Course Design with AI in Mind (part 1)

We’re hardly the first to tackle this subject and we won’t pretend to have all the answers. But there are a few things we’re relatively sure of, the most critical of which is that active learning, whether you call it Process Education, POGIL, a flipped classroom, or student-centered, is a far less welcoming environment for student use of AI than a lecture + homework approach. In active learning, students do the bulk of their exploration and inquiry within the classroom, preferably as part of a cooperative or collaborative group.

In so many of the courses that seem to be rife with students cheating by using ChatGPT (or another AI), the focus is on disciplinary content and students demonstrating they have absorbed that content by writing a research paper or essay.

In a student-centered course, the focus is on students learning and, in POGIL or Process Education courses, specifically on learning how to learn, even as they learn disciplinary content. According to Rina Bliss, professor of sociology at Rutgers University, “…while AI can assist in getting information to a learner, it cannot do the thinking for them — it cannot help them truly learn.”

But Bliss goes a step further, touching on specific approaches to teaching and learning that not only decrease the utility of AI, but increase student learning:

In education, there has been a movement toward social-emotional and problem-based learning as springboards for academics — and with good reason. Research shows that students across age groups and skill levels learn better and retain information longer when they are offered the opportunity to see how the material they’re learning connects to their lives outside the classroom. So educators attempt to spur interest in subjects and acquisition of skills by turning learning moments into communal problem-solving events. When we combine analytical learning with social-emotional learning, students become proficient in the material we want them to know and get more excited about the learning process.

AI can’t teach children to learn. What’s missing?, Washington Post April 11, 2023

In terms of activity and curriculum design, so much of this is about the Why statement!

Step 1 of the Learning Process Methodology (which is the heart and soul of our activity and curricula design) is, “Why?” This is because the motivation to learn depends upon the relevance of learning to personal, educational, career, and life experience and goals. The “Why” statement in a learning situation makes clear not only why learning about a given topic is important, but perhaps more importantly, how it is relevant to the needs, interests, or concerns of the students. For a strong “Why” statement, it is critical to think beyond immediate needs and the perspective of the instructor. Instructors are almost always aware of the relevance required by a “Why” statement, as not only have they designed the curricula, activity, and/or learning experience, they also have life and professional experience beyond that of their students. But students don’t have the benefit of these perspectives. Asking them to give their time and attention to something for their own good not only isn’t motivating; it comes across as condescending.

The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard puts it nicely,

If one is truly to succeed in leading a person to a specific place, one must first and foremost take care to find him where he is and begin there. This is the secret in the entire art of helping. Anyone who cannot do this is himself under a delusion if he thinks he is able to help someone else. In order truly to help someone else, I must understand more than he–but certainly first and foremost understand what he understands. If I do not do that, then my greater understanding does not help him at all.

Søren Kierkegaard, The Point of View On My Work As An Author

This isn’t a fool-proof recipe for keeping students from using an AI to complete their assignments and write their papers. But it does make the point that if we want students to learn, we have an obligation to find ways to start from a place of empathy (shared feeling/understanding) and proceed from there. If what students are tasked with learning matters to them and is of interest to them, they will be invested in learning. This makes the likelihood of them withdrawing from learning and instead using an AI to complete tasks for them remote.

If the food is good, kids don’t feed it to the family pet when no one’s watching…

If a show or film is interesting and engaging, people don’t reach for their phones…

If what students are learning matters to us,
we have to make sure it matters to them.