
And the teacher says, well, there looks like they're using something like X.
I think that parent is probably going to go back and say,
how do I get X?
How do I give my son or daughter the advantage?
And that X would be something driven by AI.
I'll put this as an open question.
What is X? What is that thing that's going to tip
where a school may be a little struggling with AI,
but once they see the benefits of this by the students,
learning outcomes, they're going to come around
like they did with calculators and say,
OK, I don't think we should ban this anymore.
This seems to be a good use of it.
But what is that use?
And I'll open this up to anybody if they want to take a shot of it.
Well, I might just push back on a minute for the comparison to calculators,
because I hear that a lot.
And with a calculator, we know and can verify the process
by which that response comes out.
If I'm having AI write an essay or a lesson,
it's making assertions and supporting those assertions.
And I have no idea how that's actually happening. Right.
So if I, you know, I think having students
actually take the AI response by default,
so they're not compelled to or feel like they can cheat.
But but using that response and then saying, OK, now this this is the response.
These are the claims go out and find credible information
that can support, validate or invalidate those claims.
And then now we've kind of transformed what was writing an essay
kind of assignment, which, you know, who writes essays once they're done
with school, into an assignment that actually shows them
the real world value and significance of verifying claims.
So anyway, so that's kind of my thing.
I worked as a consultant for 15 years.
I've written my my fair share of reports that are, you know,
so I think there's lots of people out there who do write essays.
Just I'm not that that is tongue in cheek, but it's also like
I see the number of emails that my wife writes every day.
And it's like, oh, my gosh, you know,
I think and I hope that I'm not stealing Alison's thunder here.
But scalability is one of the things that we're really most interested in.
And personalization of learning is something that we're most
most interested in.
And so just as a direct answer to your question, Fred,
I think that X tool would be the personal tutor.
Right. And you can see it in a chat GPT right now,
where if you prompt it to say, answer this question
like a sixth grade teacher or answer this question like I'm a third grader,
you know, you have the ability to take math problems,
social problems, history, et cetera, and have it delivered
in literally different formats.
And then, you know, if you extrapolate out that six months, 18 months,
you know, two years down the line, imagine that that has a has an avatar,
a visual, you know, sort of visual interface
where that avatar is then adapting to whatever needs.
So, you know, then you're in your gender, you know, you're
you're able to be gender specific, you're able to be ethnically
and racial inclusive, et cetera.
And what if every kid had one of those?
You know, our ability to scale the the teacher,
the the the the coach is is essentially infinite.
And that is, you know, making sure that everybody has access
to that kind of thing is is going to be a decider.
I I'll comment on that one.
Alice's thoughts. I'm a technologist as well.
So, Stephen, when you talk, I hear my same thoughts like altruistic.
What's this possible?
But, John, when I listen to you, this washes up against the shore of
how do how do I help students use this in a way that furthers learning?
And what I'm hearing from you is it's to be skeptical.
Don't take something at face value.
Your ability to question, to research, to have your own opinion
and not just give over, you know,
I'm going to cut and paste what he says and and even forget
to take off the top that's a chachi and submit this as an assignment.
Like I I almost get the feeling that your
your nirvana for AI used to have a student stand up and say,
I tried this with AI.
These are all the reasons that it was wrong.
I think it could I think it should be A, B, C and D.
And I sat down and I did A, B, C and D.
And I still put in and then I still challenge the AI and things.
And I agree with this, but I disagree with that.
So there's there's there's the tool side of it.
Like, again, I'm Stephen, I'm more in your core.
Like, what shiny thing can I create?
What thing that I do that altruistically?
But, John, I your perspective of what practically should be happening
with the student when they're encountering this is really good.
And Allison, over to yourself as well, like curious in your thoughts.
Yeah, I agree with Stephen.
Like I think the true potential, at least in the field,
well, it's for all education, but in the field of online learning for
since I've been here 20 plus years is that the real potential
of online learning is that it can personalize learning for every student.
But we haven't gotten there yet.
Like we've got the online courses.
It's digital content.
You get pointed to the right resources.
If you don't aren't successful on something, test your knowledge.
But it's not really taking it to that next level of really engaging
the students and knowing what their interests are, their learning styles
and really curating content around that.
And I think over the last year, maybe two years,
like since the pandemic, then everybody was exposed to online learning.
It's the number one topic, even over A.I.
this year was how do I engage my students online?
Like it's not even close.
And even with A.I., I thought like we did a big survey of all of our attendees.
And it's still how do we engage students?
And I think as Stephen said, it's the potential to really scale this.
Like we've got the basics.
We've been doing A.I. and online learning for a while.
But how do we really get it for every student to really?
Here's the content.
I know you like this topic, so I'm going to rework this
chapter or whatever you have to read or write and bring it down
to your grade level of reading, your reading level,
create a project or something that you can do to really engage you
in something in a topic you may not really be interested in.
Like we as teachers can engage students and stuff that they're interested in.
But you still have a full curriculum of all of these standards
and not every kid is going to be interested in every single topic.
Like I'm not the history buff, but if there was something in a way
to get me excited about history, I mean, I'm all for that.
And I think it's going to really free up a lot of the teachers times
or really focus on the students that are struggling
or need to be pushed a little bit more.
So the teachers jobs not going to go away with this personalized learning,
but it's going to give them more time to actually teach and coach
and really build those relationships with students
while they're working on other things.
And they'll get that real time feedback from the AI.
And so I think like I think that's the biggest power of all of this
is it's going to let teachers do their job.
And what they're really good at is building the relationships
and working with students to help them learn.
Could I could I do it?
Oh, I just I just want to make.
Just just quickly, like I realize I may be coming across
as kind of a downer with some of my responses and concerns.
But, you know, I am very excited about the potential.
I use it every day. I am using it to build courses.
I am using it to write standards based assessments
and help identify essential standards in different subject areas.
I'm using it to like create role playing Dungeons and Dragons lessons.
And I'm putting Creative Commons licenses on my ways of using
these tools with students.
So I've written three books on it now, one for students,
one for teachers, one for, you know, educators in general
to help do some of the heavy lifting around solving problems
that we face in education.
So I don't I don't mean to come across as like, you know,
scaring people off of it, because I've totally embraced it
in my own work and my work with students.
But like Allison said, the biggest value in all of this for me
is to finally do all the things that we've always said
were important that I never had the time to do
and especially freeing up that time so that I can then
use that for for more personal feedback with my students,
building those relationships,
because in that online setting, it's a challenge.
So I do have more time now, even though it takes me
a little bit more time.
I do have more time overall to then reach out to my students more. So.
Just throw that in there.
No, no, it's it's good.
I just want to paraphrase back like what you describe
wasn't so much as it's going to change the world of education.
It just give you more time.
If you can, if if we if there are tools that come out
that are AI powered, that could save 10 percent
of the time for K-12 educators or higher educators
throughout the world, the United States or North America, Europe, whatever.
The the difference that that would make would be huge.
I mean, people would see it as a benefit, not as a threat.
And then, you know, there's certainly threatening things about it
that are to be concerned about, but it's saving the time for it.
Stephen, I think you were going to say so.
Yeah, so I think if you'll you'll allow me this analogy,
just follow along here.
It's it's a lot like what happens when somebody comes in and says,
hey, if you won the lottery today, what would you do with all the money?
Right. If you were that next person to win that,
let's just say, a billion dollar lottery.
The first answer, everybody, everyone's mouth is, hey,
I'll take a vacation. I'll buy a house.
I'll do some of these things.
And you really, really quickly find that there's, you know,
that that that peters out very quickly. Right.
You get you get bored.
There's only so many things to buy.
You can only golf so much, et cetera.
And you've got to start filling your time with other things.
And my analogy here is, is that you've got to start
doing the hard work of living. Right.
You have to start figuring out, how do I give it back?
How do I start building, you know, building people up?
How do I create a foundation?
How do I create a foundation and blah, blah, blah, blah. Right.
The same thing with these tools in AI.
I think there's an analogy here is that, holy smokes,
what if we actually weren't able to give a personalized tutor
to every student in the world? Right.
What if what if we realize that in the next,
let's just say, five years?
What are we going to do with all that other time that we have?
How are we contributing to, you know, advancing knowledge?
How are we contributing to if I'm an L and D, you know,
forwarding the business goals of my business or I'm, you know,
moving from the L and D department to actually having a seat
on the strategy of the business.
So as John was rightly pointing out, it's like we with
when you have tools that create efficiencies,
you're then presented with that uncomfortable feeling of like,
oh, no, all that busy work that kept me busy no longer exists.
And so now I actually have to find a way to add value.
And if it correct me if I'm wrong, but
I have three three children and they're now in sort of the
I have primary, middle school and secondary.
And and throughout their entire education,
I've always heard from the educators that
the future is can I work in groups?
Can I be have creative solutions?
Can I be a problem solver? These kind of things, right?
That's those are the skills we need in the future.
And it seems to me like we're now just having this great leapfrog
in moment or potential moment where that is coming to fruition.
If you talk to my 14 year old right now, he assumes
these tools are are for him to use. Right.
It's not if maybe whatever.
Like there is an assumption there.
And ultimately, you know, the ability to show up
and have those critical thinking skills, have the ability to say,
wow, that's an interesting solution.
But does it fit? Will it work? Does it create a profit?
You know, does it you know, is this going to create damage?
Like how, you know, what are the after effects and the externalities of it?
That's that's the stuff.
And so I think that that folds right back into the, you know,
what is the educator focus on and, you know, how how are we going to say,
look, are my kids cheating or are they not, you know,
not going to be developing their brains?
That is where the hard work is going to have to happen.
Awesome. You and I want I think it's worthwhile pointing out,
you work with state school systems, you work with large districts
who are trying to come out with policies
and ways of using technology efficiently.
So it's very interesting the different perspectives here.
John is like, OK, I'm in a class and you're up there like, OK,
I'm working with large organizations.
What do you hear about like the, you know, the idea that there would be
OK, I don't know if we use the word yet, personalized instruction.
I'll try to channel you channel you for a moment, John.
You have a class of 30 students, they show up first day.
They're all at different levels.
And you're you're kind of intuitively like a maestro trying to sess out,
OK, what's the wind section and what's the drums and like who
who what am I working with here?
And you can do that after practice.
But maybe there would be some type of assessment that is going to help you.
The students will sort of do like a a little bit of a qualifying session
beforehand. I think this gets back to more your Steven, like for a tutor
to help out even a physical tutor, a live tutor.
They have to assess where students are in their journey,
where the gaps are in their knowledge and before they can do something,
which is probably what they're struggling with,
which is why they got the tutor, how to shore up those gaps.
So that they can then do the thing that they want to do.
But everybody comes in at different levels.
And it's the job of the teacher to try to bring everybody up
to at least a baseline.
That takes time.
And maybe there are things that are really you really want to get to.
But you kind of got to get this
shore up all this knowledge first before we can kind of get to the good stuff.
Allison, do you hear or do you see
organizations moving towards like the tutoring side of AI
and trying to figure out how they could use it in the class?
And then I want to get your thoughts on it, John.
Yeah, and I'm a little more unique.
We are working with the big districts and statewide
departments of Ed and ministries of Ed.
But our focus has been more on the online and hybrid classrooms.
And a lot of them are already doing those pre-assessments
when a student enrolls.
Like if it's a full time course or even in a supplemental course,
there's usually some kind of pre-assessment to see where they're at.
And some courses, they can test out of different
topics or projects if they already know that area.
And then others, the teachers aware like, OK,
they really need a lot of help in this specific area.
And so we're we've seen it in online learning for a while,
but it's still here's your test.
Now the teacher has to go back and adjust the coursework and do all that,
where I think that this is where the scalability comes
and the power of AI, where they can kind of direct the student
and the course is adjusted based on where they're coming in.
So I think it's been a little bit easier for us
because we're already working with schools and people that are open to this.
There are I think the pandemic helped a little bit, too,
in some cases at one point in time, like I think John said it earlier.
It's all becoming political, like everything,
especially in this country, becomes political at some point.
But at first it was like, OK, online learning is great.
And there's so much potential.
And then it's like, no, we have to get the kids back in the classroom.
That's the only way they can learn.
But I think the true power is going to be in the hybrid schools.
That's where we're seeing the most growth is that
the technology is great, but it is nice for at least a couple of days
of the week to be with a teacher and to be with other students.
Collaborating, solving problems, using that time face to face
to build those relationships with teachers and other students
and really get more of that smaller group support
where they can go off with their tutors or the online digital content
and work through that at their own pace.
But when they need that extra help, come back to the hybrid school.
So we're seeing much more openness to that.
The hybrid model than the fully online school.
And as we learned during the pandemic, the physical schools
offer a lot of things that kids can't go fully online,
even if they wanted to, because their parents have to work
and nobody can stay home with them or they need lunches and food
and other things. I think the hybrid is that sweet spot.
And I think now you can have that AI tutor at home
and then the teacher and the physical classroom and they can work together
to really like we keep going back to that personalized
learning approach where you're getting the best of both worlds
and the human interaction and the online.
Interesting. You know, I think we've all thought a lot about the student.
We've all thought about plagiarism.
We thought about what the impact of the student is.
John, I want to go back to you because you look at it
from the point of view, the educator, like.
And so doing things for the student implicitly has to do something
for the educator. If any tool will be available.
So so I'm going to pose you a question where we're in this.
It's one year later.
We are all meeting right now, as we did before.
And in that year's time,
what would you like to be able to do differently
as an educator that you think AI has a good shot of helping you do it?
Yeah, I mean, so a year from now for doing this,
I could tell you all the mistakes I made and how to avoid them.
So what I'm thinking of right now, you know, for instance,
it I use Moodle as our LMS.
It would take a few hours.
So let's say so I've been working on this lately,
working on a lesson on elements of a story for a middle schooler.
And if I write a quiz on that lesson
in order to make a multiple choice quiz, it's going to take me
to do it the way I want to do, where it's giving feedback
based on every response and like reinforcing the learning, all that.
It's going to take me a few hours, probably, to generate the questions
off of the lesson and to put each one in individually.
And so I can go into chat GPT and I use the plus version
and have it generate a 30 question multiple choice quiz
that does all the things in XML format.
I can copy and paste that, save it as an XML document,
import it to Moodle less than 15 minutes, you know, maybe maybe 10.
I'm getting pretty good at it now.
So the way to so the time that that saved
and now allows me and I'm thinking of getting like an interest survey
of my of my learners at the beginning of the year.
What kinds of things, what kinds of media are they interested in?
And so now if they're doing a lesson on elements of a story,
I can have chat GPT write a 30 question quiz
assessing their knowledge on the elements of a story
using Pokemon, one using Harry Potter, one using Star Wars,
one using, you know, some anime that they might be interested in.
And now I can upload into my class all in less time
than it took me to write one quiz to begin with,
which I probably only would have written five questions
for a quick formative assessment or practice.
But now I can have a 30 question quiz, pull in five random questions,
and now they can take that a few different times as practice.
So I can build in practice and these quick formative checks
in ways I never would have dreamt of before.
And it wouldn't be much trouble to just continue to do that
and build that catalog and library of quizzes
so that becomes less and less time even, you know, from year to year.
If I if I may, Fred, I think I want to build on that.
What John's saying as well, like I and two threads here
building one of what you're saying, John,
imagine all of the teachers in the world who, you know, you every
you struggle getting parent interaction. Right.
And there's two reasons, you know, some of the reasons why parents have
is because they don't have time.
But a lot of times it's because they don't understand the material
that the kids are bringing home with them. Right.
Like they either forgot or they're just not familiar with it or it's new.
Suddenly, now you have this ability to say, hey, look,
take this home or hey, parents, you know, work with your kids.
And you again, you have that tutor there, you know,
where you can type in a question and have it come back
and then sit and have a conversation with your student or your child
and those kinds of things.
But the one that was really I wanted to put on the table was
outside the classroom.
If I think of the administration of running a school,
of running a school district, of running an L and D department,
those kinds of things, scheduling classes,
you know, even just creating that, you know, who's teaching what
and what students are going in which class. Right.
What is still now for many schools like, you know,
moving tabs around a board to get teachers in right places. Right.
AI can do that in seconds. Right.
If I if I'm a teacher and like, hey, look, I need to I need to schedule days off.
You should be able to go into your administrative system and say, hey,
I need to take October 15th through the 30th off because of X, Y, Z.
It goes in, books your days off, you know, deducts from your time,
tells you how much time you have left, etc.
That should all be done in a second.
And we already have examples of that happening.
If I want to communicate with an administrator about,
you know, changes or those kinds of things, those that that communication
can happen much more efficiently as well.
So thinking about how can this help education
and the infrastructure of education and how we deliver it
goes way, way, way beyond the classroom. Right.
It's and we have to think about all of the parts
around the business of education as well.
And I mean that in the broadest sense of the term,
just how do we create the infrastructure around it,
both in traditional education spaces, but also then in that ongoing
lifelong learning that every adult is is required to do now.
I'm glad I'm glad you brought that up, because there are so many other aspects
of a of a school day and a school where this could benefit us.
And I'm even thinking in terms of security with all the anxiety
around violence and shooting in the US, you know,
we could do facial recognition and there's all kinds of AI detection
software available that could be integrated into into these buildings,
maybe to provide some more sense of security for for learners.
So, you know, teacher evaluations,
you know, supporting special ed teachers writing 504 and IEP goals
for students with unique needs.
So, yeah, it definitely extends and impacts us well beyond just
just the classroom experience.
Interesting, like what I'm hearing is not so much something new
and unimaginative that people haven't thought about before,
but really looking at what you do today
and increasing the efficiencies that you're free of time
to take on maybe a more expansive role with the students.
Well, that's that's the big way to diffuse an innovation, right,
is to is to make it relatable to things that we're already doing.
If we present it as a way that is substantially different
from what people's current practices are, it won't take off, right?
People won't start using it.
So we need it to be relatable, observable, trialable,
measurable, all those factors of the diffusion of an innovation.
So, you know, that's that's one of the things
I'm trying to focus on right now as I work with other schools
and teachers is it's not substantially different.
It's just it's going to help support the work
that we know we should be doing.
Very good.
Like, I mean, I'll use an analogy.
If I was a tennis instructor
and I wanted to help somebody learn how to play better tennis,
if I could record them at a high speed video camera
and play it back in slow motion for them,
they could see step by step what their stroke was
and I could guide them into doing better strokes.
I might have achieved that on my own,
but the technology really short circuited that.
It's there. That is your stroke.
And maybe this goes back to helping the students
see their output of their material,
but giving you more visibility and more ability,
more time to give them feedback and help them do better.
The question I asked earlier, Alison,
like if we were here again a year from now
and we were having the same conversation,
I think saving of time does make a lot of sense,
but at a policy level or at a broad sense,
what would you believe is the probably the likely
or the best use of AI at the educational level?
That might be what we've already been talking about
or might be something different,
but interested in your thoughts.
I kind of hope that we would need to ...
I wasn't going to answer that question.
No, I'm trying to think of something different.
Here, let me ...
I hope it's just part of our daily lives
and that this isn't such a huge new topic and new thing.
It's just integrated into everybody's daily life
and we're okay with it,
but now we're trying to figure out
how to new uses for it,
but how to ...
I don't want to regulate every little piece of it,
but how do we keep it from all the big scary things
that you hear on the news
that it's going to derail elections and healthcare
and blow up the world and all that bad stuff,
but it's more like it is a positive thing.
It's not so crazy and scary anymore.
It's just a part of life.
Google is a part of life now,
or the calculator, or cars, or other innovative technology.
So that would be my hope and goal is ...
I don't think that's going to happen in a year,
but maybe in five years' time,
but that would be my goal is if it's a part of our life,
then how do we make life even better than it is now,
because it has so much potential.
Very good. And look, I think there's almost two themes.
There's what could it do to save time
and increase efficiencies,
and what thing could it do that we can't do already?
John, you could just work harder and do more,
but AI, like what you described was,
sure, I could create five different personalized quizzes
based on the preference of my class,
but I'm not going to spend 20 hours doing it.
Right, but Fred, I apologize for jumping in there,
but I want to talk about that in the chat.
Ao Ao just put out there, it says let's not discard.
I'm a huge fan of leapfrog.
I call them leapfrog technologies, right,
where it's like, let's actually hop over.
Here's an example, again, plug in my summit here,
but from the summit that's going to come out
from a company called Hour One,
they have a great example
from the company called Berlitz.
And I hope most people are familiar with Berlitz,
but they're a foreign language training service
that has been around forever,
one of the old, old stalwarts for many decades now.
And one of the things that they've realized
is that they can create avatars, right?
For teachers to deliver online,
and they can create a lesson
and then translate it into 120 languages instantly, right?
And so those same principles of language learning
are now available to all of the 120 languages
they teach literally instantly.
So when they tweak a course,
it's translated instantly to 120 languages, right?
So that's a leapfrog moment.
If you have a say, if you are,
let's take it to a non-traditional education,
but business application as well.
Let's just say that you are manufacturing a product
or a service, and that service evolves or change, right?
Every time you change that,
you've got to push out new information to your sales force,
to your customer service force, et cetera.
Usually they're a global sales force
or customer service force,
and you've got to translate it to the local context.
Localization and contextualization,
again, is an instantaneous process now.
You have to let that explode in your mind right now.
What used to take months and months of hard work
by many, many people is now an instantaneous application.
And it's just absolutely ridiculous to think about that.
I think for those of you that follow DeepMind
and Alpha Fold, right?
Figuring out the proteins
and the chemicals around them,
that was something we were taking years to do.
And DeepMind came up and did something
that can do like a hundred million proteins now.
That was just a complete game changer.
I really welcome the diverse opinions here
and just how different perspectives of it.
I'll put on my techie hat for a moment.
I'm kind of with Stephen in terms of like a personal tutor.
This is my hope.
My hope is that we just like,
I remember when Minecraft came out
and someone pitched it to me,
someone at work was playing it.
And I was like, oh, okay, that sounds cool idea.
I doesn't think that makes any sense.
And then I went back home for Christmas
and I asked my nephews, do you play Minecraft?
He goes, oh yeah.
And I asked them, well, who else
to school plays Minecraft?
And they just looked me in the face and said,
everybody, aren't you playing it?
So I believe that if we get to a place
where there's a personalized tutor,
and again, there's the Matthew effect going on here.
There's a very large percentage of the world
that do not have access to the internet.
And it's just COVID pushed a bit that forward,
but man, we got to do a lot more.
But for those that have access,
my belief is that if you,
for maybe specialized applications or certain languages,
Duolingo is a great example.
I'm on day 66 of French.
Maybe next year I can say a little bit more in French.
But if you have a personalized tutor
and it is really good at figuring out the gaps
in your knowledge and you're gonna go into John's class
and John has said, look,
just you're gonna really enjoy the class
if you're at this level, no worry if not.
But if you're not at this level,
here are some ways to get there
and they will help you.
Like the promise to student is like,
look, you could study on your own hard.
You could try to pick it up in real time, traditional,
or you could do a combination
where here's something that's going to really coach you
and that real time picking up in the class
is just gonna happen faster.
So you do less work and you learn faster.
This is me expressing my hope.
As we get to a place
where there is like a personalized tutor
and that it is driven by AI,
adapted to the student's personal learning,
but managed by the school in a way
that like John you have classes come in
and you see some type of dashboard
that tells you all the students
have done some assessment,
figured out the gaps in their knowledge
and that there's some things working behind the scenes
to help solve those gaps
is just as it's working foreground
for you to help free up time.
And the amount of time that you get to engage
the students because of AI being a supportive role is more.
And that personalized part plus freeing up your time,
it feels like these are the two things
that are kind of obvious,
but it has to get to a place going,
maybe what Alison you were saying,
it has to get to a place where it's comfortable.
Like there has to be an adaptation of knowledge
and it's gonna be a little scary
because people are gonna say,
oh, this is gonna change the world.
Probably not, but we all adapt it to social media now.
It's just vernacular.
We expect to be able to change things online
and Twitter or Facebook or Instagram.
I expect to email somebody.
I'm constantly on the phone with somebody in Europe
and like, okay, I'll send you the document.
Two seconds passed.
Have you got it yet?
Like we just expect it to be that instantaneous.
And there's this progression
I think we have to go through with AI.
So let me turn it back
and we'll do a few closing remarks.
So I'll start, Stephen, I'll start with you
then I'll do John and Alison.
I'll finish up with you.
Stephen, if you were to fill in the sentence,
my hope is that AI and education
will achieve the following benefit.
We don't have to describe how it would be done
but maybe it could be something
that probably is very hard to do today
or maybe impossible.
But if you could take one benefit
that AI could achieve or help achieve
in the educational industry,
what would that benefit be?
I'm gonna be really philosophical in my answer here
simply because I think what my big hope is
and it comes back to my very first premise
is that I think creating these efficiencies
and moving all this busy work out of the way
allows us to really focus on the human experience.
And my hope is that we'll have educators
that are focusing on building social relations
or helping students to build social relations
that they'll have leaders and businesses
and L and D departments figure out
how people can work in teams and across borders
and through conflict better and easier
and work on those skills and build those muscles
of being humans together.
Simply because as you just pointed out,
we are totally connected
and we expect answers instantaneously
but the human experience is necessarily messy.
And so working on those problems is what my hope is
is that we can concentrate and focus on
and get through in the future.
Thanks Stephen, John, your thoughts.
Yeah, so I would just add that a lot of times
we expect all teachers to be experts on everything
and we provide all this professional development
on these topics.
And I am fortunate to have 24 years of experience
as these tools are starting to come out
and interact with them in a way
where I can look for things like implicit bias
and I've been doing equity work for my entire career,
building curriculum my entire career.
So I'm able to build these things in
but a lot of early teachers don't have the benefit
of all that professional development and experience.
So this will be a shortcut for them.
So while they may not have all the vocabulary
to talk about those topics,
a very basic understanding
and a little bit of prompt engineering,
they can develop materials and communications
that incorporate those things
that we all think are important
but they may not have had the skills
and resources to do that yet.
And then we can vet those responses
and then start integrating them,
just so much faster than we were ever able to before.
Nice and then Alison,
if there was one thing that AI could do
in the coming year to achieve some benefit,
what would you like to see that benefit be?
I think like I had in my doctorate program,
I had one professor when we first started was like,
life is all about relationships.
Like this is a technology program
that you're gonna get your doctorate in
and you're gonna get caught up in the technology.
And I think this technology is going to allow teachers
and students to go back
to really building those relationships.
I think that's the power of online learning.
Most online teachers say that they know their students
better than they did their face-to-face students.
And I think that's really gonna allow,
AI will help spark that learning,
really focus on other things
and let the students learn at their own pace.
But the teachers and the students
are gonna be able to come back
to building those true relationships
that are really gonna ignite
and spark that true love for learning
that we all as teachers and educators,
our goal all the time.
So I think it goes back to relationships
and it's gonna allow for that again.
Very good, I'll add my thoughts to it.
I'll give it by analogy.
I'll use another tennis analogy.
A couple of years ago, I was at a conference.
There was a tennis club.
I went to a tennis club.
I paid for some instruction
as part of a group lesson with three other people.
I don't remember the lesson,
but the part that's vivid is the four of us
playing and the instructor was calling out
from the sidelines, okay, do this, do that.
And we were just hitting it.
It just seemed like, man, I'm playing tennis better
than I played in a long time.
And it was that relationship
that the instructor was building between us
and coaching us and encouraging us.
And in the context of the world's problems,
I don't think the world's problems
can be solved by individuals anymore.
I think it has to be solved by groups of people
who are really good at working together
and have built into or bought into the idea
that I am gonna be able to work and solve problems
when I work more effectively with each other.
And if the AI frees up the ability for the instructor
to foster those interpersonal, those teamwork skills,
this doesn't mean all disciplines.
I think we'll just graduate students
who are gonna be more effective
at tackling the world's problems
and ready to use AI as a tool to do that,
but they're gonna be able to do it with others
and work really effectively together as a group.
All right, I will make the offer
that we will be here next year.
At the same time, we'll pick up the discussion
where we left off.
We'll see how we did.
I really thank Alison, John, and Stephen
for sharing their time with us and their expertise.
And I thank you all for joining.
And I will stop the recording now.
We might linger for a few moments,
but again, thank you all for joining.
That was a great session.
Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you.