Kickin’ it Old School

(Course Design with AI in Mind, Part 2)

If we agree with Rina Bliss, professor of sociology at Rutgers University, when she writes “…while AI can assist in getting information to a learner, it cannot do the thinking for them — it cannot help them truly learn” then either we find ways to co-opt AIs in the learning process or find ways to limit our students’ use of AIs. A future post will deal with deliberate use of AIs in the learning process, but for now, we’ll focus on limiting the utility of AIs through intentional and thoughtful design of learning activities.

Our previous post in this series argued for making learning activities of greater interest and value to students themselves—finding ways to increase student motivation. When students want to learn and engage in the process of learning, they’re less likely to dodge doing so by relying on someone or something else. (It is good to remember that students have been known to resort to having other students do their work for ages; in this respect, AI is simply the newest resource students can use.) Learning environments (courses/classes) and specific activities where students are 1) active and 2) responsible for constructing their own learning are contexts largely antithetical to use of an AI.

Siva Vaidhyanathan professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia, shares from her recent article, My students are using AI to cheat. Here’s why it’s a teachable moment,

So going forward I will demand some older forms of knowledge creation to challenge my students and help them learn. I will require in-class writing. This won’t just take them away from screens, search engines, and large-language models. It will demand they think fluidly in the moment. Writing in real time demands clarity and concision. I will also assign more group presentations and insist that other students ask questions of the presenters, generating deeper real-time understanding of a subject.

This is the same argument made in, As AI-Enabled Cheating Roils Colleges, Professors Turn to an Ancient Testing Method where Professor Huihui Qi decided to introduce oral exams in her courses because they would, as the article phrases it,

…push students past rote memorization, prompt them to think on their feet and reveal a student’s conceptual understanding of the subject matter better than most written exams. They are also very hard to hack.

What we see in these two accounts is educators focusing on students being active in the classroom instead of passively listening to or watching a lecture and then, later, creating a work product on their own (which is a recipe for cheating, even if not by AI). We also see students needing to “think fluidly in the moment” and “think on their feet” (i.e., being responsible for constructing their own learning right there and then).

We couldn’t possibly agree more.

In-class writing, presentation, and oral exams are just a few of the general activity types that require active students engaged in creating their own ongoing learning. What more can we offer along these same lines? Here are just a few ideas from our Activity Design Institute/Workshop:

This is not an exhaustive list but should help to demonstrate that this is our wheelhouse and area of perhaps our greatest expertise: We know how students learn and can teach educators how to increase and improve student learning.

So many educators are working hard to rediscover what is often referred to as a kind of ancient and arcane wisdom. We find this a bit ironic, since we’ve been helping educators learn to create precisely these kinds of active and ‘unhackable’ learning activities since 1991. Incidentally, that was the same year the first commercial web page was introduced, and the World Wide Web approved for public use by the National Science Foundation.

Our old school expertise decreases reliance on AIs for cheating….

We’re still kickin’!

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