The structure of college classes will have to change in an AI world. That's according to Roy Magnuson, the director of the newly created Adaptive Edge Institute at Illinois State University. The institute studies new technologies and how they influence teaching. Right now, the hot tech-thing is Generative AI.
“There's no putting it back in the bottle. If the bubble collapses, and the stock market crashes, the technology is not going away, right? The things that we see today are just going to be faster, cheaper, smaller, more accessible,” said Magnuson.
Magnuson said AI should not be attacking learning outcomes. To get beyond the moral angst of kids using AI to write essays, Magnuson said, if writing the essay is the point of the class, the course needs to be re-evaluated. He said it will be possible to use AI to help students gain mastery of a subject, even including writing by accelerating the “iteration loop” that helps young people build skills through repetition.
“Maybe you can look at synthesis. You have them write and get reflexive feedback from the AI. Or you take a set of bullet points and have it create summaries and have them [students] react to those things. You can have them take an idea and have the AI split it out into 10 different social media posts for 10 different things, and have them critique those things,” said Magnuson.
He said the conversations need to continue to happen about when students should use AI and when not to do that. One model for that conversation is the TILT [Transparency In Learning and Teaching] framework. Be upfront with students about what you are trying to accomplish.
“Why there is going to be struggle, why the struggle is important, why the failure is more important than the product, the process is what we're trying to go through,” said Magnuson. “So, don't do that, because it's a violation of what I'm telling you to do. And there are the ramifications for that. But also, you're cutting yourself off the knees here. You're not getting what you need out of the class.”
He acknowledged that point is easier to make stick in smaller course sections instead of mass lecture hall classes.
He said universities are taking a variety of approaches to AI, everything from thou shalt not ever ever … to full steam ahead, with virtual professors. He said ISU is somewhere in the middle. ISU rolled out the new institute in August.
“It [AI] challenges us to reimagine not just what we teach, but how we think about learning itself,” said ISU Provost Ani Yazedjian. “The Adaptive Edge Institute is one of our responses to this transformative moment as we actively work to position Illinois State University as a leader in navigating continuous change rather than merely reacting to it.”
Already, Magnuson said, projects are showing promise. One involves a secure-compute sandbox cut off from the internet. It allows teachers to record, transcribe, generate inferences on everything that happens in sixth grade classrooms at Metcalf lab school, and give instructors feedback.
“It accelerates humanities research in a way that is absolutely transformational,” said Magnuson.
He said AI in that context sets up a paradox: The more layers of technology between teacher and student, the more human instruction can become. He said having the computer document and analyze according to prompts you give it reduces the “cognitive load” on the teacher in the moment.
“You're not thinking in your head, oh man, how much time did I spend on that? Who's talking? Did I remember this, that student, or whatever,” said Magnuson. “We've seen things as much as, hey, did you realize you're you are talking 70% of the time, or three people spoke the entire class?”
He said instructors usually have a sense of that already, but this gives specific help.
"So you can say … I need to bring in this student or this one. Oh, that was a really good point that student has. I want to make sure in the next lesson that I follow up on that,” said Magnuson. “Which allows you, then, as the instructor, to be more human, right? You're reacting to things, and your instruction gets better.”
Another project is building “custom interactions frameworks,” with the help of Amazon data centers — things like tutoring bots that run parallel to a class.
“We’re able to take transcriptions of classes instructors are doing and then feed that into a system that then can give feedback based on exactly what the instructor is saying in class. A student can go and work with this thing on these certain concepts parallel to class,” said Magnuson.
He said that has the potential to affect student retention rates by looking at different pain points in a course. For instance, the first third of a class is the most important. The students that don't pass the first exam are almost certainly not going to pass the class. AI might help them pass that exam.
“We know this idea can work and does work other places. But there's a lot of nuance to what the instructor needs to do. What's that class? What is the student interaction? How do we onboard students? How do we train them to use it? And that's what the institute is doing,” said Magnuson.
He said large language model AI is already producing “bespoke research” in many fields that could accelerate materials research, physics, biology, and medicine.
“They're coming up with ideas that humans did not come up with. These are things outside of its training set. No one, no human, has ever had put together these thoughts, and a language model is doing that. And people are scientifically testing those things, and they're working so that that is a spark, if that grows into a flame, that's truly wild,” said Magnuson.
He conceded there may not be any case in any technology ever in which it has not been deployed in both the best and the worst cases at the same time. He said the pendulum will swing in every direction, and although the future may be scary, it is not pre-determined.
“Our future is probably not dystopia or utopia. It's somewhere in the middle, and it looks more like what we're doing today, yet, with lots of terrible things that are occurring and lots of amazing things that have occurred,” said Magnuson. “We need to have those conversations.”
