[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 448 of the Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast, How Artificial Intelligence is impacting Higher Education with Cynthia Alby.

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Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak, and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students. I am so pleased to be welcoming back to the show today, Cynthia Alby. She has spent most of her career immersed in what could most accurately be described as “avid cross-discipline idea synthesizing” and you’re going to hear a lot of that in today’s episode.

She studies pedagogy, sociology, psychology, neuroscience, and economics, anything that might yield useful clues to improving the art and science of teaching. You would’ve heard her previously on Teaching in Higher Ed on episode 391 with her co-authors for a book called Learning That Matters. That’s a book that’s meant a lot to me and is a great reference if you have yet to pick it up, and I highly recommend it. Cynthia’s primary research question is, how might we renchant learning for both students and faculty?

Dr. Alby received a PhD in language education from the University of Georgia. She joined Georgia College in 2001, where she is now a professor of teacher education and works extensively with the Center for Teaching and Learning. She’s also the lead developer for Georgia’s Governor’s Teaching Fellows, a program she’s worked with since 2001. Cynthia and her husband raise a critically endangered breed of sheep on their farm, Shangri-Baa. That’s B-A-A like Baa. [laughs] Ridiculous. Oh, jokes on podcasts. There you go. Cynthia Alby, welcome back to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:02:28] Cynthia Alby: I am thrilled to be here.

[00:02:28] Bonni: You and I are theoretically on a break right now as of this recording, but your mind has been swimming, as has mind as has much of higher education around artificial intelligence. Before we go deep into its impacts on higher education, could you just start with in general, what is artificial intelligence?

[00:02:54] Cynthia: Well, it’s simpler than you would think. I’m probably also more complicated, but it’s systems that can perform tasks that would require human-like intelligence. Of course, there’s this kind of the famous Turing test where basically Alan Turing said that artificial intelligence is when a computer can trick a human into thinking it’s human. If you gave a person AI and human, they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. I think with ChatGPT, you could give someone something it had written and say, “Do you think a human wrote this?” and they would say, “Oh, certainly.”

They pass this to the tests. I think.

[00:03:39] Bonni: I love how you start us out simple and gave us a concrete definition, and then like you said, it’s both simple and also really complex. It’s, at least for me and so many of the thinkers I really admire allowing us to reexamine our values and our principles. I find myself kind of annoying myself a little bit where I’m like, “but what does it really mean to write anyway?” It’s asking, what does it mean to own something or to create something that’s really coming up in so many parts of society, not just higher education?

If we were though to try to group the ways or maybe the primary ways in which artificial intelligence very presently seems to be emerging, are there big groupings that we might consider just to try to narrow it down a little bit for ourselves?

[00:04:28] Cynthia: Yes, I mostly think of it only in terms of education, but within education, I think we have to think about all the different things that it can do in terms of certainly now writing, but already AI could translate from language to language, write code, create works of art, create music. When you start thinking about just what do students do, what can AI do, they match up pretty well. It’s kind of fascinating.

[00:05:04] Bonni: In some ways, we think about the ways that advances in technology have affected things such as a calculator or a spreadsheet. I feel very grateful that I took statistics. I had to go back and take an undergraduate statistics class as a working professional who had been out of school for 10 or 15 years. The guy who taught it was delightful. At the time I was a vice president of human resource development and all the projects that I worked on got to be around, “Oh, how could you use statistics to analyze salaries in an organization?

How could you use it to look at recruiting practices and their effects?” Everything felt very relevant to me, but he didn’t feel like I needed to be able to pull out a pencil and a pad of paper and be able to literally know how to calculate standard deviation. Instead, as long as I knew what that story was telling me when presented with that data, he was just fine with us using Excel or other types of statistical analysis tools in order to do that.I certainly have people that are my same age. I’m in my 50s, who get a little jealous of me because they remember the importance of doing that by hand.

I don’t think there are easy answers to that because certainly, I can’t pretend there might have been a little bit of value lost. I know for example, how to calculate an average, but I remember when I was early in my career teaching computer classes in Microsoft Excel, they have all those built-in functions, but you can also create a custom one for yourself. In our advanced Excel class, we had to teach people how do you create an advanced function. I was just asking the man, “Well, the equal’s average, that’s just creating an average so how would you do that?”

He said, “I don’t know.” I said, “Well, no, I don’t mean how would you do it in Excel, but I just mean if I gave you a piece of paper–” because I literally couldn’t imagine a world in which you would not know that you add all the numbers together and divide them by the total numbers. I hope it doesn’t sound like I’m making fun of him because I’m sure people would make fun of me too for things that I rely on, tools to do it for me. That there is no easy way of saying no. You really have to know how to take the clock apart to know what time it is.

These are really important questions for us, I feel like Cynthia, to continually be asking ourselves.

[00:07:31] Cynthia: Oh, absolutely. I think what it comes down to is, first of all, we can’t do it all. We’ve always had to make choices and I think more and more our choices are going to require us to let some of it go. Some of the things that we thought were so key, if AI can do it well, it’s entirely possible that we could hand things over to AI. That would allow us to do other things that we wouldn’t have had time to do. I think just as usual, it’s painful not to be able to teach as we were taught in certain ways.

That I think about the things that I studied and I loved and I just want students to have that too. Sometimes that’s the right answer, but mostly it’s not. I can remember when I was first teaching high school English and had this book list and it was my favorite books. I knew any high school students would also love these books. I was very wrong, so I had to learn what they were interested in and what they loved and build from that. That’s just difficult for us sometimes I think.

[00:08:47] Bonni: Would you explore for us some of the ways that our teaching might be impacted by– and actually, I want to introduce one other vocabulary word before we keep going. That is a tool called ChatGPT, and that is an artificial intelligence tool specifically around writing that you all listening will see a lot in the headlines. ChatGPT is just one of many artificial intelligence tools that can facilitate writing. Now with that being said Cynthia, what are some of the ways that our teaching, our assessment methods might be impacted by ChatGPT tools, like it, other kinds of artificial intelligence?

[00:09:31] Cynthia: Well, I see two possible futures here. I realize they’re an infinite number, but I can see us looking in the face of AI and thinking, okay, what we need to do is clamp down and control. We need to have more and better plagiarism detectors. We need to make students sign things that– like just this surveillance and punishment. I can see where this could take us in that direction. I think what is shocking people about ChatGPT is that it can do a lot more than people think. When people have said to me, “I just don’t understand why people are so worked up about this,” I say, “You have to go and play with it and as soon as you do [chuckles] you’re going to get freaked out.”

For example, I don’t even know why I asked it to do some of the things I’ve done, but I said write a lesson plan on comma usage and it just instantly spit out. Really a pretty decent lesson plan is it one I would develop or use? No, but it was quite adequate. I think once people start to see that it can do that, their first instinct is going to be control and clamping down.

[00:10:53] Bonni: Before you share more about the answer to the ways it will impact us, you mentioned going and asking it to do stuff for you. We’ll have a link in the show notes to ChatGPT and we encourage people go start playing with it. When do you have to create an account? Can I just go start typing? What is it like to click on that link? What would it look like for me to go play with it?

[00:11:15] Cynthia: It does require that you create an account. It takes about one minute. It doesn’t ask for a credit card or anything, so it is not difficult at all to get started with it except, the more people are hearing about it, the more people are getting on. Sometimes it kind of quasi-shuts down, like just won’t answer my prompts or it says at the top, “We’re experiencing too much traffic right now.” I’ve got a piece that we’ll reference in the show notes that has lots of links to what other people have entered into ChatGPT and so they could go take a look there if it was down for a little bit.

One of the things I wrote to amuse myself was I did an interview with ChatGPT. [chuckles] I asked it questions and then I cut and pasted its answers without playing around with them. Anyone who wants to look at that piece could see what it’s capable of. I also see this other future where because students are working with artificial intelligence, they can just do so much more. They can get so much further on a project, they can focus in more on the meat of things and spend less time on, for example, the polishing or the initial brainstorming.

One of the fun things I’ve noticed from playing with it is that it often can help students get around the most common sticking point. Do students hate all writing? No, but they do sometimes get stuck at the very beginning when you’re trying to get ideas flowing. They get frustrated towards the end when it’s so much about getting it polished up. Those are two things where AI, particularly ChatGPT, excels. If we’re willing to let it and I realize that’s a big if, I feel like it could bring students new joy in writing because they could be focusing on the parts that are more meaningful to them than just about anyone else.

[00:13:25] Bonni: One way I know that you have suggested as have others, that we might experiment is actually just to type in an assignment prompt. if we have some type of a written assignment, to go in there and write so many words or so many pages using x citations, and just to see what some of those results are. I wanted to mention that people could go and click on this link. For now it is open, as in you mentioned, create an account, but there isn’t going to be any kind of a charge for now.

Companies, large ones you might have heard of, like Microsoft, for example, have made major acquisitions into companies that have artificial intelligence specifically around things like writing or other types of computation. It is just a matter of time to where we don’t have to click on a link and go somewhere else to make use of artificial computation and writing tools. They are going to be baked right into our tools. In fact, Cynthia, I started playing around with a new notes tool that’s called Craft, and the website for anyone interested is craft.do.

I was just getting used to it. I really like it a lot, but anytime it’s a new tool so where do I go to make this a heading and how do I use this feature? It brought up a thing that said, “Would you like to use the assistant?” I thought, “That sounds great. Rather than me cooking around, I’ll just see how this particular assistant works.” Cynthia, it had artificial writing intelligence right inside of it. Rather than– I was working with our provost on some communication announcements for a 2024 accreditation visit, and before I knew it, it had written three paragraphs that were better than anything I could [laughs] have written about accreditation.

We should mention that one of the pushbacks, I suppose, attentions is, “but it is wrong.” You and I are describing the beautiful affordances of artificial intelligence and how we might leverage it in our writing. It is not always accurate. Cynthia, that doesn’t mean we just sit here and go, “Well, it’s not right,” and shake our heads, because increasingly it will become more accurate and will become more of a tool. The world feels in many ways like it is changing right before us and yet we also have had other parallel technological advances that have happened where people start to say, the sky is falling.

The sky, in fact, has not fallen when the typewriter existed or when you could actually publish en masse and those kinds of advances.

[00:16:02] Cynthia: I think another thing is when people go into play with ChatGPT, when you first put in a prompt, often what you’ll get is surprisingly good, but not great. The thing is, you can keep tweaking it. For example, when I interviewed [chuckles] ChatGPT, I did my first run I don’t know, the answers weren’t very exciting, very interesting. I went in and re-did it and for each question I asked, I said an answer in the style of Malcolm Gladwell. It was remarkable how different the answers were with just that little tweak.

I’m sure if I had put in other types of tweaks like, “Okay, and now do this and now do that,” it’s remarkable. Now, was it writing as well as Malcolm Gladwell does? Nowhere near. It was a lot better than that first run where I didn’t ask it to do it that way.

[00:16:58] Bonni: Cynthia, would you be up for pulling it up on your screen and just reading one of your questions and one of the answers that it provided to you?

[00:17:06] Cynthia: I think I can, although that most of the answers are fairly long [crosstalk]

[00:17:09] Bonni: Oh, maybe pick out a few senses or something.

[00:17:11] Cynthia: Soon after I said, do it in the style of Malcolm Gladwell.

[00:17:14] Bonni: [laughs] Coincidence.

[00:17:18] Cynthia: I think ChatGPT thinks he’s a little long-winded.

[00:17:21] Bonni: Yes, maybe pick out a few sentences. I think it would be fun just for people to hear what you asked and then a little bit of what it had to say back to you.

[00:17:28] Cynthia: The question that where I found the answer most interesting was this one. I said, “Let’s say a student was writing a research paper. What might it look like for her to use ChatGPT ethically rather than just asking you to write the whole paper for her?” Here’s a couple of things that it replied. “One way a student might use ChatGPT ethically while writing a research paper is by using me as a tool to help them brainstorm and organize their ideas.

For example, a student might provide me with a research question or topic, and I could generate a list of possible subtopics or points to explore. This could help the student to structure their paper and ensure that they have covered all the relevant points.” I thought that reasonable. This next one, though, I’m like, “Is this ethical? I’m not sure.” It says,” Another way a student might use ChatGPT ethically is by using me to generate text that expands or elaborates on their own ideas.

For example, a student might provide me with a brief outline of a section of their paper, and I could generate additional sentences or paragraphs that provide more detail and support for their argument.” That was interesting. If it’s providing additional sentences or paragraphs that provide more detail and support at this point in time, I’m just not sure many instructors would be all right with that. Now, maybe should we be are we moving into a future where we’d be all right with that. I hope so.

[00:19:02] Bonni: Yes. It definitely gets asking some questions and back to what you said earlier about it’s natural for us to think about our own learning process. What was it like for us? What we want to resist is, let’s make sure that whatever bad, good, indifferent experiences we had get replicated for others. If they haven’t gone through the gauntlets that we went through, they’re not educated and that is really where we need to shift our mind. I know one thing that you’ve written and taught and shared a lot about– circles right back down to the broad category of what is known as authentic assessment.

How might we rethink? You could do particularly written assignments or maybe it’s written assignments that become something else to begin. As you said, not to police more, not to control more, but actually to facilitate learning. more.

[00:20:01] Cynthia: I’m a huge fan of authentic assessment and for me, that often would mean any kind of performance task. I’m defining that as there’s a role, a goal, an audience, and preferably a real audience. I think what it all comes down to is when students are doing work that matters to them, they don’t turn to AI for anything other than little helps. For example, one of the articles that I just wrote, I used ChatGPT for one thing and that was the title. The title I had, I went in love with it so I said, “Give me 10 variations on this title.”

There was one I liked better and I went with it so I can see students using it. If they’re in love with what they’re working on and they’re passionate about it and they’re doing something that feels worthwhile, I think that’s the kind of thing they’ll end up having AI do for them. Or maybe they’ll have it polish up what they’re writing in the end, things like that. To me, it all comes down to how can we ask students to do things that are worth doing? What’s worth doing? What it’s coming down to at this point, is what’s worth doing.

The things that aren’t worth doing, they can farm out to AI.

[00:21:20] Bonni: What are some examples when you think about broadly speaking in higher education? I realize this is an impossible question to answer, but I’m going to ask you anyway. Across some disciplines, what are some examples that you’re seeing of what actually is worth doing?

[00:21:36] Cynthia: Well, I think it’s got to start with student curiosity. When you ask students, when are you curious about, what are you angry about? What do you wish you could change? When students are building from that, they’re generally coming up with ideas that really matter to them. I just hope that’s the direction we head in. I know that to some degree it might mean learning that is much more student-directed. Seating a lot of control. Working alongside students. Recognizing that– Especially right now, they bring a lot to the table.

If it’s them plus me, plus AI, I just think between the three of us, we could accomplish some extraordinary things but that’s not going to happen unless I believe that a student brings a lot to the table.

[00:22:32] Bonni: What are some other examples of authentic assessment that you can think about in addition to, “I want to get people curious.” You got me now, I’m curious about whatever this is. Tell me more about then this performance task and maybe give a couple examples from some different disciplines.

[00:22:50] Cynthia: I think it’s– When I start thinking about a performance task, the first question I always ask myself is, okay, I’m hoping students will be able to show their understanding or ability to do X. My first question is always, who does that in the real world? Who does that in the outside world? Who does that beyond campus? Because that’s often going to lead me to okay, to be authentic, that’s what I would have my students do. For example, people in the real world make podcasts and that’s something that students just really seem to enjoy so I can see where the artifact is a podcast.

I have students perhaps write a podcast talking about how they see AI as a possible way to extend learning. I think we may have downplayed having students teach other students. In almost any course working with students to develop just a really excellent lesson is a great performance task. When students know, “Oh, my fellow students are going to be asking me questions, I’ve got to honestly know that.” I think doing interviews, creating storyboards, analyzing data sets, these are all things that professionals do, that experts do.

Almost no one writes five-paragraph essays. So much of what I feel like we’ve asked students to do in the past just didn’t have a real audience and wasn’t something they could see themselves needing to do in the future.

[00:24:32] Bonni: It’s so great hearing you talk about these things and I want to let people know who are listening that you have provided us with a rich set of resources because we’re apparently skimming the surface here. People are going to be able to go, they can read your interview that you did with ChatGPT, they can go and look at lots of different reflections on assessment. You’ve got a document that’s all these problems that you see and then what some possible solutions might be.

You are careful to stress that this is definitely emerging. These conversations are going to be taking shape. You and I might listen to ourselves a year from now and go, “Oh my gosh, so much has changed since that conversation.” This is still early days for us considering the impact. I want to know from you now, what are some next steps that you would recommend. People listen to this interview, they go start to explore some of these resources. I guess you can get lost in it. How do we shrink it down a little bit, Cynthia?

If people are just going to do one or two things, where do we start in order to not just get so overwhelmed that we shut down?

[00:25:42] Cynthia: I’ve been trying to think of it in terms of what could you do short term as workarounds? What could you do short term to work with AI? Then what are we thinking about long term? I’m going to come in on that. What could you be doing short-term that is working with? I’ve got I think two possible ideas that could work. One is, as I was thinking about all this, I kept coming back to a story my friend Marguerite Koepke told me. This was back when e-portfolios were a really new thing in architecture.

She was a landscape architecture professor and she had gotten this big grant. She had a room full of all the fanciest computers. First day of class, the students come in and she says, “I have no idea how to use any of this equipment, but I know what a good portfolio looks like and together we’re going to figure all this out.” Then they just all dove in and had what she says was the best semester of her life. We could all do that. In fact, I’m planning to. We could walk in and say, “What I had planned doesn’t feel like it’s going to exactly work.

What if instead we have some credible conversations? What if instead we play together with this technology and see what happens?” Which is my second suggestion is design some assessments or assignments that let you play. What makes a good prompt? You can put the same prompt in multiple times and it will give you multiple results. Comparing those, there’s just so many interesting things that we could do. I think if it started with students, “Hello, what do you need to know? What do you want to know? What would you like to do?

Where could we go with it?”

There’s a middle school I’m familiar with where they spend the first week of a semester, maybe it’s even longer than that. It might be two weeks with the middle school students creating a curriculum from scratch based on a combination of their needs and interests and the state standards. What if we could do things like that? I think people would have an amazing time.

[00:28:05] Bonni: When I think about– I find myself just in this tension pretty regularly of wanting to take the work that I do incredibly seriously and also not at the same time. As I think back to my own failures and educational experiences that have been less than stellar for me, we can’t be that hard on ourselves because you just never know what it is that you might say or do or invite someone to experience along with you that will actually take root. Everybody’s so different and the learning process can be so different.

I’ve been thinking a little bit about, I still draw inspiration from a conversation I got to have such a long time ago with Bryan Dewsbury, and in that interview, he recommended an essay that he does in his biology classes called This I Believe and I ended up buying the curriculum for the This I Believe Essay and assigning it in a business ethics class that I teach. As I sit here right now, classes are going to start in a week. I actually am presenting at a conference in between that time, not going to have a ton of time to burn everything to the ground like I typically want to.

It’s just that’s the way the world’s going to work but I’m now, as you were talking a little bit about that, trying to think through, maybe I could– I just feel like that This I Believe by the way is wonderful writing because it’ll have them write it really short and then write it really long and then write it a little bit and do lots of revision. A lot of these people take the class when they’re seniors, it’s the final semester of their senior year. It’s really hard to single-handedly get people excited about a pretty writing-intensive assignment in a business class and our program that does not emphasize writing.

Already there’s some baked-in resistance to wanting to do that. I was thinking, Cynthia, what if [laughs] we had them ask, “Why not?” It’s not a writing-intensive class. None of the learning outcomes for the class are to become a better writer. What if I just went with it and said, “Okay, you see what would happen if you put some words that you care about that you believe in that are your values into ChatGTP? Have it write a 500 word and then a 250? What do you notice? What does it make you wonder?

Like I said, I don’t know that I have time to completely reinvent it, and sometimes when you’re trying to resist something so hard. I don’t know if you have any other thoughts for me or advice as I probably have an hour to possibly, and maybe not even that, to devote to this single assignment in a class that has probably 40 little mini baby assignments in it.

[00:30:50] Cynthia: I do think if you start with helping them brainstorm what they really believe. The whole idea behind This I Believe is, I’ve lived life this long so far, here’s something that I just so deeply believe. Make sure that they get that done up front and are in love with it. That provides the part that’s personalized where they wouldn’t want AI to take it from them, but then they could, as you said, start taking that idea and playing around. I think what they will come out with is a piece perhaps that is partially written by AI.

There’s lots of things like ChatGPT’s going to roll out some stuff in there like, “It doesn’t sound inspiring,” and they can play around with it. You could literally say to it, “Make this more inspiring.” I just feel like what they would walk away with in the end would be incredibly valuable.

[00:31:49] Bonni: What I so often want them to walk away with is, you mentioned earlier in our conversation about the value of having a public audience. I get excited about that, and Cynthia, they just don’t. It’s their senior year, it’s the last semester. By the time the public performance comes around, graduation’s in a week. That is not typically a time where I find them super excited. Again, because the program that I teach in doesn’t have a lot of public performance elements.

They have some, but it’s certainly not a regular part of the curriculum it’s not embedded in it in any sustainable, meaningful way. That’s really helpful for you to think. I guess we should probably move on to the recommendation segment. I could literally talk to you all day. [laughs] We should take this time to do the recommendation segment. So many times with recommendations, I tend to not tie it to the theme of the show, but Cynthia, I’ve known this conversation was coming for, I don’t even know, has it been a month, an hour, and three weeks or something.

All three of mine are recommendations that are related to today’s topic. The first is that Brian Alexander had a group of people talk about the topic similar to our conversation today about ChatGTP, and higher education. I’m going to suggest if you’d like to listen to even more conversations, that’s a great one. There are a lot of tremendous people I respect and regard highly, including Brian Alexander, facilitating that conversation. That’s a great one to look at. Lee Skallerup Bessette has put together a Zotero Library.

A few episodes ago, I mentioned that– It’s funny, I’ve been using Zotero for at least a decade, probably way more than that. I have really enjoyed when writing with people, to have a shared library like that. Cynthia, it’s funny, the thought that someone had put together a Zotero Library, I mentioned Tracie Addy. That was a recommendation a few shows ago. Has it for her publications. I was like, “How cool is that? I can go look at her stuff and click and add it to one of my Zotero libraries.” How wonderful that Lee Skallerup Bessette has done that for us, a Zotero Library that’s ever-growing as of this recording.

I’ll have a link to that in the chat. You would benefit, by the way, even if you don’t use Zotero. It’s just a webpage with a bunch of references on it you can click, but if you happen to also use Zotero, and want to save these references to your library, super easy to be able to do that. Then the final one, Ezra Klein has a wonderful podcast where he interviews amazing people. He went back and re-run an episode from mid-2021. That feels even more relevant today than when I first listened.

I can remember too, I tend to listen to his episodes within a week of when they’d come out, so I vividly remember going, “Oh my gosh, this is just amazing conversation,” with someone named Brian Christianson. Then when they re-aired it, and I just listened at the end of 2022, it sparked all these new questions and new ideas. It is seriously a brilliant conversation. I want to go read Brian Christianson’s book and learn all the things because I feel like, it wasn’t just like it happened in 2021.

He’s been thinking a lot about these issues more than some of us might have in higher education, and just a really great thing to get us thinking even deeper about some of the philosophical questions that emerge. It really felt current in a way that was even more visceral than when I first listened in mid-2021. Cynthia, I’m going to pass it over to you for your recommendations.

[00:35:33] Cynthia: An interesting thing that happened to me was I had had some surgery, and so I set aside a lot of time to recuperate, that frankly, I didn’t need, the surgery just went great. All of a sudden, I had a lot of time to be able to dig into this whole ChatGPT thing. I know most people don’t have that. I had the great opportunity to just look at so much. Two things that particularly stand out for me are from the EdSurge Podcast. The first one I listened to was called an inside look at the student disengagement crisis. That’s going to feed into this whole AI thing.

When students are already feeling disengaged, they’re just going to be all the more likely I think to want to turn to shortcuts if we aren’t engaging them. There was something about this episode. It wasn’t that it was things I hadn’t heard before, but hearing students talking, I don’t know, it flipped a switch in me where I was going from student engagement crisis theoretically to a sense of it in my gut. I was just able to act in different ways after hearing him interview a number of students. I just really recommend listening to that one first.

Then right after that, I listened to another episode. These are both really recent ones, called How High Schools Should Change for an Era of AI and Robots. I could see how the two went together, even though they weren’t meant to. I could see how disengagement is something that we’re trying to overcome right now. The ideas that the authors in the how high schools should change episode, just really had some remarkable ideas that got me excited. Even though it was about high school, almost everything they talked about could be applied to higher ed.

That’s my first recommendation, is that pair of podcast episodes, but then also I just encourage you to go to the website for the book Learning That Matters. I wrote that book with several colleagues. I think the book itself lends itself to a world beyond AI because what is it about? It’s about how to make learning matter, but specifically, the resource page is where I’ve been collecting and curating articles. I know that your audience doesn’t have the time to come through everything. I’m trying to do that for you so that you can quickly and easily find articles that are going to be just what you were hoping for.

[00:38:15] Bonni: I wanted to first say that Jeff Young is the journalist who did the interviews that you talked about. You have just managed to move Jeff Young’s interviews, which he shared about. He was really excited because he got to travel to Texas for at least one of these conversations. These are special. This is really intentional journalism from a very gifted interviewer and storyteller. Thank you for helping me move that up in the queue, because he had shared his excitement over the project, and I’m looking forward to learning more about it, and you helping me bump that up.

Then speaking of the Learning That Matters, I loved reading your book and getting to converse with you and your co-authors when it first came out. I love how it still stays fresh and current. I went up there and in preparing, I had to control myself. [laughs] I wanted to go explore everything, but it is really neatly organized and very clear but so helpful and so relevant for where we’re finding ourselves today. You didn’t just leave us with a book that stays static, although that book is going to remain current for an incredibly long time because it is rooted in values and effective practices.

It’s fun how you’re keeping it fresh and alive. Wonderful resources there. I had a delightful time preparing for today’s conversation.

[00:39:29] Cynthia: I do have one more thing to add. I don’t know if you’re going to want to necessarily include it in the podcast.

[00:39:33] Bonni: Oh, no, please do.

[00:39:34] Cynthia: I was thinking further about your assignment and how your students don’t seem that interested in an authentic audience. I was wondering, I think if you got their permission to publish these online as examples of how AI can extend learning, how students and AI can work together. If each piece had just a short paragraph at the end where students reflected on what it was like. If they knew you were doing that, and because you have a large audience, it might have a large audience.

Thousands of people might come look at this because wouldn’t they be– I would be fascinated. I just wonder if that might lend that sense of authentic audience to the project.

[00:40:25] Bonni: Oh, thank you for that suggestion. One of the things I’ve been doing in recent semesters and years is asking them– I do a supplemental course evaluation is essentially what it is. I ask them to share some stories around care and the sense of perception that they had and what ties to that perception of care that they may or may not have. I always ask them, “Would it be okay to share this story? Please don’t share it with anyone. I just like it between the two of us. Or you could share it internally at our university or you could share it.”

They have the choice to make any of those. I literally will have one out of a hundred people will say, “I just prefer it to be between the two of us.” It might be, I think sometimes I think there’s going to be more hesitation than there might actually be. Yes, if they were though to know that this is really cutting-edge stuff and people are asking a lot of questions that maybe it would spark something in them. I think I might trick them and I say that very sarcastically, but into metacognition. Because like I said, it’s not trying to grow writing skills.

Even if it was, there’s probably a way that it could be used to develop writing skills as a new peer to involve in the peer [laughs] review process and stuff.

[00:41:41] Cynthia: That’s right.

[00:41:42] Bonni: Oh, thank you so much for adding that last recommendation in. Cynthia, thank you for getting in touch with me too and asking if I was having any conversations. Your e-mail came literally right as I was starting to put some seeds out there. I really feel like you’re great at explaining things in very easily understandable ways and would just be a great start to what will be a series of conversations around these very important matters.

[00:42:07] Cynthia: Had a great time talking about it.

[00:42:08] Bonni: Yes. Thanks for being here.

[music]

Thanks once again to Cynthia Alby for coming back on the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, this time to talk about how artificial intelligence is impacting higher education. Today’s episode was produced by me, Bonni Stachowiak. It was edited by the ever-talented Andrew Kroger. Podcast production support was provided by the amazing Sierra Smith. If you have yet to sign up for the e-mail updates that come from Teaching in Higher Ed, head on over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe.

On most weeks, you’ll get an e-mail from me with the show notes of the most recent episode along with some other resources that don’t show up on the show. Thanks so much for listening, and I’ll see you next time.

[00:43:12] [END OF AUDIO]

The transcript of this episode has been made possible through a financial contribution by the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE). ACUE is on a mission to ensure student success through quality instruction. In partnership with institutions of higher education nationwide, ACUE supports and credentials faculty members in the use of evidence-based teaching practices that drive student engagement, retention, and learning.

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.