Student-Success

Back in the mid-1990s I read an absolutely amazing article that had a lasting impact on my thinking. Despite looking for it several times over the years, I’ve never been able to find it again. This was the era of 14.4k, 28.8k, and 56k modems, when we used our home landlines to dial up and connect to the internet. The article’s main argument was that, just as architects have to understand and account for gravity in their designs of bridges and buildings, web architects have to understand and account for bandwidth in their website designs. Back in the day, including too many large images on a webpage could “weigh it down” to the point of “collapse.” Your 28.8k connection provided so little bandwidth to your home that you simply couldn’t download that much data in a reasonable amount of time, so after waiting a minute for the page to load you just gave up and went somewhere else. ...

Human Teachers and AI Teachers Would you be surprised if you pulled a random person off the street, shoved them into a classroom full of students, and then found that they weren’t a particularly effective teacher? Of course not. And why wouldn’t that be surprising? Because effective teaching requires a great deal of knowledge and skill, and the person you pulled off the street most likely had no relevant training. ...

This is the opening section of my September 19, 2024 presentation, Why Open Education Will Become Generative AI Education. I’m pre-posting some of the presentation content due to the very active conversation the announcement of the presentation has created. Last week I posted the middle section of the presentation, How Generative AI Affects Open Educational Resources, in which I described how we need to move beyond narrow thinking about how generative AI impacts our work with traditional OER and begin thinking more broadly about the power generative OER. ...

This is the middle section of my September 19, 2024 presentation, Why Open Education Will Become Generative AI Education. I’m pre-posting some of the presentation content due to the very active conversation the announcement of the presentation has created. Next week I hope to post the first section of the presentation, which outlines the reasons why people who care deeply about affordability, access, and improving outcomes should consider shifting their focus away from OER (as we have understood it for the last 25+ years) and toward generative AI. Or, using the language I introduce below, from “traditional OER” to “generative OER." ...

As I’ve been (re-)reading OER adoption research through a more critical lens I’m seeing a recurring pattern of significant threats to validity in the designs of studies purporting to measure the impact of OER adoption on student outcomes. While there are numerous methodological issues to consider, in this essay I’ll discuss three. Specifically, I’ll share: three questions you should ask when you read research about the impact of OER adoption on student outcomes, the reasons why you should care about the answers to those questions, and the questions the study is really addressing when the answer to any of the three questions is “no.” Three questions to ask when you read research on the impact of OER adoption Ask yourself these three questions when you read OER adoption research - especially research that claims to find a positive impact on student outcomes. ...

One of the main concerns about generative AI is “cheating,” or students getting credit for work they didn’t do. This is actually a problem that collaborative learning has been grappling with for decades. In fact, if you think of generative AI as a collaborator in a group project, there’s actually quite a lot of existing practice and literature we can tap into for guidance about using generative AI effectively in the service of learning - both in how students learn and how instructors assess. ...

Last week I asked a “What if?” question about the way generative AI might change the ways that learners interact with instructional materials like textbooks. This week I’d like to ask another. I’m at the GRAILE workshop on AI and higher education in Denver today, and sitting here in this space I’m hearing things through a slightly different filter. For example, when someone mentioned teaching assistants earlier this morning, it made me think - what if generative AI could provide every instructor with a genuine teaching assistant - a teaching assistant that actually assisted instructors with their teaching? ...

There was some interest in my post yesterday about what I called “generative textbooks,” but based on people’s comments I don’t know that I explained the idea very clearly. The idea of a “generative textbook” is that, instead of containing instructional content, it provides the learner with a series of prompts they can use to elicit information from a large language model like ChatGPT. Here’s a brief example to clarify what I mean. ...

I’ve limited myself to one hour of writing for this post, so it’s more a collection of thoughts than a coherent narrative. I expect I’ll have lots more to say on this topic in the future. For now, I just want to get the beginnings of this idea out into the world, together with some initial implications. Since ChatGPT’s meteoric rise to popularity, I’ve constantly been amazed by the creative ways people have imagined to make use of generative AI. For months now it feels like each week I read about some new way generative AI is being used that just completely blows my mind. For example, my son who is studying cybersecurity recently told me prompted ChatGPT along these lines: ‘You are the hiring manager for a cybersecurity position at a large company. Conduct a mock interview with me, asking me ten conceptual questions. After I have answered all the questions, give me feedback on my answers. Then ask me ten technical questions. After I have answered all the questions, give me feedback on my answers again.’ My son tells me this exercise was incredibly helpful and he plans to do it several more times before having a “real” interview. ...

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. ...