Equity

Prelude The extraordinary woman who mentored me through graduate school and co-chaired my PhD committee, Dr. Laurie Nelson, frequently talked to me about the idea of “current best thinking.” Characterizing something as your “current best thinking” gives you permission to share where you are in your work while simultaneously making it clear that your thinking will still evolve in the future. It is critically important to remember that both open education and generative AI are tools and approaches - they’re means to an end, methods for accomplishing a goal or solving a problem. I’m interested in solving problems of access and effectiveness in education. I think open education and generative AI have a lot to offer toward solutions to these problems. But I want to, from the outset, caution all of us (myself included) against becoming enamored with either open education or generative AI in and of themselves. As they say, you should fall in love with your problem_, not your_ solution_._ ...

There’s broad recognition that access to high-speed internet is necessary for success in school, work, etc. This recognition has led to a number of state and federal programs to improve access to broadband, like the FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) which provides internet subsidies to low-income households. If you believe that access to large language models (LLMs) and other generative AI will also be necessary for success in school, work, etc. in the future - as I do - it’s probably not too early to start learning lessons from programs like ACP and thinking about how we can apply them to improve access to LLMs and other generative AI. ...

Our work at Lumen is focused on eliminating race and income as predictors of student success in the US postsecondary setting. One thing we’ve learned as we’ve worked to erase this persistent gap in academic performance is that it is far easier to “slide the gap to the right” than it is to close it. In other words, interventions intended to benefit the lowest performing students often benefit all students, so that everyone’s academic performance improves. That’s great from one perspective - everyone learned more! But rather than decreasing the size of the gap, these interventions leave the gap in tact and nudge it up the scale to the right. Interventions that have an accurately targeted effect can be hard to find. ...

Treadmills are iconic pieces of exercise equipment for the wrong reason. They’re famous primarily for sitting unused in basements and spare bedrooms all across the country. These treadmills go unused despite having some pretty sophisticated features, including embedded video trainers who talk to you during your workout, realistic imagery of running routes, automated speed and incline adjustment to match the imagery you’re seeing, and even a “cruise control for your heart” that monitors your heart’s beats per minute and adjusts the difficulty of your run in real-time to keep you in your target heart-rate zone throughout your workout. However, all the amazing features in the world can’t improve your fitness level if you never get on the treadmill and use them, which apparently many owners don’t. ...

I’ve spent a lot of time over the years working with doctoral students as they search for “the question” that will guide their graduate studies and, eventually, their dissertation work. While the question can often be expressed in a single sentence, its power to shape a student’s graduate experience and frame their dissertation work is undeniable. Properly asked, the question implies which electives to take, determines what literature is in and out of scope, and even suggests a research method for the dissertation. The question, clearly articulated, is an incredibly powerful tool for focusing and aligning work toward a meaningful answer. ...