"Write an essay answering one of these questions, then ask Claude to highlight the limitations. Improve the essay, provide better evidence, and submit along with your conversation with Claude." I like this very much, but I still worry there is someway workaround that lets Claude do "all the work." Perhaps we need a chatbot that doesn't know any content. Students would be allowed to use it as a writing aide. But, that may be theoretically impossible because the bots learn to "write" by "reading" widely.
AI, modern digital technology (smart phones, social media, SaaS apps, clouds, APIs, data services etc..).. have shifted the relationship between consumer & producer in every industry or domain they enter.
I think most will agree that 90% of higher university staff are not rock stars that can spend the 100s to 1000s of hours to determine on the own the best way to engage AI, digital, SaaS, Clouds, Smartphones, etc.. you are a unique, elite level professional that is this committed to excellence.
Reality is large scale education systems that must instruct & grow 100s millions of students can't scale on heros but on the lowest common denominator of standards based investment with tools, quality control & support to meet the scale of this historic shift in education.
Modern large university higher education has a fundamental issue in their design of the service & delivery model. It is not built with the undergraduate student at the center of the value or impact but the undergraduate student is adjacent to the university, their staff, research, grants, real estate, financial engineering, health systems, brand, partnerships etc.. that are paramount vs. the undergraduate student.
The AI/Digital/Smartphone/SaaS/API/Data Service wave that is smashing thru all of society world wide is in conflict with the POV of the undergraduate student learner & their ability to engage the legacy pedagogy of modern large undergraduate universities.
What doesn't square with reality for undergraduate students, instructors/lecturers/professors & higher education institutions is how can they all create a modern student user centered approach to manage the coordination problem of meeting education standards of student learning, development, course objectives etc..while embracing next generation technology, AI, learning tools.
At the same time meeting all those above standards, requiring higher education institutions & their staff to develop proficiency in mapping educational pedagogy to the new advancing technology, AI, digital engagement.
This requires enormous investment, time, resources, standards development, learning ethics, tools, deployment etc.. which only the largest university systems have the scale to meet.
One key aspect that is not given much attention is that the design model of the modern large university/college which forces students & their time into instruction based on a legacy term model
with pedagogy, economic, pricing & time approach that is structured, priced, paid for on the term paradigm.
This is why the large university model is a University Industrial Complex that shifts externalities to the students, lower/mid level staff, parents(that support their students)
This creates huge inefficiencies, its not very lean, agile, data, workflow, user/learner centered driven. It doesn't drive a transparent feedback loop with the higher education institution, their instructors, or learner driven, its not based on knowledge acquisition, measuring effectiveness or standard practices that are effective from the learners POV.
Its built on the legacy needs & design approach from last 1000 yrs in European education which is fine when the world only educated 1-5% of its male population in high education :)
But the new universal world which is really pre-k thru 12th yr (3-18yrs old) & university (18-24yrs) is a 20yr learning model with massive universalism (which is great, normal & the standard) but doesn't fit the legacy design of the 19th & early 20th century for university education.
This University Industrial Complex model has been fragmented in 100s of ways to maintain the basic/legacy framework for large universities but that model doesn't really provide the benefits that 80+% of higher education students/families require out of education.
The key universal growth requirements that 80+% of the higher education population need are critical skills for market based employment, basic critical thinking skills, life skills, general knowledge across a few dozen diverse areas of liberal arts, science, humanities, spending time, growing around diverse populations & learning how to be a lifelong learner.
This is what the majority(80%) need for their huge investment in time, money, support, family etc..
10-20% are elite which is what majority of large universities are built around as a student population.
These advanced requirements, very different design needs from our basic university system(for the next 80%), I would argue the system is basically designed for the top 10-20% of students & in some ways the elite of the elite(top 1-3%) who will drive university brand, research, health services, government grants, commercial investment, partnerships university financial requirements (real estate, investments, fundraising etc..)
Which really means that the modern large university is built to drive a handful of outcomes for top 1-3% of the "professional university industrial complex" while the next 15-20% acquire status for the upper middle class & the bottom 80% are stuck in a broken model that forces them to develop only on path that fits the institution not the learner while removing them for 2-6yrs of being able to grow outside the university model.
A lot of truth in this comment. The societal and technological sands are shifting all around the venerable institutions of HE but there are a lot of ostriches that don't want to address the more fundamental questions and path dependence/institutional inertia is another big challenge.
This is a reasonable critique of the legacy university approach to education. A great deal of progress in human development will come from 0.1% of us, but that next contingent of engineers and creators are actually the base upon which the tiny slice of entreprenuers and innovators depend. Our system is doing a fairly good job creating that high skill workforce, but it's dependent on using the university model to accomodate immigration.
Why we tell the middle class that they need to go to a traditional liberal arts university education is beyond me - perhaps it's just a misattribution of higher earnings from a college degree to some belief that the skills acquired in college are the basis of the higher economic output. They clearly are not. Business is the best hope to solve this aspect of the problem, not universities. Businesses will hire based on skills and the students are actually responding quite quickly to the labor demand picture - looks at major selection over the past 20yrs, a huge shift away from low productivity humanities majors to in-demand STEM majors.
The only truly unfixable threat is govt policy that intervenes to stop the natural migration away from low productivity approaches to education. Even on that front, the recent path is optimistic, with various school choice initiatives gaining traction at the state level.
Very much agree with the spirit of this essay, which calls for us to be clear about how the debate around AI tools fits into the broader framework of education, aka "what are we doing as educators anyway."
We homeschool - AI tools will be explored and encouraged, as tools and in aid of the overarching goals of becoming skilled and educated. Grades and competition do serve as important motivators - fear of failure may well be an essential part of motivation for nearly everyone. "There's a test; I want to do well, therefore I must study." But grades are not essential as a credentialing system. My degree from Princeton, honors, all that, are really less informative about me than being admitted - the fact that I majored in math regularly garners more attention than the school I went to, as it should. The point is that credentials are weak signals about skills and talent as constituted today. Instead of asking how we can corral AI tools so as not to undermine our status quo credentialing system, we should ask how to create more effective credentials, one's not plagued by the limitations of college admissions and grading as it is practiced today.
What we want is 'wisdom in the students'. We don't want 'cleverness in the students' or 'obsequiousness in the students' -- though lots of what we do seem guaranteed to get either of those instead. But to get around AI we need to stop grading students on their ability to say/write
what we wanted to hear/read. Instead --RIGHT NOW -- we need to test them by asking them to find fault with proposed solutions/descriptions. Maybe later we will get chatbots as are great at this as well, but right now -- wisdom is deep understanding. so far chatbots are just wonderfully clever.
"Write an essay answering one of these questions, then ask Claude to highlight the limitations. Improve the essay, provide better evidence, and submit along with your conversation with Claude." I like this very much, but I still worry there is someway workaround that lets Claude do "all the work." Perhaps we need a chatbot that doesn't know any content. Students would be allowed to use it as a writing aide. But, that may be theoretically impossible because the bots learn to "write" by "reading" widely.
Great article as always Prof. Evans.
AI, modern digital technology (smart phones, social media, SaaS apps, clouds, APIs, data services etc..).. have shifted the relationship between consumer & producer in every industry or domain they enter.
I think most will agree that 90% of higher university staff are not rock stars that can spend the 100s to 1000s of hours to determine on the own the best way to engage AI, digital, SaaS, Clouds, Smartphones, etc.. you are a unique, elite level professional that is this committed to excellence.
Reality is large scale education systems that must instruct & grow 100s millions of students can't scale on heros but on the lowest common denominator of standards based investment with tools, quality control & support to meet the scale of this historic shift in education.
Modern large university higher education has a fundamental issue in their design of the service & delivery model. It is not built with the undergraduate student at the center of the value or impact but the undergraduate student is adjacent to the university, their staff, research, grants, real estate, financial engineering, health systems, brand, partnerships etc.. that are paramount vs. the undergraduate student.
The AI/Digital/Smartphone/SaaS/API/Data Service wave that is smashing thru all of society world wide is in conflict with the POV of the undergraduate student learner & their ability to engage the legacy pedagogy of modern large undergraduate universities.
What doesn't square with reality for undergraduate students, instructors/lecturers/professors & higher education institutions is how can they all create a modern student user centered approach to manage the coordination problem of meeting education standards of student learning, development, course objectives etc..while embracing next generation technology, AI, learning tools.
At the same time meeting all those above standards, requiring higher education institutions & their staff to develop proficiency in mapping educational pedagogy to the new advancing technology, AI, digital engagement.
This requires enormous investment, time, resources, standards development, learning ethics, tools, deployment etc.. which only the largest university systems have the scale to meet.
One key aspect that is not given much attention is that the design model of the modern large university/college which forces students & their time into instruction based on a legacy term model
with pedagogy, economic, pricing & time approach that is structured, priced, paid for on the term paradigm.
This is why the large university model is a University Industrial Complex that shifts externalities to the students, lower/mid level staff, parents(that support their students)
This creates huge inefficiencies, its not very lean, agile, data, workflow, user/learner centered driven. It doesn't drive a transparent feedback loop with the higher education institution, their instructors, or learner driven, its not based on knowledge acquisition, measuring effectiveness or standard practices that are effective from the learners POV.
Its built on the legacy needs & design approach from last 1000 yrs in European education which is fine when the world only educated 1-5% of its male population in high education :)
But the new universal world which is really pre-k thru 12th yr (3-18yrs old) & university (18-24yrs) is a 20yr learning model with massive universalism (which is great, normal & the standard) but doesn't fit the legacy design of the 19th & early 20th century for university education.
This University Industrial Complex model has been fragmented in 100s of ways to maintain the basic/legacy framework for large universities but that model doesn't really provide the benefits that 80+% of higher education students/families require out of education.
The key universal growth requirements that 80+% of the higher education population need are critical skills for market based employment, basic critical thinking skills, life skills, general knowledge across a few dozen diverse areas of liberal arts, science, humanities, spending time, growing around diverse populations & learning how to be a lifelong learner.
This is what the majority(80%) need for their huge investment in time, money, support, family etc..
10-20% are elite which is what majority of large universities are built around as a student population.
These advanced requirements, very different design needs from our basic university system(for the next 80%), I would argue the system is basically designed for the top 10-20% of students & in some ways the elite of the elite(top 1-3%) who will drive university brand, research, health services, government grants, commercial investment, partnerships university financial requirements (real estate, investments, fundraising etc..)
Which really means that the modern large university is built to drive a handful of outcomes for top 1-3% of the "professional university industrial complex" while the next 15-20% acquire status for the upper middle class & the bottom 80% are stuck in a broken model that forces them to develop only on path that fits the institution not the learner while removing them for 2-6yrs of being able to grow outside the university model.
A lot of truth in this comment. The societal and technological sands are shifting all around the venerable institutions of HE but there are a lot of ostriches that don't want to address the more fundamental questions and path dependence/institutional inertia is another big challenge.
This is a reasonable critique of the legacy university approach to education. A great deal of progress in human development will come from 0.1% of us, but that next contingent of engineers and creators are actually the base upon which the tiny slice of entreprenuers and innovators depend. Our system is doing a fairly good job creating that high skill workforce, but it's dependent on using the university model to accomodate immigration.
Why we tell the middle class that they need to go to a traditional liberal arts university education is beyond me - perhaps it's just a misattribution of higher earnings from a college degree to some belief that the skills acquired in college are the basis of the higher economic output. They clearly are not. Business is the best hope to solve this aspect of the problem, not universities. Businesses will hire based on skills and the students are actually responding quite quickly to the labor demand picture - looks at major selection over the past 20yrs, a huge shift away from low productivity humanities majors to in-demand STEM majors.
The only truly unfixable threat is govt policy that intervenes to stop the natural migration away from low productivity approaches to education. Even on that front, the recent path is optimistic, with various school choice initiatives gaining traction at the state level.
Very much agree with the spirit of this essay, which calls for us to be clear about how the debate around AI tools fits into the broader framework of education, aka "what are we doing as educators anyway."
We homeschool - AI tools will be explored and encouraged, as tools and in aid of the overarching goals of becoming skilled and educated. Grades and competition do serve as important motivators - fear of failure may well be an essential part of motivation for nearly everyone. "There's a test; I want to do well, therefore I must study." But grades are not essential as a credentialing system. My degree from Princeton, honors, all that, are really less informative about me than being admitted - the fact that I majored in math regularly garners more attention than the school I went to, as it should. The point is that credentials are weak signals about skills and talent as constituted today. Instead of asking how we can corral AI tools so as not to undermine our status quo credentialing system, we should ask how to create more effective credentials, one's not plagued by the limitations of college admissions and grading as it is practiced today.
What we want is 'wisdom in the students'. We don't want 'cleverness in the students' or 'obsequiousness in the students' -- though lots of what we do seem guaranteed to get either of those instead. But to get around AI we need to stop grading students on their ability to say/write
what we wanted to hear/read. Instead --RIGHT NOW -- we need to test them by asking them to find fault with proposed solutions/descriptions. Maybe later we will get chatbots as are great at this as well, but right now -- wisdom is deep understanding. so far chatbots are just wonderfully clever.