Online Learning in the Second Half

In EP 41, John and Jason discuss the evolving challenge of moving beyond 'copy-paste' AI policies to create syllabus guidelines that encourage students to engage in the 'productive struggle' of learning.
See complete notes and transcripts at www.onlinelearningpodcast.com
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Host Bios:
Walk into schools today and generative AI is on the agenda—and many leaders aren’t sure what to do with it. John Nash helps them figure it out. An associate professor at the University of Kentucky and founding director of the Laboratory on Design Thinking, he makes AI practical and useful, not just theoretical. He’s on two generative AI advisory boards at the University of Kentucky and one at MidPacific Institute in Honolulu, advising educators from local superintendents to teachers in international schools. He teaches courses in design thinking, leading deeper learning, and mixed methods research, and his research interests study the application of human-centered design in organizational leadership.
Jason Johnston is the Executive Director of Online Learning & Course Production in Digital Learning at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His background includes developing and launching online degree programs, directing educational technology, teaching, and working as an audio engineer. Holding a PhD in Educational Leadership, an M.Ed. in Educational Technology, and an M.Div., Jason advocates for humanity and equity in online education while helping educators leverage technology for the future. He co-hosts the podcast Online Learning in the Second Half (www.onlinelearningpodcast.com) and enjoys playing guitar, building Lego, and traveling with his family.
Resources:
University of Kentucky Syllabus Policy: https://celt.uky.edu/ai-course-policy-examples
University of Tennessee, Knoxville Syllabus Policy: https://writingcenter.utk.edu/sample-syllabus-statements-for-ai-guidelines/
Jason’s Policy Icons: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MG9h68__uqPSz6HXNeVymJhal1VNapjyK-2PFa5QFxI/edit?usp=sharing
John’s Policy Example: https://johnnash.notion.site/John-Nash-s-Stance-on-Generative-AI-Use-by-Students-in-Courses-2eff24fd17cc8043ae2be34712680c28
Chronicle article by Geoff Watkinson “I’m an AI Power User. It Has No Place in the Classroom. Learning to think for yourself has to come first.“: https://www.chronicle.com/article/im-an-ai-power-user-it-has-no-place-in-the-classroom (paywalled - should be able to read for free with login)
Theme Music: Pumped by RoccoW is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial License.
Battle Hymn of the Republic is public domain from the Library of Congress https://www.loc.gov/item/jukebox-767050/
Transcript
We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions or can help with any corrections!
[00:00:00] Jason: Can we do the quick intro?
[00:00:02] John Nash: Yeah,
hold on.
[00:00:03] Jason: That was the intro to your other podcast.
[00:00:06] John Nash: Yeah,
[00:00:06] Jason: John, have you
[00:00:07] John Nash: exactly.
[00:00:08] Jason: Beyond My Back?
[00:00:10] John Nash: No, I am not podcasting. Behind your back.
I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston.
[00:00:15] Jason: John. Hey everyone. And this is Online Learning in the second half the
[00:00:19] John Nash: I.
[00:00:19] Jason: Learning podcast. Mm-hmm.
[00:00:20] John Nash: Yeah, we're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation we've been having for the last three years about online education. Look, online learning has had its chance to be great, and some of it is, but a lot still has a way to go. How are we going to get to the next stage, Jason?
[00:00:35] Jason: is a great question. How about we do a podcast and talk about it?
[00:00:39] John Nash: Perfect. What do you want to talk about today?
[00:00:41] Jason: You know, you always ask me that question and I really appreciate it. But what do you want to talk about today, John?
[00:00:47] John Nash: Oh, you know what I want to talk about today? I want to talk about the struggle that instructors are having to set guidelines for the use of generative AI in their classes.
[00:00:57] Jason: I think that sounds like a great conversation, especially the front
end of a semester here.
[00:01:02] John Nash: Yeah, is it the lawyers that say, or the justices that say, "this is not settled law?"
[00:01:07] Jason: Hmm.
[00:01:07] John Nash: This is definitely not settled law. We, we are not lawyers. We do not play them on podcasts. We are just a couple of, a couple of folks that are trying to think this through.
So, Jason, we just came off of a really cool episode with Megan Haselschwerdt at University of Tennessee, one of your colleagues, who engaged your office to think about ways to deal with how her students were using generative AI in her class.
And that's really made me think a lot about how a lot of us are wondering how we can have guidelines that work in our classes where it really doesn't matter what it is we're teaching.
I think it'd be good if we could talk about that. I've had some really big evolving thoughts around my own stance on this. Even after three years in, I think I've finally written down something I can live with. But there's a lot of options out there for faculty and teachers and instructors.
There are stoplight protocols. There are guidelines out there that universities have put out that faculty can adopt just right out of the box. But do they really fit? I talk with my colleagues at my work and they're sort of saying, sometimes "just tell me what I should put in my syllabus" and I'm replying with things like, "well, it's hard to say that this will fit your syllabus because really it's an ethical conversation you need to have with yourself and your students."
And so, I think it'd be really good for us to sort of lay out what we're doing, what we're hearing, and get people to give us feedback on what they're doing and even call into question our own stances.
[00:02:43] Jason: Yeah, at the end of the podcast with Megan, we're kind of asking for advice for faculty. One of the things she talked about was that she wished she had a little more coaching before she started her class when she was designing her class. Wish she had a little more coaching, a little more time to talk about it.
And I think that makes complete sense. I think what we're seeing is that, without a lot of time spent on it, I think faculty are, are kind of defaulting to the two extremes. Either they're not saying anything about it, maybe just letting anything happen with regards to ai, or they're putting in a really quick statement, or maybe they say something in their first class how they don't allow any AI use whatsoever. I think Megan's story, and this is a spoiler about how good it is, but I think it was just a great story to talk about how faculty might be able to kind of wrestle with that and figure out where there might be a middle ground that would actually increase learning for the students and engagement, but also potentially decrease the actual use of AI.
[00:03:51] John Nash: Yeah, maybe talk a little bit about what the overarching approaches are at University of Tennessee Knoxville, and I can say what has been promulgated here at the University of Kentucky. I think they're a little bit similar and just sort of, there are some I call them stoplight protocols.
You get a red, yellow, or green kind of approach that a faculty can copy and paste and drop into their syllabus. And can you also talk a little bit about what the pros and cons are of that copy paste approach without maybe thinking about what the actual work is that students might do in your class.
[00:04:27] Jason: Yeah, we a similar thing it sounds like to UK, which the provost office has the kind of the, the, the strict no AI, the, know. AI freedom kind of thing, and then a moderate approach. And we can put the links into both of those. Both at UK and University of Tennessee, Knoxville. And, and so that's, so that's, essentially the guidance we've been giving for syllabus.
And I think people do copy and paste those in. the kind of what our approach as we're helping. Faculty design online courses have been a little bit more customized and to spend some more time in that messy middle of "moderate," because when it comes to "moderate," it does take, I
think, more intentionality
and more communication and more thought you approach it.
And probably
more
specific. Policies that would apply to certain assignments. And so there may be one assignment that has a different kind of moderation another assignment. So, for instance, in my class the, I teach a couple of online classes a year for UT and in my human computer interaction class in the fall. In their reflection pages, I ask for no AI use whatsoever. So, I have a strict policy when it comes to my reflection because, up to a level anyways, I want to see the mistakes, I want to hear their thinking. I want to kind of walk with them on, on what they're, even if it's some rambling. But., on a lot of the other projects I have, have more of kind of a human first, human last kind of approach, or we've called an AI human sandwich with AI in the middle to help called human in the loop kind of approach.
Most of my assignments are that way and I just. Really want more transparency and I'm able to articulate that and I'll put in the link as well. You're free to take a look at and use something we use. I try to communicate with icons as well to try to communicate what that process would look
[00:06:37] John Nash: Right.
[00:06:37] Jason: So, it might look like it might look like a, a human then an AI or just a human and AI symbol, and then a human again, or it might just be human AI. And so, we expect you to do most of the work with a human first, and then you can use AI to kind of clean up at the end. Or even have an assignment that I ask them to use AI to come up with the initial idea,
Right?
So, AI first
[00:07:02] John Nash: right.
[00:07:03] Jason: but then human last
[00:07:04] John Nash: Yeah.
[00:07:05] Jason: to evaluate and critique it.
[00:07:07] John Nash: And those icons, you can put those in the syllabus by each assignment, so at a glance, they know in advance like, oh, okay. Yeah.
[00:07:13] Jason: Yeah, without even reading. If they get it from the beginning, and I put the examples in
[00:07:17] John Nash: Mm-hmm.
[00:07:18] Jason: and then in the actual Canvas assignments, they can see at a glance what my expectations are. You know, I think a lot of policy is about communication, right? And trying to communicate what your expectations are.
And I think if students are left without that communication, then they'll, they will do whatever they want to do, which is, is, I think, completely fair.
[00:07:41] John Nash: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Our stance at the University of Kentucky is similar, and we have a few sites where faculty could consult to get guidance on what to put in their syllabi.
One is a group that was convened by the provost called the Advance Group, and I happened to sit on that, we recommended that course policies exhibit four characteristics, that the AI policy is people-centered, is adaptable to the circumstances of the course, is thinking about the effectiveness of what the policy is trying to do, and then trying to keep awareness upfront for the learners too. And so, our Center for Enhancement of Learning and Teaching called CELT, they have a, a, a site where they've got real boilerplate. So, no use, conditional use and unrestricted use. And with some examples.
I think, you know, it's interesting as we listen to Megan's episode, if even with no use students will use AI if you have a "no use" policy. And so, I'm wondering if you've got a rationale that is very simple that you say, "well, idea generation and analytical thinking and critical analysis are key outcomes in this course," and I'm reading verbatim from an example, from our university site.
And so "as a result, all assignments should be submitted by the student, a hundred percent original work." Great. I think you can say that all day long and students will still jump into ChatGPT. And so, this has been the challenge for me is that you can put these in, but there's another level that has to kind of happen in the actual human interaction in the course to get students to hopefully adhere to , the rationale and interest you have for why you don't want them to use ChatGPT. Isn't that the case?
[00:09:29] Jason: I think it is, and I think it's fair that students know why. Right.
[00:09:33] John Nash: Mm-hmm.
[00:09:34] Jason: A lot of students are coming at these classes with more understanding than teachers have about AI and how it's used and how they use it in a daily basis. Right? And so, I think it's, I think it's really fair to do that.
[00:09:47] John Nash: I think it's important that we have these templates for faculty to use. I think that they're just the tip of the iceberg and the kinds of capacity building we need to still do to help faculty understand what happens when their assignments collide with students' desires to use AI in spite of whatever's written in the syllabus.
[00:10:10] Jason: Right. Well, and I had an example recently too on a dissertation committee. The, the topic is about AI and instructional design, and we didn't have a policy about dissertations and so,
[00:10:25] John Nash: Yeah.
[00:10:25] Jason: these cookie cutter syllabus ideas about AI aren't going to fully explain how we make this a rigorous experience for the student, and how we can, with assurance as a committee, sign off on it and say, this is the student's work, right? How do we foster that transparency? But also recognizes 2026, you know, do we, we, we don't expect them to go back to the card catalog anymore, do we? And start writing down all their references and checking out books and putting them on the photocopier.
[00:11:05] John Nash: Yes,
[00:11:06] Jason: You know, there's lots of technologies, that we have adopted in the last 30, 40 years, and we need to be, adaptive thinking about this.
At the same time, I think it serves the student well to communicate well. They know the expectations and we don't get any of us into a spot at the end, and so we were able to develop something that that seems to work in that regard.
[00:11:32] John Nash: I think a lot of our listeners are lecturers, instructors, professors, instructional designers and you mentioned sort of the dissertation work, so let's just take a second and talk about that weird special stripe of instruction, which is the dissertation advising.
We're talking about that now in our department. We're a chiefly graduate department. We have a lot of dissertating students, and we're wondering now, what is the stance that dissertation advisors should take. It's different from having a, there's no syllabus for the dissertation advising process.
It's a six month to two-year mentoring process where the student is expected to engage in independent research to demonstrate that they can be a scholar and execute a study. And, boy, can AI creep in just about anywhere and how shall advisors talk to their mentees about the use of AI? Should there be a department policy?
I'm not sure there should be. Or there could be, but I'm not sure there can be because every dissertation is different and every dissertation advisor's ethical stance is going to be different. We're a small department, seven or eight faculty. Very different attitudes towards how each believes students may use generative AI in their dissertation writing process. Some are quite liberal with it, some are very scared by it, and I think it's been difficult to really get down to the fact that it's a personal mentor-mentee discussion and decision about where each stand. It's a little different from just having a syllabus for an undergraduate design course or a writing, course.
It's, yeah. What do you think are, am I going too far here or is this a special strip?
[00:13:16] Jason: I don't think you are.
[00:13:17] John Nash: Yeah.
[00:13:17] Jason: I think about how really every classroom, every teacher, student connection and relationship is built on trust, at least on some level. I think that dissertation is probably 10X what you would find in, in need in a master's class, even in independent learning, right? In terms of
[00:13:38] John Nash: Yeah.
[00:13:38] Jason: building trust, and I think that's a lot of it is trust, transparency. It needs to be there because. If the trust starts breaking down one side or the other, in terms of how this is being produced, and this is,
[00:13:51] John Nash: Yes.
[00:13:52] Jason: Pre AI as well as we know, right? That the hardest dissertation experiences have been when that trust has been eroded, especially between the chair and the, and the student. And so, this is nothing new, but I think AI just brings in another, little possible foil to that relationship and something that on the front end we need to communicate, we need to put on the table and talk about, and also not just come down with some sort of edict from on high. This is the way it'll be. But let's figure out what this looks like between you and I, the, our, our own relationships with technology. The content that we're trying to make, the kind of analysis that we're doing. You want to create new knowledge? Well, in some, cases you're going to have to use AI in order to take this a further step than, what the last person that studied this was doing.
[00:14:48] John Nash (2): Yeah. And the other wrinkle that comes into this is that the, the generative ai, while it can generate text, that can be technically accurate in particularly in study design and in thinking about framing literature, the dissertation process is not just the end written product, which everybody's very familiar with.
You go to the library, you see the printed dissertation, but to get there, that student must orally defend their ideas in front of a committee. So, dissertations, if you're not in this world day to day, are challenging and difficult, tricky political and scholarly activities because the advisor's reputation is at stake with the rest of the committee members. The student's reputation is at stake with their committee members and how they talk about their ideas. If the ideas are not flowing well from the student in a defense, then the other committee members can wonder if the chair of the dissertation was doing their job.
It's fraught with all kinds of pitfalls, and I think with generative AI in play now, I'll speak only for myself as a dissertation advisor going forward, I'm going to be thinking about more mini defenses. With me and my student, mini oral defenses to make sure that they can actually talk through what they're putting out there, do a public demonstration of their learning, because if I already know they're a good writer and I've read their writing and then they start using AI and I can't tell the difference and then I think they understand what they're talking about, but they don't.
I'm in trouble. They're in trouble.
[00:16:21] Jason: Yeah, I love that. You know, and it kind of points to things we've been talking about the last two years, how rethinking what pedagogy looks like in the classroom because of AI has actually
[00:16:34] John Nash: Yes.
[00:16:34] Jason: uncovered some of the cracks. I think there's lots of times where someone gets to a dissertation defense and they're not prepared. And it is partly their fault. And maybe mostly the student's fault, we might say this is their defense, right? They're the, they're supposed to be the experts, but it also leans on the, on the committee and the chair.
[00:16:51] John Nash: Yeah.
[00:16:52] Jason: And how much better it be to have those check-ins, to scaffold, not just the writing of the chapters, but to scaffold the defending of the chapters and the ideas and putting it to
[00:17:07] John Nash: Yes.
[00:17:07] Jason: it to the test in terms of speaking it out loud, with somebody who knows a little something too and can, can push back.
[00:17:15] John Nash: So, I read something recently, Jason in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. It was just actually within a few days of us recording this piece here. It was on January 9th an essay by Geoff Watkinson, and the, the title really caught me.
He said, " I am an AI power user. It has no place in the classroom." And this immediately struck me. I thought he was. Talking to me, I'm an AI power user. I'm using this tool nearly daily. I think you are too. And I've been concerned about what place it has in the classroom. I've talked before in our episodes and with others that I teach a design thinking course that I think is almost un-AIable.
But I also teach dissertation writing courses that are AIable. And so, I'm, I'm thinking, wow, what did he have to say here? And he said, what I think I've been thinking is that he's been using generative AI since the very beginning, and he saw a change immediately in his own work. Tasks that took him a full day now took 30 minutes. He paid for a premium version of Claude, and he taught himself through an AI certification, how to use these tools. And his output increased and his quality increased. And for the tedious administrative work he was doing for writing proposals for a tech company it was great.
And then he said, I'm able to do this because I have been an expert in this field for years, and the way I'm using AI is to advance work that I already know how to do. But this is a world apart from teaching 18-year-olds how to put their thoughts on paper and talks about how really, it's the productive struggle in teaching and learning.
That's important that AI can eviscerate and therefore he's being very careful as a power user to be thoughtful about the way it comes into his classes and almost doesn't come in at all. And I thought this might be the way, this might be the way to think about this, but how do you frame it in a way that it works for you in almost every way you teach?
And that was, that's what I've been struggling with.
[00:19:24] Jason: That's really interesting and it points to this idea that is best used in the hands of experts. But the very
[00:19:34] John Nash: Yeah.
[00:19:35] Jason: reason you're in school is because you're not an expert.
[00:19:37] John Nash: Right. And he's not worried about cheating. You're like, wait, what? No. He's worried about losing the moments of revelation and growth that a student gets when they do the cool productive struggle that they do
[00:19:52] Jason: The aha moments, the light bulb moments
[00:19:53] John Nash: mm-hmm.
[00:19:54] Jason: which are
[00:19:54] John Nash: Yeah.
[00:19:55] Jason: those are teacher payback times too, right? To be able to see those things happen. I think for any of us that teach, those are the very reasons why we, we get into it. So, you would, yes. You would hate to lose those.
[00:20:05] John Nash: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, I wrote down for the very first time late last week in three years of using generative AI a policy kind of guidelines that I think I can live with in almost all of my classes.
It's built on what Watkinson said, and also from some folks that you've introduced me to through our podcast related to the ideas of feminist pedagogy and feminist pedagogical frameworks.
And for those who are not familiar with that, it's really about strategies that support learners' goals by promoting learner-centered approaches presenting community-driven content, keeping the learning experiences as transformative as possible and close to the ground of the work that they're doing so that you can achieve the goals that you want to do.
And by using some of those thoughts and from a book called "Feminist Pedagogy for Teaching Online", edited by one of our past guests, Enilda Romero-Hall, with also Jacquelyne Howard, Clare Daniel, Niya Bond, and Liv Newman.
And by the way, we will be interviewing Jacquelyne Howard and Enilda Romero-Hall about this book. But these notions along with Watkinson ideas, bring me to this place where I have an ethical stance about why I think the productive struggle is important, and we'll talk together every time about whether AI is appropriate. And if I catch it getting used in a way that doesn't seem right, we're going to talk about that and help you get back to the productive struggle. I think that's kind of where my head is at now.
[00:21:37] Jason: I love that. Can you give us a little sample from your syllabus?
[00:21:41] John Nash: Yeah.
[00:21:42] Jason: you do a dramatic reading of it or,
[00:21:44] John Nash: no. Yes. Like yeah, dramatic reading. You pick the, pick the voice of the ones that I like to do, like to a Sean Connery voice, or no, I'm not going to do that.
[00:21:52] Jason: Music.
[00:21:53] John Nash: can do it to Barney, the Dinosaur.
[00:21:55] Jason: Mm,
Yeah, you could do that.
[00:21:57] John Nash: Yeah.
[00:21:58] Jason: I was of thinking, with an orchestra playing
[00:22:01] John Nash: oh, right. Yeah.
[00:22:02] Jason: behind you, kind of like escalating to the final moments of the syllabus. Sorry, go ahead.
[00:22:08] John Nash: no, no. Thank you for the offer.
I'll give
[00:22:10] Jason: With all of that aside, what would you, just give us a little sample from it.
[00:22:14] John: Yeah, I think it just, it does three things.
It, it starts off by talking about how AI is powerful and it's powerful for work you've already mastered, and it's dangerous if it's a shortcut for work that you're learning. And, in it I confess that I've been using AI extensively in my professional work for tasks I already know how to do well and it makes me faster and better at that work.
But in education and the work that we would do in a class, that requires struggle, cognitive work, messiness of not knowing, ambiguity, all the things. And AI can eliminate that struggle. And for me, and I say to the student, to you, that's what I want us to have. So, the Second section tells them what I'm asking of them, and I'm asking them some of the typical things you would expect to hear but maybe expand it upon a bit.
But I want them to own their thinking. I want them to be transparent about the AI use. I want them to do the foundational work that needs to happen to have the productive struggle. And I want them to name it when it's not working. So, if they're struggling, I'm there. I'm not throwing them into the deep end of the pool without anything, I'm there.
And so, my last section is a commitment to them. And by telling them I'm going to make my criteria explicit. I will show my own thinking and my uncertainty, and I'm going to acknowledge when things might not be working and how we can work together because it's really for us to do this together. And I think it kind of, maybe we take a page as I'm always talking about Michelle Miller's "same side pedagogy."
I don't want to be adversarial here, but I want to also admit that you're here to learn something and I'm here to say, I think I can help you do that.
[00:23:55] Jason: I love that. It really is an invitation into that messy middle of. Of the syllabus approach to AI in a sense, right? Because
[00:24:07] John Nash: Mm.
[00:24:08] Jason: You are welcoming the student then into that productive struggle, even through your approach to how AI may or may not be used.
[00:24:16] John Nash: Yes, and so we'll see how it goes. I think that we as instructors need to be helpful to ourselves and helpful to our students by saying "we're in this together, and I think I have some guidance that can help you get to a goal you're hoping to reach. And if you take a shortcut and I notice it, I mean I can, I can look squinty-eyed at what you turned in, and I can tell that you probably skipped some steps and used AI. I'm going to politely call you out on that and tell you, maybe you should do this again, because I want you to really learn this stuff." And I think that's where we've got to get.
[00:24:53] Jason: Yeah. Yeah, I love that. Would you share that perhaps with our listeners? Can
[00:24:58] John Nash: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:25:00] Jason: you share a copy of that. We'll put it into the resources as well.
[00:25:02] John (2): And I invite anyone listening to this and reading it to push back on it. Poke holes in it. Tell me how we can make this better. I mean, maybe I'm being pollyannish here and hopeful, but I think it's, I don't know. We'll see.
[00:25:12] Jason: Yeah. No, I love it.
[00:25:13] John Nash: I.
[00:25:13] Jason: John for that. And yeah, this has been a great little conversation about AI and syllabus policies. I think it's really helpful at the front of a semester to talk about these things. I think we need to have more conversations and so we welcome conversations from you all.
We're on LinkedIn. We'll put at our website online learning. podcast.com. You'll see all the notes for this show, as well as places that you can reach us at LinkedIn. to have more conversation about this, and if there's any way we
[00:25:42] John Nash: Yes.
[00:25:42] Jason: you either through ourselves or through these resources, then yeah, please reach out.
[00:25:49] John Nash: Yeah. If you're a first-time listener, please hit follow and subscribe to our podcast. You'll get this in your feed. If you like what you're hearing, you'll, you'll get more. We've got some good guests coming up.
[00:25:59] Jason: Oh, man we've got some great, I'm really excited to release our upcoming episodes. They just keep getting better and better and a lot of themes that are happening this year as expected, I guess, around wrestling with policies and use and technology use. Of course, these are our ongoing themes, but yeah, we've just got some great podcasts coming.
[00:26:18] John Nash: Good talking to you, Jason.
[00:26:19] Jason: Good talking to you.
Good talking to you, John. And with that, we will leave you listeners with a dramatic reading of a selection of John's AI syllabus.
[00:26:32] John: AI is powerful and it's powerful for work you've already mastered, and it's dangerous if it's a shortcut for work that you're learning. I confess that I've been using AI extensively in my professional work for tasks I already know how to do well and it makes me faster and better at that work.
But in education and the work that we would do in a class, that requires struggle, cognitive work, messiness of not knowing, ambiguity, all the things. And AI can eliminate that struggle. And I say to the student, to you, that's what I want us to have.
and I'm going to acknowledge when things might not be working and how we can work together because it's really for us to do this together.
I don't want to be adversarial here, but I want to also admit that you're here to learn something and I'm here to say, I think I can help you do that.

EP 40 - Does Allowing AI Reduce AI? A Surprising Finding with Dr. Megan Haselschwerdt
In EP 40, John and Jason talk with Megan Haselschwerdt about her transformative semester moving from a futile "cat-and-mouse" game of AI detection to a trust-based partnership with students, demonstrating how transparent dialogue, a more open policy, and addressing "insurmountable" assignment loads are far more effective than policing.
See complete notes and transcripts at www.onlinelearningpodcast.com
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Guest Bio:
Megan Haselschwerdt, Ph.D., serves as an Associate Professor and HDFS Graduate Program Director in Human Development and Family Science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She earned her Ph.D. and M.S. in Human and Community Development from the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign and a B.S. in Psychology from Indiana University-Bloomington. As an interpersonal violence and family science scholar, Dr. Haselschwerdt’s research focuses on intimate partner violence (IPV) from the perspectives of victimized adults, young adults with childhood exposure, and support professionals. Specializing in qualitative methodologies like grounded theory and reflexive thematic analysis, she also collaborates on mixed-methods studies to examine help-seeking behaviors and develop trauma-informed interventions. She currently directs the Family Violence Across the Lifespan research team, leading initiatives such as the REVEAL Project and the Young Adults Live and Learn Project to promote safety, healing, and justice.
Resources:
Dr. Haselschwerdt’s Scholarship: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=hTSsBcQAAAAJ&inst=9897619243961157265
Megan’s AI Use Policies: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1I2THuGIaKYstGyZylQS4FgvbNV0B1j3Q3hEpGI4K_l4/edit?usp=sharing
Jason’s AI Policy (and free / open source icons for communication) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MG9h68__uqPSz6HXNeVymJhal1VNapjyK-2PFa5QFxI/edit?usp=sharing
Theme Music: Pumped by RoccoW is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial License.
Transcript
We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions or can help with any corrections!
 
[00:00:00] Jason: I'm going to butcher your last name probably
[00:00:02] Megan: Oh yeah, that's okay. We do too.
[00:00:03] Jason: us with that
[00:00:05] Megan: Yeah. So, we say it all very differently in our family, so it's totally fine. I, I say Haselschwerdt as though there's a z Yeah. Other people, other family members say hassle, but yeah, I say it as though there's a z Hazel Schwart.
[00:00:16] John Nash: Okay, cool. I was,
[00:00:18] Jason: Hazel Schwart
[00:00:20] Megan: Mm-hmm.
[00:00:21] John Nash: I took German for years and so I love the sound of German, so I Yeah. I said,
[00:00:27] Megan: Yes. Yeah, we, we.
[00:00:29] John Nash: be totally German of
[00:00:30] Megan: We offend Germans when I say, like, what, how we say our last name? Yeah. It's unrecognizable. Yep.
[00:00:36] John Nash: Nice shirt. Yeah. Okay, cool.
[00:00:40] Jason: Haz-el-Schwart
[00:00:41] John Nash: Haselschwerdt,
[00:00:42] Jason: You
[00:00:42] Megan: Yep. That's totally fine.
[00:00:44] John Nash: Okay. Haselschwerdt.
[00:00:45] Megan: I think Jo, uh, John has it the authentic way and Jason's American butchered from Ellis Island Way works just well too.
[00:00:53] John Nash: I can't, yeah, I can't help myself though. So
[00:00:55] Jason: I can't help myself either
[00:00:57] Megan: ha ha...
Intro
[00:00:58] John Nash: I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston.
[00:01:01] Jason: Hey John Hey everyone. And this is Online Learning the second half the Online Learning Podcast
[00:01:06] John Nash: Yeah, we're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation we've been having for the last three years about online education. Look, online learning has had its chance to be great, and some of it is, but a lot of it still has a ways to go. How are we going to get to the next stage? Jason?
[00:01:22] Jason: That's a great question How about we do a podcast and talk about it
[00:01:26] John Nash: love that idea. What do you want to talk about today? I.
[00:01:29] Jason: today I don't know how many times I can do this joke but how about we talk a little bit about AI and education
[00:01:34] John Nash: Wait, is that a thing now?
[00:01:36] Jason: Yeah
[00:01:37] John Nash: I'm willing to try.
[00:01:38] Jason: Yeah, I don't know much about it seems like everything I learn about it then I unlearn about it as well. But I'm really interested today We've got a colleague here one of my colleagues from University of Tennessee Knoxville with us Megan and we are just talking about me butchering her last name And so I'm just going to let her introduce herself Megan
[00:01:58] Megan: Hello, I'm Megan Haselschwerdt
[00:02:00] Jason: Welcome to the podcast It's so great to have you here and tell us a little bit about what do you teach what do you do at University of Tennessee Knoxville
[00:02:08] Megan: So, I'm an associate professor in the Department of Counseling, Human Development and Family Science. I'm in the Human Development and Family Science side of things, and I'm the Director of Graduate Studies. Outside of teaching, I'm an intimate partner violence researcher, family violence researcher. But in the context of teaching at the undergraduate level, I teach HDFS 385, which is Child and Family Diversity. I teach this course at the graduate level, and I also teach some qualitative research methods, family theory, that sort of thing. But for undergrads I've been teaching Child and Family Diversity, fully in person, hybrid, kind of split between in person and asynchronous online.
this semester is our first time with the fully launched distance ed online course.
[00:02:50] Jason: That's great we really got talking because of really my role at University of Tennessee which is in more of a centralized office And I was included in a conversation where we started talking a little bit about AI the classroom And first could you give a little bit of a context about how long the course that we're talking about and then how long you had been teaching that course.
[00:03:16] Megan: Absolutely. So, I've taught this class since fall of 2020. And so, it's had the, I can't even keep track of the number of modalities I've taught it in since 2020, which I think some people don't realize if they haven't taught between multiple modalities, that really, you're ending up creating a new class multiple time
[00:03:35] Jason: Yeah
[00:03:36] Megan: Things don't translate. And I, that's part of the learning this semester is what translates well from even hybrid into fully online asynchronous. So, this course is a semester long class. It's a three-credit hour course. And this is my first time teaching it this fall 2025 in this current form.
it's mostly traditional brick and mortar students. It's our new distance ed program. So only five of about our 85 are fully online. The other 75 or so are, traditional students who either opted into the online version or were registered for an in-person version that we ended up canceling and merging into my course.
[00:04:16] Jason: Interesting. I wonder about how many of our classes and programs will shift into more that digital doesn't necessarily mean distance
[00:04:25] Megan: yeah.
[00:04:26] Jason: know that as students are taking these online that as we flex modalities you talked about the modality shift of your classes. Thinking about the number of modalities that they have taken to go through an undergrad Then potentially a graduate program
[00:04:41] Megan: And it's been interesting, our students, we collected data, coming out of, the early parts of the pandemic at least. And what we found is that students really wanted more in-person classes. they said they felt frustrated that they'd had mostly online courses.
And so, we tried to make sure we were always offering a good balance. But when we offer an online and an in-person in the same semester, the in-person course is under-enrolled. We think that maybe this is specific more to juniors and seniors who have established their social networks, they have work, they have volunteering, they have just a lot of complicated demands, and so maybe for them online is more appealing.
But we've also heard from students how difficult it is to, if you have an online class and an in-person, like racing out of the in-person to find a place where they can do the online, especially if it's a synchronous online class.
So, the data that we get does not align with students' registration decisions, and that's made things a little complicated.
[00:05:36] Jason: Yeah, so getting into this class, I think that's the wonderful context and I love the fact that your program is thinking about this and being thoughtful about the student experience. Thinking about this class you've been teaching it for five years or so tell us I really want to get into the story of this and
[00:05:52] Megan: Yeah.
[00:05:53] Jason: what has happened this semester Tell us a little bit about why you reached out to our department initially.
[00:06:00] Megan: So, when I was building this class, so I've historically always taken you know, University of Tennessee provides us with an AI kind of general policy syllabus statement of, you know, open access, moderate use AI or like no AI. And I've always historically done the moderate use.
However, I have not taught undergrads in the AI era until this semester. I'd only taught graduate students. And so, this semester went into it with my syllabus, decided because it's fully an online, the smartest thing I could do just my own thinking, not from literature was I should say no AI use because I really want this class to be reflective. I want it to be drawing upon their personal lived experiences. I want it to be. And so I went back on a policy, like kind of how I'd approach things in the past. And so there was a blanket no AI use. We made clear as best as we could through our syllabus, through our videos, through all the onboarding that we're not grading for grammar. We're not grading for your opinion. We're not grading for you to agree with the content. It doesn't need to be polished. And I think we naively thought that through these engagements and how we wrote about it and how we talked about it, that students would feel really comfortable trusting that we were really comfortable with the unpolished version of their written selves.
And so that's where we started. I have a 20 hour a week graduate teaching assistant who was invaluable to this class. And in the beginning, we both were grading and taking note of things. because I had taught this class hybrid in fall of 2023, before AI really became, like in our class, we, I think it, we hadn't seen as much in our undergrad class of around how AI was going to be utilized. I have all these examples of how students responded to the same kind of prompt.
And so, in this class, we do a premodule reflection just to kind of get them, it's supposed to be like a 10-minute brain dump. We make; we try to make it as low stakes. We suggest you set a timer for 10 minutes and you just kind of brain dump on the topic. So, if our topic is going to be around foundations like, kind of like white supremacy, the foundations of like, on which the country was founded. We have a prompt that's like ", tell us the story that you remember learning of the founding of the United States focusing on pilgrims, Indians. Like, kind of like the, the prompt kind of reckons back to like, what were you taught about this in elementary school?
And so, we're used to getting very specific, like I remember this time. Mr. Johnson's second grade class, you could tell just like real examples from their childhood.
But what we noticed early on, this was like week two or week three of the class that we were getting like almost the exact same thing. And told in the same style and told with the same phrasing and using words that we hadn't put in the prompt, but like we're very generic and just, and you know, if you saw one or two, that's one thing, but all of a sudden we're like at 60, 65 of the 80 or you know, and so then we went down this rabbit hole using AI ourselves to see like to what extent does this seem like we, is it, how is, how likely is it that everybody just has the same sort of thing to say? Then I went back to my, you know, the 2023 responses and realized no one of that year said anything like these. So, we watched this for a little bit, and then the final straw I think was at the end of that week.
It was like, if there's a quote from one of the documentaries, you know, like "America is sold as this melting pot, but like, is it really?" And so, I'm like, so if America's not a melting pot, like. What is it? And it was like one third --the TA started calculating, right? So now we are spending ample amount of time trying to figure out how much of a problem this is.
It was like one third of them described it as "a salad plate" or "a salad bowl" in quotes. And I never had that response. And it was all of, and it was like in quotes, and it was just it, you know? Then I went back to 2021. Nobody else talked about a salad plate or a salad bowl, so that's when we started to feel like, honestly, like in our, like we felt like hostile towards the students.
Like we felt just because also with building an online class. I don't think I understood, like truly, and you know, we've done survival online teaching during the pandemic, but having gone through Jumpstart, I don't think I, you know, it is so important and so kind time consuming, especially that first time.
So, I'm like, I am spending all this time trying to create this exciting and engaging and thoughtful course and my TA's working so hard, and so we were just like, but it looks like they're just slopping everything into ChatGPT, and they're not even engaging it. And so, we felt like, I think hostile would be a fair way to describe it.
And again, since we're not interacting with them face to face, like we don't see them as humans and it feels like they don't see us, they don't, they're not respecting our time. and so that's when I was like, okay, we need to do something different. And that's when I reached out to digital learning and TLI.
What do we do here? Like, this isn't working. during, fall 2021 we had an experience where I made a small tweak to the assignment. I took out a final exam and made it a reflection paper. And that unraveled some students, that change.
Just like any change, just some students were just like, the syllabus says this, how could you, you know? And so, I've been afraid of making substantial changes in an undergraduate course during the semester thinking, you know, people need stability, they need the same, making a big change could cause, you know, even more disruption.
But we had the idea of doing a survey. So, we did a survey. It was instead of one of their normal assignments, the assignment was to complete this survey, and we asked them about their AI use. We asked them just general questions about how they felt the class was going, their trust in us.
Usually what I would do at a mid-semester point, this was a quarter semester at this point, check in, how they feel about the content. is the content the impediment? and so what came out through the written and then the more open-ended responses, was that it was anonymous.
That's right. 'Cause it was, are you using it? How, and if so, how are you using it? You know, the blanket statement says no use, but how, okay. Clearly, it's being used. So, if so, how are you using it and why? And that's when it got very interesting. So, most of them said they were using it to refine what they wrote.
Some of them said they were using it for brainstorming, very few anonymously, acknowledged that they were fully, just plugging in the prompt and, getting something out. But most said that they were using it, I think almost nearly all said that they were using it in some way and the reasons why is what really surprised us.
So, most of them said I acknowledge that you said we didn't have to pay attention to grammar, that kind of thing. They were deeply afraid of being judged for their writing style, and they were very uncomfortable and not fully trusting in how we would receive their more unpolished writing because it really was in these pre and post module reflections that are supposed to be kind of ugly and not pretty, not written perfectly, where we saw the most pristine writing.
So, though we thought we did enough to build up trust and mutual respect and like a, a recognition that we would accept their work as it was, they didn't feel that yet, and they were just also afraid. And then there was a group work component to things each week, and they were really concerned that they would come across as uninformed or they would be unintentionally offensive or that they wouldn't know the right words.
And so, we talked about that a lot in the beginning through our videos and things, but that didn't assuage
their anxieties as we thought it would. And so, and they were also anxious that they could be authentic and that we wouldn't penalize them for their questions or concerns.
[00:13:48] John Nash; It's fascinating. I'm hanging on every word.
[00:13:50] Megan: Good.
[00:13:51] John Nash: it's like a drama story unfolding.
[00:13:53] Megan: Yeah.
[00:13:54] Jason: I'm really impressed by the fact that you reached out that you recognized maybe what was going on And I think that was one of my first questions to you was about how do you know and I think that made a lot of sense and partly because of your experience in this class that you're able to recognize it So I'm really impressed that you reached out that you recognized it. But then I think really impressed as well that you then followed up with that survey to try to explore the why of this and not just knee jerk reaction. Even though I appreciate you talking about this feeling of hostility almost this lack of human connection I appreciate you being transparent about that because I think this is very common I appreciated the way you followed up with the survey to get more information to get into the whys of why this is happening and it makes a lot of sense to me
[00:14:42] Megan: Can I share one other example in I’m trying to remember back our levels of frustration. So, I'm teaching a graduate course at the same time. And so, I've been bringing this to them as a discussion, like, okay, I'm teaching professional development class for our first-year PhD students. a suggestion from a graduate student who was on the conduct board at a different university, said that when we were on conduct board, what we discovered, the only thing faculty could do at that time a couple years ago to prove that there really was like cheating, was by adding a Trojan horse into the prompt.
And to see if you were just copied and pasting how this would play out. So, the Trojan horse was like, and so I this, we did do this, and it was kind of funny, but that's when we realized we'd kind of crossed over into like, we need help because we're being, we feel too hostile.
So, I started adding, I actually used AI to help me create a Trojan horse for a couple different assignments where they came up with a phrase.
So what we did is you had the prompt in canvas, and then there was this line afterwards that was in white font, so they couldn't see it, and in tiny font that said, in your answer, make sure you address x, something completely unrelated to the topic, something you would never have had in the class. And so, when if they copy and pasted it right into chat, GPT, the chat GPT response would engage around some doctrine or something that was completely made up and you couldn't Google.
It doesn't exist. And we found that a handful or plus of students who were not paying attention to even their prompt and to chat GPT, were just using this made-up thing.
I'm so confused. I did use this prompt, but when I copied it into my Word document to work on it, this part came up and I thought, oh, I just missed that doctrine in the documentary series. And so, the Trojan horse did not work 'cause this student was right, like we could see she walked through the logic of it.
And so sure, maybe it did catch people who were inauthentically. But we tried a couple of different things that did not work in AI detection, and that's what led to the reach out, the survey and ultimately realizing that any detection effort is going to be a dangerous rabbit hole that's going to lose your sanity And it actually is not truly an accurate representation necessarily of AI use.
[00:16:49] Jason: Did you try to use any other AI detectors
[00:16:53] Megan: Yes. We used some of the different, I can't remember their different names, a couple AI detectors and they were okay. But actually, we spent, I ended up purchasing a subscription. I overused my limit with chat, GPT. And so, I ended up purchasing, I would say in total, we probably spent me and the TA maybe collectively 10 to 15 hours trying to get to the bottom of the extent to which this was a widespread problem because we felt like it was just had hijacked learning in the class. So, we used ChatGPT lot and actually it was very helpful. But at the end of the day, it couldn't do anything to help us.
Individually, I had no interest in taking 60 students to student conduct board, especially when realizing that like this was going to yield nothing. And so, it was a fruitless effort of using the AI detection tools. But we did, we spend way more time than we should have tried to deal with that.
[00:17:49] John Nash: Megan, it sounds as though there was a point then where you and your TA sort of collectively threw up your arms and so you, you consulted Jason shop and you went in a direction.
And before you tell us that story, I want to talk a little bit, if it's okay with you, about what you think you learned right to that point. Was it because we've talked to different people and I've sort of consulted my own thinking around how assignments should be made in the effort to try to sort of catch students and have them, and I'm going to use words carefully here, but I understand how you might feel resentment towards the students for not taking the work seriously. And, and in some ways, I've even felt it, you say, I need them to bend to my will because this course is important, and I've spent a lot of time structuring this. And so, I need them to, to you know,
[00:18:42] Megan: adhere
[00:18:43] John Nash: to the standards that I'm sitting here. And then at some point. you realized maybe I'm not structuring it the right way, and maybe I
[00:18:51] Megan: Yep.
[00:18:51] John Nash: rethink this, these strict notions I have of how they must bend to my will.
That the learning outcomes could still be achieved. But what I'm doing now is not going to, because now I'm going down this rabbit hole.
[00:19:03] Megan: Yep.
[00:19:04] John Nash: is that fair?
[00:19:05] Megan: I think that through this and the data that we obtained, I realized also Jason, I can't remember if it was you, somebody sent me that tool for calculating how much time was being spent in the class based on the number of pages, assigned videos, that kind of thing.
[00:19:17] Jason: one of our instructional designers
[00:19:19] Megan: Oh, that's right. Yes. Yep, that's right. Who was my digital learning coach this summer? What I realized with that, 'cause one of the things that came up in the survey was that the one other reason they were using AI was because of the volume of content that they were receiving.
I, when I re, when I did the calculate, my assessment of how much time was spent on the class was probably half of the reality. You know? So, if I was thinking this would take them four to six hours when I plugged in some early weeks, we were getting in the six to eight plus hours, which technically according to university standards, that falls within whatever.
But it was, it was a lot. It was, it was more. And I think that part of that is the issue of teaching, like. The diversity class. Not that we don't have people interweaving diverse ways of thinking and doing in families and children across other courses, but in this class, I do feel like a very strong obligation to like to ensure that, if nothing else, these students leave our program without doing harm to others. And I feel like this is like the one shot I might have, you know, to really help that. And I, that's not really a fair depiction of like our courses or curriculum, but I think because of that I do tend to have too much in there.
And so, I think that that did help us reflect on how much we were assigning, how many assignments we were assigning. Also, that we did module zero, like the introduction and module one in the same week. And next time we will devote a whole week to the module zero and onboarding to the class. And I think that that actually will make a big difference in terms of setting the tone to help with some of the trust pieces.
There was a reflection on it wasn't just them, it was us, and that we had to make some pivots in this class, and then some that we couldn't control, like how we onboarded the class in the future.
[00:21:08] John Nash: I feel like it was new to you that they, that you naively thought that they would trust you out of the box. I wonder in 2023 and 21, did you feel like they trusted you or did something shift?
[00:21:21] Megan: I think that, so interestingly prior to 2021 when we were in person masks off. I am able to. Engage with students in a way where they see my humanity and we can get to know each other even if we don't know each other quite well. 2021 was when we were in person, but in masks.
and also online, I can build rapport, I can build that trust. But 2021, I was really surprised when we were wearing a mask how. It was very hard to build rapport with them and vice versa. They couldn't see when we're talking about hard things, they don't see me smiling.
They don't see. And so, I actually felt 2021 of all the semesters I've taught was the most challenging for them seeing me as a human, as an instructor. The reason I could tell this is because I was pregnant for the second time in that semester. The first time I was pregnant in 2019.
I had to stop the students like kindly from like their questions and curiosities and excitement surrounding my pregnancy. We teach mostly women, young women who work with children. So, there was a lot of, in curiosity in 2021. When I had to explain that I was pregnant 'cause there was a day we missed 'cause I was unwell and it was, I was becoming clearly more pregnant.
There was no human connection with me at all around the pregnancy. And that was fine. It just was a noticeable difference. Like they did not see the masks did hinder them from seeing me as human. So, I was mindful of that. So, 2023, it was fine. Again, normal back in person. Great. So, I am still kind of always mindful of that 2021, where how the class is perceived when they don't see the instructor who's teaching con content that challenges them personally as a human.
And so, I think sometimes when you've gathered a lot of respect from students and trust, I forget that I forgot this semester was a whole new group. They don't know me. They have no connection to me. There's no reason why they should trust me.
This is a supercharged political, historical moment. I think that I overestimated students' ability to trust me based on what I said in a video or on the syllabus.
[00:23:22] John Nash: Yeah. Nice. Thank you.
[00:23:24] Jason: Yeah, pick up the story So you've
[00:23:26] Megan: Yeah.
[00:23:27] Jason: For those listening we're in the fall of 2025 for those listening in the future. Actually everybody will be listening in the future but we're in the fall of 2025 and so you've come to some of these realizations some of these design changes that perhaps you want to make and you've decided that you're going to step ahead with your TA to try to make some of these changes At what point in the semester do you start to make this pivot
[00:23:53] Megan: I think that this was during week four is when we did the quarter semester check-in. And I substituted out an assignment. So, this was a full a full assignment shift.
and we started making the changes immediately. So, you know, I think module five, like week five had already been loaded. And so, they were already underway, we explained the changes, and I think it started in module six. So, you know, it was pretty quick, but it wasn't immediate, but it was as quick as we could in terms of uploading the next content.
The first thing we did was explain the new AI policy shift and, you know, Jason kindly sent me what he uses in his syllabus And so I modified that for my class of, you know, human first and human last. You know, we want your brain doing the work, but we're here to figure out how we can use AI to kind of help you.
Further your thoughts, further your work, and so on and so forth. And so that's when we implemented that. We implemented it like the icons above each different assignment. A icon of like, no, like there are certain things like quizzes where you, like, they, like, we're not supposed to, it would be pretty hard to just the timeline and things, but like other assignments where you can, you could, and that they were supposed to utilize a statement of how they utilized it.
I would say some utilized that statement throughout, others didn't, and we didn't really have a policy in place where you were penalized for not doing so. But that's something to kind of think about in the future. But pretty early on in this semester we made this big shift in our policy and its implications for the rest of the semester.
That seems really quick to me to be able to pivot so good on you and your TA to move that quickly You know, at the end of the day, the TA is the one ultimately at this point, who's grading everything. And I know that she agreed that we needed to make the pivot. I think that it was a continued tension for her throughout this semester. And we had talked about it some, because I think.
Even though we, saw some substantial improvements. It did still feel hard to feel hindered in like what really could be done when it was clear that a student or two or a couple students were really misusing now this flexibility. So even though it's kind of like the one bad evaluation, everything's great, you're kind of focused on the one.
I think that that still was hard. So, I will say it, for me, it's easier for me to feel like, yes, great progress. 'Cause I didn't see, the extent to which the TA was subjected to kind of this shift still in what we're expecting student writing to look like.
[00:26:23] John Nash: but you saw some kind of shift that went in a better direction than you expected or a positive
[00:26:28] Megan: Yeah,
[00:26:29] John Nash: that?
[00:26:29] Megan: We actually saw, it almost seems like students started using AI less. On these reflections, we started to see specific examples. We had a couple students meet with the TA to talk about, like, we realized that many of them did not understand what we meant by personal examples.
And so, a student who would give feedback like this doesn't show authentic student voice came and met with a TA and as the student's talking our TA's, like, that's exactly what we're looking for. Like that story, that little snippet of your third grade or whatever and they were like, oh.
So, we realized in the future we need to be much more clear by what we mean by specific examples. It also seemed that this quarter semester check-in really helped build trust. I summarized, you know, and I shared, I said, here's how I used AI to summarize your feedback.
You know, and so there was a lot of transparency involved, and I think that that also started to begin the process of them actually trusting, at least what they were submitting to us. I think also as a semester goes on and students’ kind of test the water with what they push back on or whatever, and they earn full points 'cause they've engaged at the assignment, they started to trust further that they could authentically engage.
But we did see a shift in a reduction of what appeared to be AI generated content as we move throughout the rest of the semester.
[00:27:46] John Nash: That shift, you noticed there was sort of a, what there's an old methods textbook by Krathwohl. He talks about knowing judgments sort of is one way that knowledge gets produced and that experts may, You and your TA made knowing judgements that these, this looks qualitatively different than
[00:28:01] Megan: Yep.
[00:28:02] John Nash: Right.
[00:28:02] Megan: Yep.
[00:28:03] John Nash: totally legitimate. And not to paint too broadly with a brush stroke here, but you saw two things. One is we opened up the allowances of use of AI and AI use went down and by asking students what they thought and felt and incorporating that feedback rapidly, improvement was seen. Are those two big points that I can say are fair to say.
[00:28:30] Megan: Another point, and I will say, you know. On the record if you want to use it, or honestly this could be a whole different discussion, which I actually would love to have, is we started using AI very and I, and I typically do in my grad classes, like we play with it, we utilize it, we mess with it. But I had some of our more big or controversial topics. I created assignments with ChatGPT, and I had them plug it into AI and then they analyzed AI's response. And I think our use of it maybe also helped, but I think that that's probably not the substantial part of it. But I do think as like another topic like how to use AI to like, navigate the sociopolitical climate in a way where I wasn't teaching certain things. Like, comparing administration's policy approaches. AI gave the breakdown and then they reflected and unpacked it in assignments. And so, I think our AI use may have helped, but I do think the two big takeaways that you mentioned are the key point.
[00:29:35] John Nash: And now I hear it's almost as though prior to this shift, you were on two sides of this situation where you had content and the students were supposed to learn the content, whereas now, after the shift, you came to the same side and particularly around AI saying, here's how I can use AI
[00:29:53] Megan: Yep.
[00:29:54] John Nash: And here's how you might use it with me. Is that kind of like how it is now?
[00:29:59] Megan: I think that's a good way to think about it. And that's also helpful for me to think about because I won't be teaching this again until the fall. But thinking about in that week, that first week, having assignment or something that's kind of around like a video of me talking about the ways that I use ai, the ethical lines that I've grappled with, with ai what we know about the science and employment for people who rely too heavily on ai, like, to get them thinking about that too, the way I do in my grad classes. So, I think giving a little bit more trust and respect to them upfront and owning my use
[00:30:27] John Nash: Mm-hmm.
[00:30:28] Jason: I was struck too about how you said the survey itself was a trust building exercise essentially, right?
[00:30:36] Megan: Yes.
[00:30:37] Jason: Which makes complete I really thought about it more of a this is an opportunity for us to gather information so we could move ahead .But really there was something that changed perhaps in the students In the fact that you were asking them and that you were reaching out to them in that way and they had an opportunity to be a little bit more transparent about it And not just trust building but probably communicative in that way too right There's a
[00:31:01] Megan: Yes.
[00:31:02] Jason: survey communicated something a shift the issue perhaps some changes that were coming down the way
so.
[00:31:11] Megan: Yeah.
[00:31:12] John Nash: Yeah So, Megan, what happened at the end of the semester?
[00:31:16] Megan: So, we had been feeling really good. I mean every once in a while, the, like my TA and I would send me like a funny, like one that like clearly, you know, one of 80, you know, that just kind of made us laugh 'cause it's just not how. A 21, 20-year-old would engage in a con, you know, but for the most part we were feeling, you know, pretty good with it.
Or we were noticing where we could do things a little different and that would've probably changed the kind of answer. But now fast forward to the end of the semester and we actually see a huge uptick in clear AI use again. In the survey they talked about that there was a large amount of work in the class and that was one reason why they or others. So, I think in the survey we said why might someone use AI? And so that helped it to not be, you know, we know how students usually are responding about themselves, but it helps take that off of them a little bit.
I think the end of the semester, even though I had actually been really reducing some of the work as the semester wrapped up for their sanity and ours I think the overwhelm of the end of the semester, even if it's unrelated to our class, did probably play a role in what we saw was a bit more AI use.
So, there was two kind of final reflective assignments and in one was individual and one was in their group and in the reflective individual assignments. We had a question around looking back at the course description or the goals, you know, like how did this align? And then there was one that was like, what would you have liked more of?
Like what would you have liked to have understood More? Like what? Or like, you know, something and we had like two. There was like something more about resilience and then something more about disability, but in a very specific way that was clear that most of these had had a very substantial AI role versus just editing.
So that was one thing we noticed. And then in the, the final group reflection in their team. So, they'd been with the whole semester, they were just supposed to think back. I think a couple questions of like, how did doing this work in a team like enhance your learning or something like that. And my TA sent this is making her cuckoo bananas like all over again because it was so many of them what they plugged into ChatGPT, ChatGPT interpreted this as a group project,
You know, we're all contributing to a presentation where this is just a canvas discussion board that they were having. There was no, and so these responses are completely disconnected from actually what they were doing. And we saw this among students, even those that had not, had been really strong and not using AI throughout.
And so there was, at the end of this semester where we were most excited by these more authentic reflections. We hope to receive a bit of a return to the beginning of the semester, so we haven't fully unpacked that at this point. But there is something there were maybe the stress of the end of the semester; they just need to get this done.
Maybe they have another big exam, and this is small scale stuff where we saw a return back to overuse. From our perspective,
[00:34:09] John Nash: Fascinating.
I can concur from personal anecdote, similar situations, not necessarily to use of AI, but it, when students, undergraduates have taken my class, they've seen it as a secondary effort to their courses in their major. Whether it's in chemistry or in business, and they'll complain that they have so much to do over there that their effort towards the end of the term when our big project was happening was lackluster.
And I think, I wonder if it makes us think about the ways in which we should load up assignments. Towards the end. We wanted to be a culminating, like, look at the bow we've put on this thinking and look where you've come. And now I wonder from your story and my experience, how we maybe rethink that a little bit.
[00:34:51] Megan: Yeah.
[00:34:52] John Nash: Hmm.
[00:34:53] Megan: That's where we're kind of left. So very positive shifts. We learned tremendous amount as an instructor, as a ta, and as the TA will independently teach in the future too. But I think that, I will say, if I were to ask my TA kind of how they would've described this grading experience, I think that they would probably say it overall was kind of a soul sucking experience.
And I think part of it was. Having to shift how we think about doing things, and I think also she would say that there was tremendous growth in the students. There was a lot of positives. But I think as learners whenever we have signs where it feels like people aren't using their brain, I think from my TA's perspective, that felt a little scary about the future of learning.
[00:35:34] John Nash: That's almost like back to, that's the knowing judgment, isn't it? I, I'm getting feeling in my gut that people aren't using their brain and that's, yeah, that's real. Jason, you want to ask this cool, final question.
[00:35:46] Jason: Oh, sure I was going to throw in just as an idea of, we've been reading through this book Opposite of Cheating which I highly recommend
[00:35:54] Megan: Okay.
[00:35:55] Jason: and in chapter three talk about one of the things they talked about just made me think of why students are more likely to cheat when they feel the following One of them is that an assessment is insurmountable And I thought that was interesting like as you described this great midpoint where it seems like that students are in the flow and they're being more authentic and they're using AI less and so on And then this description of coming up to the end of the semester And I think about not just a single assessment but you think about the end of a semester sometimes feeling insurmountable and how those feelings may compound across your courses When this is our finals week a library and told me yesterday that the library was packed right They were pulling out foldable tables for people to sit down and to do their work and You think about that And I wonder about too in terms of overall design whether or not there are ways in which can rethink perhaps these as wonderful as they are as you said John putting a bow on the semester Let's see really dig in Let's see really what you have learned but maybe there's some ways to rethink the end of our semesters in terms of these big assignments What do you think?
[00:37:13] Megan: No, absolutely. I agree. And I think actually when you said this about insurmountable, it made me think, so the questions, I think, so there was like five short, but open-ended questions like kind of reflection paper kind of style.
And the first two questions we asked might have honestly been too intellectually challenging for this level. They are the same questions I've used in the graduate version of this class. So, I expect a different kind of response from the undergraduates, so the goal of this class is to understand how did we get here and why does it matter?
And I ask them to reflect on that. That might be too big. For, the group. And then the other one was how well did the class, tell the tale of the ongoing struggle of oppression, resilience? And those might have been a bit too intellectual like that might've.
Triggered some anxiety or imposter syndrome. Like I know what those responses typically look like, but that those questions might have been too big. And then I get into these smaller ones of like, what did you like? What did you not like? What would you tell future students? And those questions are lower stakes,
And so, I think thinking about what kinds of questions we're asking at the end of the semester is probably important.
[00:38:27] Jason: That's good thanks for reflecting out loud with us on this You're just barely ending the semester here so we really appreciate you spending the time with us I kind of had a final question which was as we have a lot of instructors and instructional designers who listen to this podcast what advice do you think that you would give instructors then given your experience this semester when they're thinking about setting up their class for the next semester
[00:38:57] Megan: Yeah, I think that I was so focused on the diversity, like addressing those pieces and then jumpstart and that was me, you know, and also just the demands. I think that there should be a substantial amount, more time spent discussing. AI when working with faculty members who are going into distance ed courses or online teaching.
I think that that wasn't something I did enough of probably. So, I take responsibility, like, you know, I think that there should be a lot more thought and reflection and thinking. Before teaching your first, or as you're teaching online distance Ed. So, people working with faculty I think we need to have a lot more engagement around it because I have some faculty members who are much less engaged with it and have no idea how much AI use was even going on in their course.
And so, I think that there's a large range within faculty of those who are like, no, stay away from it. Avoid it. Don't engage. Hope it's not happening. And so, they don't see kind of patterns to those of us who are like, who went too far down this rabbit hole of trying to like to solve the problem. And so, I think that that range exists probably in all departments.
And so, I think more discussion and support as built into like those structured programs like Jumpstart, like I know the university offers all kinds of workshops and trainings and so forth, but I think when working with faculty, I think, that would be ideal to be part of the conversation more so.
[00:40:11] Jason: Yeah, that's good
[00:40:13] John Nash: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Megan, for joining us. This was a tale for everyone to hear. I really think so. I think, yeah. Yeah.
[00:40:21] Jason: you be willing to share the final policy that you used in your class
[00:40:26] Megan: Mm-hmm.
[00:40:26] Jason: With us Okay That'd be great we'll put that as well as I can share the policy that you started with The one that I share out to faculty I actually have some icons as well that I use for communication that I can share out And we can put those in the Podcast notes and for those listening online learning podcast.com where you can find this episode And a lot more episodes too we've building a little bit of a library John but where you can access these notes and look at these policies for yourself Think about how you're applying your thoughts about AI into your next Course or semester So thank you so much for spending this time with us It was amazing to connect with you a little bit more and hear your story
[00:41:12] Megan: Thank you so much. This was really great. Thank you for having me.
[00:41:14] John Nash: We did it.                   
[00:41:15] Megan: Woo!
[00:41:17] Jason: We did it

In EP 39, John and Jason discuss with Lance Eaton the threat that AI-driven "agentic browsers" pose to continue industrialized online learning models, the necessity of clear institutional policies to support instructors, and why good pedagogy remains the best solution to the “AI problem” and faculty exhaustion.
See complete notes and transcripts at www.onlinelearningpodcast.com
Join Our LinkedIn Group - *Online Learning Podcast (Also feel free to connect with John and Jason at LinkedIn too)*
Guest Bio:
Lance Eaton, Ph.D. is a writer, educator, faculty developer, instructional designer, and educational consultant based in Providence, Rhode Island. He holds degrees in History, Criminal Justice, American Studies, Public Administration, Instructional Design, and Higher Education. His writing has appeared in newspapers, trade publications, academic journals, books, and encyclopedias. With more than 15 years of experience creating online content—including blogs, a YouTube channel, and other digital projects—his work spans education, technology, and learning design. He has extensive experience working with youth, nonprofit organizations, higher education, and online communities. Connect with Lance at his website here: https://www.lanceeaton.com/ , his substack here https://aiedusimplified.substack.com/, and LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leaton01/
Resources:
Post: Looking for ChatGPT Teaching Advice? Good Pedagogy is Nothing New, July 19, 2023 by Autumm Caines
Lance’s appearance on AI Diatribe Podcast.
NCFDD Workshop “The AIs Go Marching On: Finding Our Way with AI in Education” - https://members.ncfdd.org/finding-way-ai-education-webinar?submissionGuid=b1228e61-a304-42ca-a174-83c92a56a7e5
Theme Music: Pumped by RoccoW is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial License.
Transcript
We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions or can help with any corrections!
Cold Open
[00:00:00] Jason: Lance you had brought up AOL - don't know if either one of you knew, but just recently, September 30th, they actually finally stopped servicing their dial up. Just September 30th, 2025.
[00:00:14] John Nash: I heard about that there were some people That were still dialing up.
[00:00:19] Jason: Yeah.
for a lot of our listeners, they don't even realize that, that we use the dial up sound in the beginning of our podcast very intentionally because we were talking about online learning in the second half, and that was an artifact of.
The first half of online learning, we would call it where people had kind of sketchy internet connections weren't able to do a lot, but it was the beginning, you know, as, as we kind of talked about, you talked about Lance starting in online education even in the early two thousands. So, so I wondered if maybe because I, I thought you guys would understand, maybe we take a moment of silence for the, the AOL dial up service.
[00:01:01] Lance Eaton: I feel like there should be a digital bugle.
[00:01:05] Jason: Yeah, yeah, that's right. Playing some digital taps.
[00:01:09] John Nash: Alright.
[00:01:09] Jason: Yep.
Intro
[00:01:10] John Nash: I'm John Nash here with Jason
[00:01:11] Jason: Hey John. Hey everyone. And this is Online Learning in the second half the Online Learning Podcast.
[00:01:17] John Nash: Yeah, we're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation we've been having for the last three years about online education. Look, online learning has had its chance to be great, and some of it is, but some still has a way to go. So how can we get to the next stage, Jason?
[00:01:33] Jason: that is a great question. How about we do a podcast and talk about it?
[00:01:38] John Nash: I think that's a fabulous idea. What do you want to talk about today?
[00:01:40] Jason: Well, first I want to say it has been three years for the podcast, I think now. Right? But you and I have been having this conversation a lot longer than that now, John.
[00:01:49] John Nash: We have. We have, we
[00:01:51] Jason: We probably first met in 2016 now, so we're coming up on like almost a decade, I think at University of Kentucky when I was there.
[00:01:59] John Nash: Yeah.
[00:02:00] Jason: You were
[00:02:01] John Nash: Yep.
[00:02:02] Jason: 2016, a potential professor as I was thinking about the PhD program and then became my professor and chair of my dissertation study.
[00:02:10] John Nash: Well, I was a, I was a professor. I wasn't a potential professor, but I
[00:02:14] Jason: That's right.
[00:02:15] John Nash: I was a, I was a potential dissertation advisor.
[00:02:19] Jason: You know, don't lock yourself down. I think you have a lot of potential, John.
[00:02:23] John Nash: Yeah. And we were teaching online in that department since 2012. So, with the days of Adobe Connect, oh my God. And Moodle and yeah, all the fun things.
[00:02:36] Jason: Yeah, yeah. And we have with us today, sorry, I don't want to ignore our guests. We have with us Lance Eaton. You know, the bottom line is this is just an opportunity for John and I to talk. Hope you don't mind just stepping in here and listen to us jabber.
[00:02:49] Lance Eaton: To pull some popcorn. Like I, I'm interested why I'm into this hook. Where's the season going? I want to know.
[00:02:55] Jason: You could probably even riff off of like you've been at online learning for a long time, Lance, so we'll get into a formal introduction in a second. But what are some of your earliest memories of doing online learning and technologies and
[00:03:07] Lance Eaton: I, I often talk about, like, I took my first online course in 2000
[00:03:11] Jason: wow.
[00:03:11] Lance Eaton: then I taught my first online course, I want to say around 2009,
[00:03:16] Jason: Mm-hmm.
[00:03:17] Lance Eaton: And then started doing instructional design with faculty around online learning in like 2011.
So, it's definitely been, been around the block and, and have been at different institutions from community colleges up to like Ivy League institutions doing this, this kind of work.
[00:03:33] Jason: Yeah, that's good. Well, tell us a little bit more about yourself where you are located, what your current role, what, what you do with yourself.
[00:03:40] Lance Eaton: Gosh. That's a loaded question. So yeah, I'm Lance Eaton. Full-time, I’m senior Associate Director of AI and teaching and learning at Northeastern. And then outside of that I've been teaching part-time at different places like North Shore Community College and College Un Bound for years now, and then I've been doing a whole lot of like, talks and workshops and consulting around AI in higher ed since pretty much like March, 2023. I think I have hit the hundred mark in terms of like talks and workshops that I've been doing.
Just helping and, and thinking and, and working with folks to. Help figure this out. And it's been quite the trip. I'm located in Providence, Rhode Island, just for geographical sense.
[00:04:27] Jason: Yeah.
[00:04:28] John Nash: Yeah. That's excellent. So, so Lance, what are you noticing right now seem to be the experiences that faculty are having on what's working and what's not working with generative AI?
[00:04:38] Lance Eaton: I mean, what is working is what has been working, and I go back to Autumm Caines of like, if you want to figure out how to navigate ai, good pedagogy. And like that, that there's a post she wrote back in 2023, the post is like, you know, the solution to Chat GPT is, is good pedagogy. So, I think that that's one thing is just recognizing good pedagogy is adaptable. It is, it is often thinking relationally with the students. In a lot of what I have been seeing is where there's the most success is also where it's often. And, and this is hard, but it's, its often where like faculty are engaged with students thoughtfully about how to navigate this, these new set of tools that are familiar to some things in the past and also new in certain ways and, and building that trust and that rapport. So I've seen that work really well. Also, like that can, like trying to find, you know, there's real struggle there because there's some spaces that doesn't work as well or it needs something else to move it along. So large enrolled classes, you've got 200 students. That becomes harder.
Asynchronous courses also become more challenging in this.
So, I think I've like, I've seen movement in that space. I think a lot of it is like what assignments are and what they should be, what they're assessing, how that, that gets structured is a lot of the discussion and a lot of the good discussion and, and things that I see people coming up with that get me excited. We're also in this cool moment where we get to figure out what it looks like next.
I know that's hard to like hold onto because we're on this exhaustion wheel. Not just like, not just with AI, but like AI coming after the pandemic, the attack on higher ed and all of
[00:06:26] Jason: Mm-hmm.
[00:06:27] Lance Eaton: You know, government being shut down for a month at this point and like the impacts that's starting to have, so like there's, there's real hard things that are settled on our minds, but there is also, there's a way of looking at AI as a, oh, this means we, we are going to have to change and we get to change because we're realizing what I think a lot of what we've done certainly hasn't worked for everybody and at times relied
elements of convenience
that weren't necessarily great demonstrations of learning for, for different courses in different environments. So those are some things just kind of percolating in my, my head at the moment about like where my, where I want to put my attention.
[00:07:09] John Nash: Something hit me because I caught you on the AI Diatribe podcast, which was on recently, and it was your take on how the tools keep changing in these last three years. Tools keep changing the fraught environment around faculty is changing and then AI is changing also, and there's this cognitive demand. This is what struck me that you said was sort of, that's the thing that hit me, that faculty who have already been, and I think you said, I'm, I grabbed a quote here.
"You've already been hamstrung by so many other demands. Having to once again, think about their curriculum, think about how they teach, how they engage with students for like the third or fourth time in five years."
No wonder this is a challenge. How do you work inside that environment?
As we try to help faculty think about good learning design, good teaching and learning.
[00:08:00] Lance Eaton: I think that's a great question, and I don't mean to pat myself on the back, but that, like, that is a really important, that is a
[00:08:05] John Nash: You know,
[00:08:05] Lance Eaton: point of like
[00:08:07] John Nash: it was great.
[00:08:08] Lance Eaton: on faculty and the absence of, of recognizing that. So that's, I mean, when I step into spaces with faculty around this kind of work, that's one of the first things I, I look towards is just validating: this is a lot. We haven't closed loops or come back to do any kind of, like any opportunity to reflect on like what do we want to take out of the deep lessons we learned in the pandemic? And so much of that got thrown away. As a first step, just naming, like, and this is often a slide I'll have where I'm like, here's all the things going on. It's like AI as it is now and then having to think about what AI is going to be in six months. And then it's thinking about, you know, the higher the, the, the larger landscape of the world, all these existential crises.
So that validation, it doesn't cure anything. But it also, lets, lets faculty know they're in a space that gets that. And I think from there it; it's often doing a couple different. Moves that I think are really valuable. One is also helping them connect, you know, its learning, right? So, help them connect prior learning to what they're going to do next.
So, you know, I will jokingly or not, like, make mention of Wikipedia in the Wikipedia war that we were all fighting 15 years ago, right?
[00:09:26] Jason: Mm-hmm.
[00:09:27] Lance Eaton: You know, and then do callbacks to like. And we had so many of the same or similar conversations about the internet and what that would mean for teaching and learning. And so, this rightful tension we have with emerging technology and how it impacts our learning, you know, we can always go back to, like, all the way back to Socrates and, and you know, the whole writing thing was, was meh. So, like that is a, that is a perennial thing that we encounter. if they've been teaching for a while, they know that they've found solutions.
And so that's one thing I try to look towards is like, you know, you found solutions, you know, and, you know, you've been able to figure it out. Then I move into like one of the final moves, which is, and we figure this out together. Like you figure this out by trying things and sharing things so much. And again, this is a, this is a byproduct of the time in the world that we're living in is like the isolationist experience of like, you know, more and more, more just on your own, but like sharing with colleagues and finding platforms and spaces to share. And then I'll use that space to also move into. talking with your students, like, I can't, like, we can't figure this out without them. This is one way where I think the technology is different is that it it's potential to be to be helpful or hurtful in the learning space and do so in, like me, you know, many, many different ways does require us to be in better conversation with students because time and again. Like I learned from students new things that help me better use ai, but also how they use it. Like of course we're going to have the folks that are using it inappropriately, if you dig down and build that trust and you help students build a curiosity about how can I use this to support my learning and not bypass it, like. They're going to, they just come up with great stuff, and that's the stuff I want to take and curate and put into my course as like, Hey, here's, like, it's out there, it's ubiquitous. You can't open a browser without finding ai, just like jumping out at you. But here's some useful ways to engage with it. Here's some useful things to do that can help you as opposed to hinder.
[00:11:45] Jason: Mm-hmm. I wanted to say we thought the Wikipedia wars were bad. Wait for the Grokipedia wars.
[00:11:50] Lance Eaton: Oh,
[00:11:51] Jason: That's going to be something.
[00:11:53] Lance Eaton: Oh. That is, I don't, I, that, that, that worries me. Yes. AI and, and, and can feel like very extreme ideology.
[00:12:05] Jason: Yeah. Well, and it just points to the fact that there is always going to be something, right? I think that teachers have not only had this job, within the digital age here of, of re-identifying, recreating their content teaching a different generation of people. I mean, this is, I think this is the job of the teacher ongoing, right?
And I know it's exhausting. And maybe Some of the difference is what feel like grand cultural sweeps are happening pretty quickly in the last five years, right?
[00:12:41] Lance Eaton: I, I think there's, I think there's that, and I think there's, just because of the nature of this tool, and again, I understand why it's happening, but this is, this is what's contributing to it, is a lot of institutions just not responding quickly enough to give faculty and students something. You know, I, I go back to like giving a policy, even if it's the most barest bones policy,
[00:13:11] Jason: Mm-hmm.
[00:13:11] Lance Eaton: Gives the faculty clarity. About how they're going to be supported, gives the students clarity or a bit more clarity about like what the institution's stance on it is, and allows the faculty member to still have full academic freedom, but to know that like now that there's a policy, that policy at least frames what the institution's disposition is that they better structure how they're going to work with that within their courses.
[00:13:39] Jason: Mm-hmm.
[00:13:40] Lance Eaton: There's still, I, I have not done the count, but I would guess there's still thousands of, in institutions that have no formal policy or have given very limited guidelines that are either like. Just in the Center for Teaching and Learning or the instructional design team's website like distributed once a year ago via email.
And I think to me there's like, that's part of where faculty struggle a lot is like, much do they want to invest? How much time can they give to something? A time in which they don't even know, like they can do, because you can have policy and, you know, you can have policy not interfere with academic freedom and cover things that we know should be covered. Like, you know, stuff around FERPA. You know, those types of things or, or appropriate and, you know, that level of appropriate, inappropriate use. But without that there's a lot of like, I guess this is my policy, but I don't know if my institution's going to back me on, like the decisions I'm making. so, I think that plays into it as well as the, like looking for some leadership and there's, there's a, there's some vacuum there. And again, I said there's a reason for that because again, a lot of the leadership is also dealing with all the political stuff that's going on, all of the now economic stuff that, that's
going on.
So, like there, there's real demand to try to figure out, you know, all these different things.
But I think that's where there, that's what I've seen a lot of faculty
struggling
with.
[00:15:17] John Nash: I wanted to, I have sort of two other things to talk about and then Jason, you've probably got some ideas. One Lance is a little more sort of philosophical and prognostications and the other's kind of practical around faculty development.
So, but let me go philosophical first, because in this, such as learning designers and teachers and faculty have moments, we're in this moment now where there's some discussion about what the presence of ag agentic browsers means for student work inside LMSs and things like that, and there's instructional design implications for that. There's also sort of policy implications for that, and I don't think there's a shortage of discussion in LinkedIn and other circles on Substack about what that means and what happens transactionally.
I wanted to go one step further, if you'll go with me in that if this doesn't get addressed smartly. What do you think the cost is of agentic browsers to higher ed graduates who move into the workforce? I mean, I think, I think about the fact that if a, if a Silicon Valley or a San Francisco company wants to release an agentic browser, this is a company that has coders and product managers and other marketing and salespeople who got degrees somewhere to do that work, and now they're putting a tool in place that may actually undermine the kinds of learning that has to happen so that those people can get those jobs.
Do you buy into that idea and what's, what are your think, what's your thought here?
[00:16:47] Lance Eaton: So, this is a, this is a post that I am, I'm working my way through so I can engage with a bit here. I think like I, I have no have no trust of Silicon Valley to like, they can see it as making a buck, they're going to make it, you know, there's, there's, there's self-justification and we've seen that with the AI of just how easy they want to sell us, all these threats, which is why they need this money to figure out ai.
And so, we don't have the singularity, even though there's a lot more harms directly being done. So, there's like. That piece of it that I, yeah, I have no, I have no doubt. You know, you have folks like Peter Thiel and the like who are investing money to do things that will undermine not just higher education, but like public education.
So, there's like that piece of it. I mean, to me, the thing that I'm, I'm grappling with or, or trying to sketch out in my mind is to, to articulate this, this argument and this concern. So, as I said, I've, I've been, I've been, I took my first online course in, in 2000. You know, worked at, at a variety of places and engaged with lots of different folks and like it is fascinating to me that the discussion board for the majority of courses has not changed in 25 years. The online asynchronous discussion: post once reply twice. You know, and that's not just, it's not all faculty, it's not all courses, but like that still is, a major mechanism of, of interaction and is a very limited method of, of interaction.
So. When I think about that, one of the things that I have seen most institutions, they've been playing this game of, you know, we're offering online learning for access to improve access and learning on one side, and then on the other side, framing it as their money maker. They are framing it as this is the thing we are doing to make income to support other things. And they have made intentional decisions, very business-oriented decisions to cut out all the fluff or whatever they want to, like, everything they to consider is not about the bottom line. And education is not supposed to be a business. It is supposed to be a nonprofit. It is supposed to be an endeavor that not run as a business because it's supposed to be a public good. Unfortunately, because of like neoliberal practices over the last 50 years of in continuingly to dismiss or undervalue this idea of a public good, a thing that we share together, we increasingly lose public services.
We increasingly lose a public center higher ed has, is trapped in this and has seen. It's online learning as that mechanism to make money, and so it has not actually thoughtfully engaged with what. Dynamic deep online learning can be, instead of like how quickly and easy can we do it? And we can see that in the majority of the courses, like, I'm not saying there isn't thoughtful pedagogy.
I'm not saying like people aren't caring about it, but you know, the cookie cutter templated course that dominates the vast majority of online learning. Like there is a way in which we are about to pay, like we are about to pay the tax of privatizing and emphasizing the individual, value versus the communal value as agentic AI emerges.
Because I do really think if we looked at the last 25 years and we really pushed ourselves to not just make it about saving money, but to think about. In this new space, in this cyber space, in all of the tools that have continued to emerge over the last 25 years in this space, like what could dynamic learning look like?
And all we've come up with by and large is, oh, you go into an LMS, right?
You go into a closed environment, then you go into your course, which is its own closed environment. have no real control over that space. It is basically just like you follow all the things that are laid out to you, hopefully. Effectively in a very linear way, and you just complete these assignments and like the same kind of meaning making that happens in face-to-face classes but also happens in other online communities.
I mean, you can go to places online where there is rich meaning making and learning and exchange happening. We forego almost all of that. I think that's what we're about to pay the price for is like we have; we have made it into assembly line. So, when a tool comes along that knows how to maximize the assembly line, I really do wonder how some of the big, massive online institutions are going to navigate it, because I can't imagine.
Just as they've been gaining over the last 15 years. Legitimacy, like every student now that graduates in the last year through the next few years, is going to have to somehow articulate to a degree, like they had to do back in the early two thousands. That, "No, no, no, I really did this work. AI didn't do this work."
Right? Like there was a period certainly in, you know, late two thousands early in, in through the 2010s where it was becoming more legitimate. And I feel like this is the moment where, unless there's a really good solve for that, like we're paying the cost of kind of shortchanging that space as a learning space.
[00:22:41] Jason: Yeah. Great historian, Otto Peters said, even though he was positive towards online learning, said it was probably the most industrialized form of learning.
And I, I think that there's always that temptation because it is such a fantastic platform for just delivering content to people, creating a structure that people can't escape from, and then just delivering them,
[00:23:12] John Nash: Yeah
[00:23:12] Jason: content in this close structure. So, I think that I think that temptation is always going to be there.
[00:23:18] John Nash: You touched on it, Lance. I think I was thinking the same thing. I would hate for my public land grant institution, flagship of my commonwealth to decide that they will just sort of with a wink and a nod, say, "yeah, we'll take the tuition thank you." Because actually this will get the, maybe we'll even, oh my God, I just thought of this, but it's it know I, now I kind of shudder. " We will make our graduation goals now. We'll hit now four years. Instead of a five year, we'll actually get four-year graduation rates."
[00:23:51] Lance Eaton: That, that's a scary scenario. And, and I think that, you know, it's that dynamic of, I've just seen so much of you know that, to your point, Jason, of the industrialized version, like I've kept thinking about over the years, what does the parity of experience online look like? And people, you know, there's, there's a reasonable discourse of like, well, they don't need the same experience because many of them are, are fully involved in their own context and lives and things like that. And there's a part of that I get. But there's a piece of this that is still, I think they're still missing a lot of possibility and exploration. And again, there's, there's reason, there's some good reasons for that. Like accessibility is also about consistency. So, but I feel like that becomes a hammer to then mute out or to just like, not allow for any real creativity in these spaces to occur.
And so, yeah, that I, I do worry about agent browsers in this in the next few years. Because even if they come up with, think, I guess my concern is even if the browsers themselves or the LMSs themselves come up with workarounds, like, I don't know, 10 minutes on TikTok, I'm sure you'll find, you know, using the right hashtag, you will find all the workarounds.
[00:25:16] John Nash: Yeah, definitely.
Cheater's going to cheat.
Yeah. Well, so let's, we'll step away from the doom and gloom for a second and go to the practical, because there are bright spots out there. I saw your National Center for Faculty Diversity and Development webinar. That was so cool. And we will put a link to it in the show notes, What I loved about your webinar is that with several hundred in the room, you still kicked off by saying, I'm going to give you voice and choice and here's three things we could do today, you guys pick which one we're going to do. So, what are your go-tos right now in faculty development around generative AI?
Jason and I are in circles now where we're also kind of supporting our local units. We want to be helpful. What are you recommending now? What are you doing? What are you liking?
[00:26:03] Lance Eaton: I mean it's, I appreciate the, the mentioning of that workshop. 'cause that's something I've started to do regularly. I also did it in a workshop this week where it's basically, I have like three different approaches and I try to think about those approaches of highly engaged, middle engaged and less engaged. And that to me is like part of the larger process of like trying to meet people where they're at. Because again, people are coming in its year three, and for some folks they're just starting to, to think about it. Other folks are much further along like where they are stepping into any workshop, it's good pedagogy to, to allow them agency in that space. also like. It's, it's also me trying to reflect the idea of, we want to be engaged with, with our students. And when we do that, we can surface stuff. So, a lot of the stuff I do now is usually trying to do activities where they're surfacing ideas and information and like helping clarify with one another. I certainly step in and add my, you know, my insights the points that like I've been able to figure out or the things that like I can speak more directly to. But it is often, like get faculty in a room with opportunities to either share their ideas, their questions, or their discoveries. Because, especially where we are now, I think there that just needs to keep happening till there's a critical mass.
I think this is the thing. I worry about it, you know, three years. in there still doesn't feel like there's a critical mass at most institutions of faculty who. Are thinking about it, thoughtfully engaged with it in a way that isn't just, I'm banning it because I'm hypercritical of it, and I understand there's places for that, but I don't know.
I think constraints as opposed to abstinence is a better strategy. And so, I'm not, I I'm still not seeing institutions that have a critical mass of faculty doing that. And it, I Whenever I step into these spaces, that's what I try to make my goal. It's like how to surface the things that are happening to help others feel like they can do something. Because often as an outsider coming in, like I'm an outsider. Like I can, I can give ideas and stuff like that, but it's really their peers that I think are going to be most helpful in, in figuring it out.
[00:28:25] John Nash: Yeah, Jason.
[00:28:27] Jason: Yeah, other than the solution, obviously, to get you to come in and talk to our faculty and meet them exactly where they're at, why do you think this is? Because I, I think I see this at my own institution as well. There's obviously, you know, we're, we've all studied the diffusion of innovation and how, you know, we're going to have those early adopters and so on.
And I'm seeing that for sure. But I really do feel like that I expected us to be further along three years into this and, I am surprised by the number of beginning conversations we're having about AI. Partly because, you know, it feels like the moment this came out, John was texting me about it, you know, and we were, right in there figuring out what this new technology was and thinking about it. Implications for education and then it seems to filled at least part of the content of almost every one of our podcasts since. February 20 So, what do you think from an outsider's perspective or even at your own institution's, what is keeping us from moving forward?
[00:29:35] Lance Eaton: I mean, it goes back to, it's a couple moves I've seen of like, it's the policy piece and then the tool piece. So, like having a policy, gives people a sense of like boundaries, but also a policy without an actual tool to say like, here's our institutional tool, in that it's a legitimate institutional tool.
And so, when I say that like a lot of institutions have turned on like the basic Copilot, and I often, for those of us that are of a certain age, I'll, I'll use the framework of. Saying you're an institution that has turned on AI and you have that basic version of Copilot is like talking to somebody in 2005 who's really excited that they're on the web, you just come to find out that they're on AOL. This idea of like, eh, that's, that's like, again, it's this little cordoned off, quaint piece of, of the internet. So, I do think that that's, the challenge we're navigating is this tool came out, in some ways it's ubiquitous and it's everywhere in three short years, unlike a lot of other technology, which was a longer span of time. But it's still not affordable for institutions to solve the equity piece of they're either working with a version that they know some students are going to be able to buy the paid version and be working with a very different set of tools. And I think until that gets solved, it, it just does, doesn't feel quite as useful. Identifying a tool, but also like having to, to plan for it.
And this is where like I think looking back is there's really good points of comparison. We know all institutions. You know, were, were had computer labs and the internet on their campus instantly. It was a gradual layout. It required, you know, figuring out the funding pipelines. And we know also that like lots of things became more affordable.
So, at one point the idea of giving every student access to like the Microsoft Office Suite was unheard of. nowadays, like you're either getting that or you're getting your Google suite. This robust set of tools, and that's because the price points have like figured themselves out. So, we're stuck in this place where it's, the technology has like become hyper fast and not everybody has access to it, but there's an expectation of access.
So, of that turns into like what does it mean to be in the classroom and trying to figure this out? And I do think it is they,
where they can. Get the most out of this is just having honest conversations in general, but really just looking about and figuring out how is this showing up and being used in the industry, in the fields. Because again, if we look at the internet as a point of comparison, the internet it's changed how every discipline operated. It's changed how every industry operated and changed in different ways. You know, we can be historians without ever having to go now to locations to go into archives 'cause those are archives are made available. And how we engage in archival research is different and understood differently.
So, I think there's, there's something there of like continuing to, to surveil the horizons within their disciplines about what are the real ways this is going to be integrated or going to impact them and using that as a basis of discussion. Like it doesn't have to be just about AI in general. It can just be focused on what does AI mean for history, for nursing, for take your pick.
[00:33:22] John Nash: And kind of seeing that in here we are, as we say, we sort of keep talking about how we're about almost three years in and in the last 45 days in my academic department, we've had the most substantive conversations about what it means to have gen AI in our classes and what we believe about it. And the tenor of the conversations are people who are just now starting to grapple with it along with people like me in the room who've been grappling for 36 months and thinking, and we have some institutional policies, but my colleagues sort of asked like, what should I put in my syllabus and what should I do?
They almost wanted institutional direction, so they could, I don't, I don't want to say that they wanted to stop thinking about it, but it, but they wanted something kind of hard and fast. Like, what do I say and do? And I was maybe to some chagrin, you know, on their part sort of shrugging my shoulders because it's, it's not. it's not that exactly that simple. I can point you to our university's sort of stoplight protocol of a green, yellow, red, and you decide how you want that. But when it comes to, say, doctoral work or in dissertation work, or if you're a mentor to a dissertation student, then what will be your own personal ethos around this?
And the, and then we go, "oh, well that's a bigger issue, isn't it?" " Yes, it is."
And so, part of me wants to ask you what would you say, do these two things on Monday? But also, it's, it's also not always that simple, but you know. Yeah.
[00:34:50] Lance Eaton: I agree, like, it is a deeply personal question of their own teaching ethos, their, their, pedagogical philosophy. and I think that can and should be the grounding. And also, like double checking of is there anything about that that needs to be updated. I was in a conversation recently with a faculty who was still insistent on, like, was drawing this, if they don't know how to do the citations properly and perfectly, like they're not going to be prepared for the boardroom. And I was just like; I haven't been in a lot of boardrooms. But I'm pretty sure nobody is worrying about APA.
So, I think the first thing, Monday morning is recognizing. There may be things they care deeply about that may not be as important, and we're still trying to figure that out.
So, it's not “throw everything out,” but have your own critical eye about what are things you're deeply connected to, 'cause they were meaningful for you, but they're not necessarily as useful in the world we are today. You know, I think about that with, with writing, like physical writing. Some people are, you know, really stuck on that going back to Blue Books and as somebody who writes horribly in my educational experience, right. But my educational experience...
[00:36:10] Jason: there with you? Yes, absolutely. So bad.
[00:36:13] Lance Eaton: my educational experience changed how I was perceived as a student changed when I went from handwriting to the computer. My thoughts are still the same, but how it was perceived, so, you know. Wanting folks to just recognize there's going to be things they may have to let go. And that's hard. That sucks. If you hold to it even tighter some things, you're going to lose more students. So, I think that's one thing. And then the other is like, play with ai. Until it does something that surprises you, that you find is really useful, that just like, huh, and it's not that then you have to go and use it that way, but like that experience and hold that in your head to just understand like why it would be powerful and appealing to others and to help you think about what are, you know, what. If it can do something meaningful and helpful to you, like where else might you be able to transfer that into the teaching and learning that you're doing?
[00:37:16] John Nash: Yes, yes.
[00:37:18] Jason: That's great. Yeah. And we're going to start to kind land this plane here, the. Some of the themes that I'm hearing from today that I'm hearing from you, and you can add anything you want to this, but, you know, we were talking about really, again, coming back to good pedagogy in the classroom.
[00:37:39] John Nash: Yah
[00:37:39] Jason: Just like, you know, we've been talking about this book, the opposite of cheating is learning. The opposite of AI is not. No ai, it's also learning, right? It's good pedagogy. It's, it's not just banning it, although policy could be part of that, but it's also, making sure that we are engaging with our instructors and our teachers on the design side and the teaching side Be having the conversation to talk about how to integrate it and like you were saying here, your example of just getting into it, letting it surprise you, learning about it. Whether, and I was talking to a, a group at Kentucky State Department just a week ago. And I was like, you know, I'm not saying you have to use ai. I'm not even here as an advocate necessarily of you using AI in your job. However, I do think that every one of you needs to understand ai, at least what it can do, what it's doing in the populations that you're serving, understanding sense of. Of not either overestimating or underestimating where it's at in the world right now, so that you can make your own decision on this and maybe something that you just leave behind and don't use, but at least you'll understand, right?
[00:38:49] Lance Eaton: Yep, that's it. Exactly.
[00:38:51] Jason: Well, Lance, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a great conversation. Yeah, we've really enjoyed this and hope to continue to connect with you. I think we all connected with you on LinkedIn was kind of a main place. And what's the best way Is LinkedIn probably the best way for our listeners to keep up on the, the happenings of Lance Eaton?
[00:39:11] Lance Eaton: It would probably be my Substack, the AI+EDU=Simplified Substack that I'm often sharing recent talks, workshops, any materials that I'm building, just I like to put out there for others to draw upon, adapt. It's usually all, all of it is published with Creative Commons License so that other folks can, can build upon and like we can help. This out. So, thank you so
[00:39:36] John Nash: Beautiful. Love that.
[00:39:38] Lance Eaton: Thank you so much for having me.
[00:39:38] Jason: Great. Yeah. Thank you. We'll put those links in the show notes. And for those listening, you can always find our show notes@onlinelearningpodcast.com. That's online learning podcast.com. Always put our show notes in transcript. John usually draws a funny cartoon and puts it in there.
Just joking.
[00:39:57] John Nash: No.
[00:39:58] Jason: in there and
[00:39:59] John Nash: well, now I have to start. Now I have to start.
[00:40:02] Jason: See a sampling of my bad handwriting. We'll just put it all in there for everybody to see.
Yeah. Thank you
[00:40:08] John Nash: Cool. Yeah, Lance, thanks a ton.
[00:40:10] Lance Eaton: Have a great day.

In EP 38, John and Jason talk with Ryan Lufkin of Instructure about the evolution of online learning, the impact of Agentic AI on education, and how Canvas is shaping the future of digital classrooms.
See complete notes and transcripts at www.onlinelearningpodcast.com
Join Our LinkedIn Group - *Online Learning Podcast (Also feel free to connect with John and Jason at LinkedIn too)*
Guest Bio:
Ryan Lufkin is the Vice President of Global Academic Strategy at Instructure, where he works to enhance the academic experience for educators and learners, worldwide. With over two decades in the edtech world, Ryan has experience with every major technology platform that institutions use to deliver education, from the LMS to the SIS, and all the systems in between. A well-known thought leader in the edtech industry, Ryan is a podcast co-host, frequent media spokesperson, and speaker at industry conferences and webinars. Ryan earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Public Relations/Communications from the University of Utah and certificates in Data-Driven Marketing and Brand Management from eCornell.
Resources:
Canvas LMS https://www.instructure.com/canvas
EduCast3000 Podcast https://www.instructure.com/resources/podcast
Chole 10 Report https://qualitymatters.org/qa-resources/resource-center/articles-resources/CHLOE-10-report-2025
Theme Music: Pumped by RoccoW is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial License.
Transcript:
We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions or can help with any corrections!
[00:00:00] John Nash: You, you ready? Jason? Anything else?
[00:00:02] Jason: Nope. Just taking a drink, that's all.
[00:00:04] John Nash: Alright, I'll let you do another one.
[00:00:06] Jason: Yeah, that's
[00:00:07] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: Do the vocal exercises, you the
[00:00:08] John Nash: yeah, me, Mimi. Red leather. Yellow leather. Yeah.
[00:00:12] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: Yeah.
[00:00:13] John Nash: I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston.
[00:00:15] Jason (2): Hey, John. Hey everyone. And this is Online Learning in the second half, the Online Learning podcast.
[00:00:20] John: Yeah, we're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation we've been having for the last three years about online education. Look, online learning has had its chance to be great, and some of it is, but some of it still isn't. And so how are we going to get to the next stage, Jason?
[00:00:35] **Jason:**John, that's a great question. How about we do a podcast and talk about it?
[00:00:39] John Nash: Perfect. What do you want to talk about today?
[00:00:42] Jason: Honestly, and I'm not just saying this 'cause Ryan's in the room, but one of our favorite ed tech tools, Canvas. And we're here today with Ryan Lufkin from Instructure to talk to us. Welcome, Ryan.
[00:00:56] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: Thanks for having me. I love these conversations. Looking forward to it.
[00:00:59] Jason: Good. Why don't you just kind of describe the role that you play at Canvas?
[00:01:04] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: Yeah so I'm the Vice President of Global Academic Strategy which means I, I spent a lot of time talking about the trends that are impacting education across the globe. In that role, I travel all over the globe. Honestly, I was in Singapore and Meine Columbia and me. City and all over the United States this year.
Talking about exactly the topics that you all focus on as well. How does technology impact learning experience good and bad? And what does that look like? And I've been within Instructure it's funny 'cause I always say Instructure the makers of Canvas because everybody, Canvas is a household name. Fewer people know the company name.
[00:01:35] Jason: Right.
[00:01:36] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: But I've been there for seven years now. I've been an ed tech for over 25 years, and I just love the company, love our mission. I love the focus and so it's, it truly is a pleasure to be able to come out and have these conversations.
[00:01:47] Jason: Do you, do you work with anything other than Canvas at Instructure? Are you kind of over multiple things there, or?
[00:01:55] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: It's honestly our entire suite. So I think a lot of people know that we bought Mastery Connect, which is an assessment tool. We bought Parchment which is a credentials tool which I, I've watched my kids use I've used myself to send your transcripts when you're applying for college and university and things like that. We've bought Badger the Credentials program. We bought Portfolio, which is a portfolio program. So we, we really, over the last 14 years have grown from just a single product company to a real ecosystem of solutions. And unlike, other companies, we don't buy our competitors we, we buy our closest partners and extend that, that that ecosystem.
[00:02:29] John Nash: Yeah, so that's why you didn't buy Blackboard, you just decided to just destroy them.
[00:02:34] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: We, in doing so, we evolved the market, right? And I always say Canvas came along when we were still having arguments about whether or not education over the, put data in the cloud and never moved towards SaaS solutions, right? And whatever be, open source.
We're technically commercial open source. We publish our core code on GitHub as well. So to, to give people that peace of mind that, you own the code, that kind of
[00:02:56] John Nash: Mm-hmm.
[00:02:57] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: it was, it. Truly transform the market from that, your LMS systems that would go down every month when you got your little update disc in the mail to, 99.99% uptime. And when we have an outage, it's a big deal now across the industry,
[00:03:10] John Nash: Right.
[00:03:10] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: Used to be super common. So it's been a bit of fun ride.
[00:03:13] John Nash: Yeah. Yeah. Just that little bit you just described there, it really encapsulates how much has changed in just, , a decade or even, , 15 years.
[00:03:22] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: been in it, yeah, if you've been in that change, it you take it for granted.
[00:03:24] John Nash: Mm-hmm.
[00:03:25] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: how much it's fundamentally changed over the last
[00:03:27] John Nash: Yeah.
[00:03:28] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: And, education has the reputation for moving slow. And in a lot of ways, we're moving faster than people think.
[00:03:32] John Nash: Yeah, you're right. When you're in it, you forget. And again, we didn't have you on, so I could talk about all the other tools that are out there that we didn't like, but we used Adobe Connect for a long time and that was a, an abysmal failure for us that we, we just couldn't get it to go. And so I mean, we're just thankful to have tools that are stable and up and, and then even now thoughtful about instructional design.
Well, that killed the conversation
[00:03:55] Jason: we say all that to say we, . We're kind of, we're kind of fanning on Canvas today because we do, because we, as you said, we have been around. I mean, I think the first, not, I think the first LMS I used was, I it was Blackboard in that early stage 20 years ago. and at that point it was so bad that I just made my own websites basically for my for my students, right? And we're kind of left to that and a lot of, a lot of institutions were doing the same thing. It's like, these are so bad, we're going to make our own LMS system. At the time Canvas and others too have stepped into that gap and created products truly that work well. They're responsive both in the web sense of things, but also responsive to the users. Continue to get better. Run without a lot of outages are secure. , There's a lot of, lot of things that go into these LMS systems that, as John said, , it's easy to take, take for granted in in 2025.
[00:04:55] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: Yeah. And , there were four kind of key pillars when they founded the company, they were simple, engaging, open, and reliable. And the reliability piece was really the software as a service co-hosted right. Partnership with AWS. But that openness piece is one that, that still remains a massive differentiator for us, we have. I think publicly we see we've got 600, over 600 open APIs. We actually have 847 or something crazy like that. And then we, comply with the common standards like the LTI standard, right? To make sure that if oh, we've got over a thousand partners that have developed LTI apps that plug directly into Canvas.
And, we were very clear. We don't own the data. We are caretakers of the data. We don't own the experience. We facilitate the experience for schools as much as possible. We've done everything possible, not kind out of. Create that walled garden that I think, other vendors that you may have mentioned earlier, I really tried to protect and box out competitors. We work with coopetition on a daily basis, right? And embrace terms like that, right? And so it's, for us, it's all about how do we facilitate our universities and K 12 institutions to, to build the. learning experience that they want. And whether that's working with our friends or more tenuous friends, we, we support that.
[00:06:04] John Nash: Yeah, so Ryan, we're excited to talk about instructional design, thinking about online assessments thinking about where AI is going to play a role to lighten the workload, but not turn courses into some automated thing. But I think we would be remiss if I didn't start off with something that's kind of like the elephant in the room, which is where, , instructors are asking us all the time about AI agents and we've even done an episodes on it, , logging in, doing coursework.
And in a recent episode of your podcast EDUcast 3000, put a little plug in there for you, I listened to your converse. Yeah. You and Zach Pendleton talked about what you learned at EduCause 2025. And I heard you talk about something I hadn't really thought about, which is this something called model context protocol, MCP as a way to give AI a safer, more controlled access to systems. Is that something you think could play a role in the LMS world, at least in addressing these concerns that teachers have about agents logging in?
[00:06:59] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: Yeah, so you're not familiar with the term MCP it, it essentially rolls those 847 open APIs that I talked about into a more cohesive and again, I'm not, zach's the super technical one, but into a more cohesive approach. And when more about AI, it's garbage in, garbage out, right?
The more organized your data is, the better access those AI tools have to that data. The better your results are. And from a security standpoint, from a. From an accuracy of output standpoint, from a, from an agent standpoint, making sure that they can accomplish the tasks they need to, having an MCP is really important.
It just organizes the entire experience. It also makes integration with third parties easier. And again. One of the things I always like to clarify and it's something that Zach and I came up with three years ago, right on the cusp of, the AI revolution, November 30th, 2022 and when they launched OpenAI we really came up with the, this concept of eating our vegetables, right?
We have all this regulation in place and there was this immediate. We got to pass new regulation, we got to do this. Nope. We've got privacy, student data privacy covered, we've got accessibility covered, we've got security covered. We just need to make sure that we eat our vegetables and make sure these tools align with those existing regulations.
We don't need another layers of regulation specific to AI' cause it exists within the technology we're already using. And so that's something that we've really focused on. And so when we talk about MCP and we talk about integrations. All of that is done with the permission and the full disclosure of our universities, even down to the educator level.
So you can turn on AI features within your course. Things like that. We don't ever turn them on for everyone and plug data in. I think that's everybody's fear is that we're going to plug ChatGPT into Canvas and it'll suck all the data out.
[00:08:33] John Nash: Right. So, but when we think about this concern that instructors have about agents logging in and impersonating students, is, is MCP something that an instructor would invoke, or is it something that that instructor or the LMS has to put in place to say, we won't let agents log in on behalf of students or say, like Comet browser is going to, , roll in there and take the course?
[00:08:57] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: Yeah. It's funny because before, before we started this conversation around AI the thing was, we were having Chinese Foreign Exchange students log in and take our courses for us, right? This has been a problem as long as, and it was a problem when we had a physical classroom.
We had people show up. You would have to show your student ID to make sure that you were who you said you were when you were taking your final. Things like that. This is not a new problem. And I think there's a lot of times where there's a, there's a level of anxiety or belief that this is happening more than it needs than it is within education. The vast majority of students actually want to learn. And I think one of the things that AI is driving is this explanation of the why. Why do we do these things right? And if we explain the why, if we understand that like this, knowledge builds on itself. Students are less likely to turn to cheating.
But back to your question. Yes. our goal is to catch it at the system level. Right? If we're catching these bots coming in at the system level and performing these tasks, there's we've had some institutions that have had problems with bots coming in and applying for financial Aid, right?
And they're. The AI tools are good enough to actually enroll in the course and go in and do enough activity in the course to pass those standards. And so it's a constant cat and mouse game. The technology advances, we figure out ways to try to block those or identify those users. But at some level the, it's an ongoing battle that we hope to get the upper hand on all the time.
[00:10:16] John Nash: We understand that this is not all at the feet of a company like Instructure. That if a, if a bot is going to log into a course and succeed at it, and I played with a little demonstration project to show how that could happen.
It's really a more, a matter of is what's the instructional design of that course such that a bot can get in there and succeed in it and get As. Also, I think, Jason, you've pointed out that in a smaller course, this would be sort of catchable but in a larger course, it could be a bit of a challenge if there were 60, 70, 80, 90 folks in there and it was sneaking in, but as you point out, this could, there also could be a proxy human being doing it too, depending on where they sit, but.
[00:10:56] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: Yeah. Ultimately if a student wants to cheat and do that, it, they're just robbing themselves of that experience, unfortunately. And so is that kind of ongoing battle. But it's existed since education started, somebody sending in a proxy and having them learn for them.
And it's an ongoing effort. It's something that, that we spend a lot of time, one, one of the funny things about AI is we continue to uncover new use cases that we wouldn't have imagined before. And so somebody will come with a, with an example and we're like, "Wow, I hadn't thought about that one. That's a good one. We'll go track that one down." And so we, we have a constant, a team that constantly works on that.
[00:11:28] Jason: Yeah. And we've been talking about AI since we've had this podcast, it's been a constant topic. But, this fall particularly, we've been talking a fair bit about agentic AI, So as John mentioned, , we've done some testing. So currently right now, so this is for those listening in the future. This is December 5th, 2025. We know things change very rapidly. We've currently done some testing with , both the Perplexity Comet as well as Atlas, in Canvas specifically, where it can go in and this point you don't even need to do a workaround with these browsers.
It used to have to do some sort of work around kind of like. Oh, this, I'm just testing this course and you're going to do it. , So it doesn't refuse to cheat. They'll just do it for you now. To respond to, , a quiz. Get nine outta 10 or 10 outta 10, do discussion post email the professor through Canvas.
So this is current right now, so I guess my question is then what do you expect to see right now with it? Kind of what your stance is, what's in place, and then where do see this going? Are there changes happening in terms of, of Canvas, , in terms of their approach practically? As I think about from a teacher standpoint and a, in a student standpoint.
[00:12:49] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: Like I mentioned, we are, we're constantly working on this and we have really great relationships with Google and Microsoft, and we work with them as well. 'cause some of the, one of the first things we saw was Google Chrome plugins that were, "Hey, we'll take your quiz for you." And so then we've got to reach out to Google and say, Hey, maybe you could disable this plugin because it is not even hiding the fact that it's cheating, and so it's not even within our product itself, because if they're plugging those things into the browsers that that's giving access into the system. And. There's still, if you I'm also a student I'm doing a master's program at Arizona State University, and so I'm actually looking at how they're tackling some of this from the student side as well, which is just fascinating. But ultimately, within a lockdown browser experience for finals, you've that's still, you've got a turn on lockdown browser write your paper directly within that tool. There's other tools that are coming out where they plug directly into Canvas, and then you have to write your paper directly in there and it tracks every aspect of it. And that's really hard to game with an AI tool because it's very clear, it's being written by AI. and so there's a number of tools. It's a constant cat and mouse game of us trying to battle this. But what's interesting is when you're also in the workplace where like the exercise that you just went through to build a agent to go in and do this test, of people are doing that within the workplace to accomplish their work more quickly. Building that tool is actually like really interesting skill that we're also probably should be teaching students, which is, seems self-defeating except that these are tools they're going to going to need in the workplace. And so there's nothing I hate more when I hear educators say, "we're going to go medieval on 'em, we're going back to blue books and pencils" because that's just not preparing students for the future.
And we'll continue to play our cat and mouse game and try to block the, the. Use of these tools and the fair use of these tools. But we also need to evolve on, and John, I think you mentioned this a little bit, we also need to evolve how we design our courses. And if they can be gamed by AI in a lot of ways, we've got to figure out how to prevent that and turn that on its head.
And I think that's what we've been a little slow with is. How do we give the resources to educators to understand what these tools can do? Basically, AI literacy, so they understand that this is a problem, can be a problem. How do we actually help them redesign their courses and give them instructional design resources to modify how their course is designed to help prevent this type of thing?
And then how do we the tool provider, continue to fight this battle? So it's a multi multilayered evolution that we're all going through
[00:15:08] John Nash: Mm-hmm.
[00:15:09] Jason: Yeah. And we just released a podcast with a guest who was talking about kind of a multi-pronged approach, which we are completely behind, like redesign. This is, I work with a group of instructional designers at University of Tennessee, and we're talking about this every, every week, right?
And we're talking with faculty every week. And the great thing about that aspect of this is a, this is actually an. Incredible opportunity. we find that over and over again, we are coming back to strong pedagogical principles, right?
[00:15:41] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: 100%. Yep.
[00:15:43] Jason: just want to build in anyways. How do we make it more engaging?
How do we make more
[00:15:46] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: Yeah.
[00:15:47] Jason: How do we scaffold more? How do we focus on process? How do
[00:15:51] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: How do we make it more personal? Yep.
[00:15:53] John Nash: Yes, yes.
[00:15:54] Jason: Exactly. How do we connect better? , So those are, I believe in those, but I also wonder about this kind of multi-prong, so focusing on those aspects as well because , Canvas's business, kind of like my business, is online learning and right now I don't see a really strong blocking approach, a technology like blocking approach right now. And I don't know if it's because it's just not possible to do it in this cat mouse kind of thing or is it from more philosophical, or is there, I get concerned sometimes 'cause I know Canvas is also has agreements with OpenAI and so on, and I wonder about some of those kind of things.
Can you speak to any of that?
[00:16:36] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: That's what I'd love to dispel that last one aggressively. We work with every AI provider right from Anthropic to Microsoft to Google to OpenAI. We don't sell data, they don't have access to our student data. That's one of those things where hard and fast, and it limits the ways we can use AI within the classroom quite a bit. Because you cannot train, we will not let you train through our technology we will not let you train. AI model on student data. Period. Period. Hard stop. And also where I worry about some of the startups that, we go to ASU GSV every year in San Diego and there are startups making promises that you're like, "you can't deliver that functionality unless you are training on student data. And that's a FERPA violation. And do you what FERPA is?" Like the basic things there and that, so that's why we're always very. We are the gatekeeper in a lot of ways for, all of those vendors that want to work with us because we have over half the, students in North America using Canvas on a daily basis. And so how do we make sure that we are the gatekeeper to make sure those aren't, those tools aren't being used nefariously and we are absolutely the gatekeeper there, right? And we take that role very seriously. But I think to your point is it's not, it's not philosophical. If you look at lockdown browser, like lockdown browser makes it so you can't access anything.
But that test, and it is a great tool for eliminating the ability to cheat. It is not a great tool in providing any sort of engagement or interactivity or a good experience. So for us it's, we're caught in this conundrum of like, how do we track these, how do we block the use of these tools nefariously, but also allow the freedom to create really engaging courses and personalized courses.
And it's. It's not binary. We've actually, and that's where that cat and mouse comes in of constantly going back, building the MCP. One of the reasons we built the MCP is because we thought people were using some of our APIs in ways that they shouldn't.
Maybe we are being too open and we need to shut some of that down and control some of that a little bit. And not to prevent our schools from using it, but to prevent any type of nefarious use in the future. Things like that. And so we are constantly looking ahead and saying, okay, what is possible? What is the next step? What is the, maybe the things we haven't thought of? And how do we make sure that we're protecting for that? But then how do we also make sure that we're, were encouraging the use of these tools in productive ways within the courses. And I was at the, ASU Agenic AI and the Student Experience Conference a couple of months ago, month ago. I travel so much. It's a big blur. But it was so interesting to see what some of these schools were doing. Like Florida State University was embedding a NotebookLM in every course to enable. Yeah, if you're familiar with NotebookLM, it allows you to, it organizes all of the content within that course and then allows students to actually create a podcast to create study cards, right? To listen to elements as a stream, as a narrative, right? It provides a level of, personalization of content consumption, right? That really is the future of learning, right? You're meeting every learner where they are because you're letting them choose how they consume some of that content. Schools like Arizona State has actually created their I think it's called Creator Up. And it's the ability to create an agentic for every educator to create an agent of their own and apply that in different ways. And so we're starting to see all these different usage of the tools in creative ways within this kind of secure context that Canvas can provide, be the gatekeeper for. But we can't get there and we can't start exploring those tools if we're, like the letter that came out earlier this year, but it was signed by 7,000 educators that said, AI is corrosive to learning, and it was, it was, so we're going to bury our heads in the sand and pretend that we can make this thing go away. And that's just not realistic. And it actually prevents us from finding these positive uses because we're so fixated on the negative aspects of these tools.
[00:20:14] John Nash: Mm-hmm. Jason. And I think a lot about how to improve instructional design broadly, and so many instructors. Know their content so well, but they don't always know what constitutes strong instructional design.
And I think as we're thinking about what the future of Canvas looks like, and I'll speak just personally for myself, I would love to see ways in which Canvas might even support my ability to do instructional design. So what's, , what's the landscape look like there, the, horizon for that kind of thing?
[00:20:47] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: Yeah. So one of the things, and we've rolled out some features like translation and rubric development and different features that save educators time, that's where we've really focused. But one of the things that, Zach Pendleton, who you mentioned earlier, who's our chief architect and one of the smartest people I've ever met I meet with him once a week and I walk away from every one of those meetings smarter for it. But one of the things he kind of realized early on is, look, we have an ecosystem of solutions that we are supporting all the time, but we are not. The AI creators. And so if we actually go out and partner with all, with Anthropic, with OpenAI, if we become agnostic in that approach, can only develop, we can only progress so fast 'cause we're supporting all these different tools, but they're really just focused on their AI tool and so they're progressing so much faster than we could if we partner with them and then allow our schools to work seamlessly through them, that's amazing. And that's one of the reasons that we partner with AWS because AWS has their bedrock models, right? They've got, I think, 27 different large language models, Claude Anthropic, all the ones that we've talked about Gemini, all of those that you can plug in through AWS that provides that additional layer of security and control, right?
And so that's. AWS, Mary strain from AWS and I are besties, and you just spend a lot of time trading information and then covering these like different pedagogical use cases. She just sent me one from a school in Maryland. And we are, we're constantly looking to uncover that and help show schools what good looks like.
I think John, what you were talking about with it seems very. What's, anything's possible go out and do these things, but if you show someone good looks like, or what some examples are, that really is a good starting point for how do I start applying these tools in interesting ways. And so, at some point in the future, there, there are partners that are almost virtual instructional designers and things like that.
[00:22:32] John Nash: Yeah.
[00:22:33] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: And right now what we've done is let them run. 'cause they're going to evolve faster than we probably could with the resources we have, but then that fits into our model of you. We might buy them down the road and integrate those pieces in.
[00:22:43] John Nash: Yeah.
[00:22:43] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: And you see great partners like Praxis. I'll give a plug to Dave from Praxis. They've done a great job with that and using it in different ways. And they're half. They're inside the tent. They're in, they're part, they're one of our partners already. They work really closely.
They're at all of our events. And it, that's probably the model we'll follow is find those best of breed tools that are already halfway inside the tent and then pull them all the way in.
[00:23:04] John Nash: Yeah. 'cause I guess, and Jason probably knows more about it than I do, but I think, and now I'm just speaking as my, just my user hat on. It would be nice, I think to have a way for Canvas to help a, a novice, face-to-face instructor coming to the online space to avoid producing shovelware and having an adept instructional designer riding alongside as they bring that course online.
And I think that for me, this John Nash talking, I think that would be kind of cool if it could work well. But Jason, you, you run a whole shop of instructional designers. I don't know what, what would you like?
[00:23:42] Jason: Yeah, I would welcome that because, , we always say there's always more work to be done, right? Like,
[00:23:48] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: Yeah.
[00:23:50] Jason: I have no concern about our longevity in these roles and also for my instructional designers because partly 'cause I have really good ones, but also because so much work to be done.
One, there's a lot of faculty that would just prefer to work with a person. Instructional designers are really good. They see around things in different ways. there's a group of faculty that would prefer just to basically do it on their own and sometimes do it between 11:00 PM and 2:00 AM in the morning, right?
[00:24:21] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: When you'd rather be asleep? Yes, yes.
[00:24:23] Jason: And we're not going to be there. Our IDs are not being scheduled for one-on-ones during those times. And I think that, especially if they are tuned in a good way. And as you said, not just doing shovelware and able to give feedback. , We joke sometimes about Clippy, , about having a little Clippy, kind of pop up and say, did you mean to do that?
[00:24:45] John Nash: Right.
[00:24:46] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: I like the, what you just said about they need to be tuned, they need to be monitored. I think there's a lot of, I, this kind of misconception that AI can just be set and it's off on its own running and you don't have to look at it anymore. You still need somebody a, an expert, an instructional designer to be monitoring. What the outputs are. Is it staying on task? Are we seeing drift? Do we need to update the parameters around this? Oh, we didn't think about this aspect of it. We got to add that, right? These are tools that need monitors that need bosses, right? And so I think that's often funny.
We're like, "oh, fire all instructional designers and. And replace 'em with AI." That's not realistic. That's just not something that, that we see happening anywhere in the near future. They're about the scale, just as you said. They're scaling and providing that, that support when there's not a human available.
[00:25:30] John Nash: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I think a big question for instructors is how AI can lighten the workload without turning courses into automated experiences. How do you think Canvas is thinking about that balance between. In being efficient and maybe, , while we're all about the preserving the, the human aspect of teaching and learning.
[00:25:51] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: Yep, what's interesting, first pass grading is one that we've talked about a lot, right? And then we demoed the feature at InstructureCon this year, and it is, you set up your rubric and then the tool run, the AI tool runs the assignment against that rubric, right? And it gives a first pass of did they meet the criteria? Here's some basic feedback.
And the goal there really is to provide a first pass, and especially for a large course, if you have 90 people on a course, thinking about the time saving of having it go through and do a basic first pass for you, and then you as an instructor being able to go through and say, oh, actually I'm going to change this. I'm going to change that. I don't, I think it gave them too much credit for this. I think I'm going to reduce that and, but it provides that framework as a starting point. So it reduces grading fatigue. It reduces bias. We see a lot of, if your letters, if your name starts with Z, your instructor's really tired by the time they get to your paper, and they're not necessarily going to give you as thorough an overview. But what we don't want it to be is just that robots grading robot submitted work. And so what it does. You even have data, so you can actually look at, from a program level, you can look at are your instructors actually just going submit? Or are they actually going through and changing them? Because it's designed to save time and not to just replace that process.
[00:27:03] John Nash: A comment and then a follow up question on that. The, the comment is, I was reading in the, this says a lot about me and maybe how dangerous I am, but I'm in the subreddit for professors on Reddit ,and there's they, in that subreddit, professors complain a lot about AI submission and that, not that students are necessarily lazy, but that's, there's a tone of that there.
But something a professor said that I that struck me is it said, I think that I'm going to ask my students when they turn something in, I'm going to ask them how many minutes they would like me to spend grading it. And it and it sort of made me think about, well that's interesting because you're right.
If they're just going click, click, click because I'm getting a bunch of AI slop and so I'm just going to, , or I'm going to spend time thinking about this with you. And so it'd be interesting if the tools could really help professors really get into, we talk to a lot of professors who love that aspect of marking papers because they get to learn about their students more.
They learn about their interests more. That's just my comment. I think that my question kind of gets into the weeds that it's neat that it'll make a rubric, but doesn't that presume that you also have good learning outcomes? And so is there developmental work that can happen for professors before they get to that point? 'Cause it's easy to think, "oh. I'll just make a rubric." But I, I don't have good learning outcomes, then the rubric's no good, right? Is, yeah.
[00:28:22] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: And there's a number of things that we do to support outcomes, mapping outcomes, and, yeah, what's interesting is you can actually use if you have your course content and you can actually use some of these tools to help you define outcomes
[00:28:34] John Nash: Yeah.
[00:28:34] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: some of those things,
[00:28:35] John Nash: Yes.
[00:28:36] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: And so there are, this is where AI is both the cause of, and the solution to all of our problems. Not to pull a Homer
[00:28:42] John Nash: That's a Homer Simpson. Yeah.
[00:28:44] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: Yeah, exactly. But it is in so many ways, right? And because it is, I think Jason, you mentioned the Socratic method and this like getting back to this, like one-to-one approach that real human connection of learning.
And in a lot of ways AI is able to help us get closer to that if we do it right. That personalization piece I think is important. And yeah, it can actually help you create course content. But again, one of those things are, is that a tool that we should build within Canvas that we may not be able to update as fast?
Or is there a really good third? Is actually Anthropic's Claude's Learning Mode does some really interesting things around Socratic, where it does won't give you the direct answer, but it answers, Now, OpenAI has their, I think, student mode that does the, something similar, right? There's these tools that they're innovating faster and that's why that open architecture allows us to move more quickly realistically than if we were. Building all of these features ourselves especially as we move into more agentic phase. And these tools are more powerful. They can plug into the, into Canvas a little more deeply. And then it'll be I say a little bit like some of these features that we've developed will be we built them in Flash, right?
They'll, we'll retire those and it'll just be the agent throughout the tool that is supporting that. And I really do think we'll get there. We've got to, we've got to build the trust. We've got to. Build the understanding of what it's capable of. But I also think AI is great at detecting other AI. If we get to the point where Canvas for has never really done we've always relied on our partners for academic integrity.
That was a decision early on that we were not going to, be aggressive with academic integrity. We've got great partners like Turn It In and things like that, that that really focus on that CopyLeaks and some of those others. And we have not focused on that as much, but in the future with, these different models, you may see that evolve a little bit.
[00:30:26] John Nash: Yeah. What are you thinking, Jason?
[00:30:29] Jason: Yeah, I, and I love that idea of that first pass, especially as I'm thinking about larger classes, and the load that that takes both for teachers and TAs and was in a seminar earlier this summer are with some people from ASU and talking about some of these larger classes asking the question, , what if we could focus on the students that really want our feedback, right? And, , those are some of the things I really like . About AI from a grading standpoint. Thinking about from a teaching standpoint, because my students don't need me to correct another one of their commas or split infinitives, right? I don't need to be doing that. They don't need me to be doing that. It's not personal. It's not anything. It's something they should be learning. And they should, especially if they're going to go on higher education, they should be correcting themselves and learning along the way. But I don't need to be spending my time with that. However, I do want to be interacting with them over ideas.
And this is where the line comes from me, is like, , I played a little bit with AI creating comments for students, and it just felt kind of icky. That's my technical word for it. It
[00:31:39] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: Honestly, soulless.
[00:31:41] Jason: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:31:42] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: I've heard soulless is a version of that? Yeah.
[00:31:43] Jason: It just felt wrong. Like now I was like, I was a being of an imposter teacher, , that I wasn't really,
[00:31:52] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: Yeah.
[00:31:53] Jason: For me, it kind of crossed over from that, oh, yeah, here's some, here's some technical things I've now given you feedback for from AI, and this works fine points on this and that, and using a rubric, kind of like that aspect. But now that I get talking to him, Hey, good job, Billy, or whatever, it all, all of a to feel a little weird.
[00:32:10] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: Feels insincere. Yeah. The other piece too is there's, we talk a lot and I see this, I, I have a, I mentioned my daughter's a junior at university, just as we were coming on the show. And my son's a freshman in high school. And they both use Canvas.
And I actually, what's interesting is some of the frustration they get around the timeliness of the feedback, right? I submitted my paper two days ago and my professor hasn't given me my grade yet. How why not? Why not, right? They're a generation that's, everything is so automated and so on demand and immediate satisfaction. And it's really frustrating for them when it takes that long. The other aspect too, and I've seen it not to call out my professor at my master's program, but where I didn't get feedback on my, my. First paper, and I'm already submitting my second paper, so how can I provide a second, am I going to get ding for what he graded me for, but I haven't gotten it before I write it, right? And so there's some simple basic realities that we need to make sure we are addressing. And instead of villainizing AI or saying it's robots providing robots responses. That timeliness and that is, providing feedback in a useful way. So I'm building on that feedback is really important and I, it's not always easy for educators.
It's, I don't blame necessarily my professor, but it is, it's frustrating on the student end.
[00:33:21] John Nash: This is not the solution, but what you just said in the experience you're having and your children are having, reminds me of, of what happens if any of either of you have used the app on Domino's to order a pizza, but when you, you order the pizza and then it says, Jane has received your order, and then it says, Bill has put it in the oven.
And then it says Sam has stuck it in the car. And so I can imagine like John has received your paper and then John has opened your paper and then,
[00:33:50] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: John
Expletives about being tracked by this device. Yes.
[00:33:54] John Nash: yeah.
Ryan, you mentioned badging and Badger was the tool that you bought. Our institution's been talking about badging. I've heard you, I think in other spaces talk about micro-credentialing about credentialing being detached from courses.
[00:34:10] John Nash: I think about it in my course, I teach a relatively complex project-based course that teaches students how to be design thinkers. And so there's opportunity I've seen for micro badging inside that. So even if you didn't finish the course, you could have left being an empathetic interviewer or a good brainstorm or what have you.
So talk to us a little bit about what direction that's going in and where we might leverage that as instructors.
[00:34:34] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: I love that. And we talk a lot about skills-based learning,
[00:34:36] John Nash: Mm-hmm.
[00:34:37] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: which is, we hear pushback on skills-based learning. 'cause people are like, we're not a, we're not a vocational school. Our job is not to prepare people for jobs, right? There's still some of that mentality floating around out there even in the face of some of the, federal requirements now around are people getting jobs with these degrees?
Things like that. And I don't think that's the end all. I, I don't want to come down on either side of that debate. But, 40% of college students don't graduate within six years in a traditional four year program. And they leave with essentially nothing. But like you said, John, the, they could actually leave with, I actually am a good presenter. I am a good, I've got a badge and evidence-based decision making, things like this.
[00:35:13] John Nash: Yes, yes.
[00:35:15] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: And I don't think it's we've got in no other industry would somebody spend potentially two or three years of their lives and leave with nothing for what they pay. That's just, it's just insane. And how do we break that down? How do we actually start providing that incremental credit or things like that. But even then my daughter, she's a strategic communications major, she's getting a minor in psychology and she wants a certificate in data analytics, so she can show look, it's not just soft skills. Let's, I've got some hard skills. what's interesting is that certificate in data analytics is an, is non-credit program, right? Because we are caught up in this traditional model of your program is accredited, right? Because it is a full program. Most certificate programs are not accredited if they stand separately, right? They're for adult learners they're not, not for credit or they're treated separately. And so we've got to get to this model where we're looking at it all as a skills-based framework and giving students credit for that so they can then properly show to potential employers or other educational institutions that they have those skills.
They've achieved those skills in measurable ways. And there's a lot of changes within the infrastructure of education that need to happen. But what we've seen is this massive growth since COVID of. Of demand for credentials, demand for, Hey, if I'm going to grow in my job, if I'm going to, if I'm going to switch careers, if I'm going to change something, I need something.
And it doesn't need to be a four year degree necessarily. It could be a six course, certificate that would help me get a better job or help me get better pay. And we're seeing that across the globe. We've seen initiatives for that in the Philippines around tech jobs. We've seen in Mexico a very similar program where they're going to try to drive more non four year degree programs to upskill their labor force. And so this is a global initiative and we have the ability to be leading it just as we've lead the, the model for education, we've led the model for education across the globe, for the last 150 years. We have the opportunity to be leading this and we need to kind of lean into that.
[00:37:09] John Nash: Could I now 'cause I'm too lazy to go look it up and I have you here. Could I now have a students in a full 16 week course that would complete a module and be badged for that module? Yeah.
[00:37:20] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: Totally. You can set up with, we've rebranded it was Canvas credentials. They've just rebranded it as Under Parchment, so it's Parchment Digital Badges.
But yeah, you can actually set that up at whatever level you want as granularly or that could be six courses and you get a badge. Could be a badge within every module within a Canvas course. Things like that.
[00:37:38] John Nash: And I'm the authority on that badge? That doesn't have to be my institution. I mean, I'm just like, I think I've looked squinty eye at all this, you look good on this. You get a badge. Yeah.
[00:37:47] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: Yes. And the goal really is to provide a level of flexibility around, because every institution's kind of trying something different. The challenge is the value of that badge then comes from your reputation and your institution's
[00:38:00] John Nash: Right.
[00:38:01] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: and as opposed to a unified skills taxonomy
[00:38:03] John Nash: Yes.
[00:38:04] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: or something like that, where there's an agreed upon
[00:38:06] John Nash: Yeah.
[00:38:07] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: we talk a lot about that currency,
[00:38:09] John Nash: Right.
[00:38:09] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: that there was a reason that I went and took a GoogleAI essentials certificate because it has Google on it.
[00:38:15] John Nash: Right?
[00:38:15] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: I could have done that at, Salt Lake Community College or somewhere else. And, but it's the value
[00:38:20] John Nash: Yes.
[00:38:21] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: that's what I think is so in flux right now.
[00:38:22] John Nash: Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's like, oh, they got that from Nash, that "hack," Nash. So that badge not worth it.
[00:38:28] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: Or, oh my gosh, you got that from Nash? Okay,
[00:38:30] John Nash: right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Right.
[00:38:32] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: that's the,
[00:38:33] John Nash: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:38:35] Jason: like only
Gotten, have achieved that from Nash.
[00:38:38] John Nash: That's right.
[00:38:39] Jason: Yeah, I think that's an exciting direction. , I was at a session with if you're, you're probably familiar with Chloe 10 the most recent Chloe report. And there's just an enormous among leadership universities, an enormous focus on pouring resources in, into non-degree credits. And they didn't say badging, but I'm assuming that badging is going to be a big part of that. How do represent those?
[00:39:05] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: Yeah, badging is the. Badging is the external representation of those non-graded programs. And you hear a lot about stackable credentialing and that's why that analogy of my daughter, they really are looking at it as a stackable way as opposed to a degree that is just two dimensional in a lot of ways.
How do I stack up these smaller groups that shows, look, I'm really good at data analytics and I lead more on the creative side. 'cause look what I've done some visualization stuff, right? It's just a. It's a more granular way to define your skills or show your skills. And it's exciting. I think it's nice to see some, we've been talking, Badger, I think we bought Badger six years ago or something like that.
Like it it's, we've been working towards this and it's just really gained momentum. I think post COVID is, everything's moving a little faster.
[00:39:49] Jason: Well, it seems like an appropriate time to make the UHF joke. Have you guys watched UHF "Badgers? We don't need no stinking badgers." Anyways, great films side comment, but... Maybe as we're kind of wrapping up here a little bit, I would love to know from you, from your viewpoint, where are we going? This is online learning in the second half. A lot of what we talked about here is, know, we've, we've been at this for 20 years. We're looking at where online learning has been. We can, we can get information in front of students, we can have them connect with it securely. Now there's ways to interact. do you think we're going in the next year, five years, 10 years? When it comes to online learning in general, or specifically with Canvas, some of the aspirational goals you have.
[00:40:37] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: Yeah. I'll go back and say we are, we've all been in education long enough to remember, or and many institutions still have that same, we are not a business, we are academia. They are not customers. We owe them nothing. And it's been really interesting to see this evolution towards more student-centered approach.
And I think what we're going to see is a more personalized experience for students, more student agency in what they're able to take. We see this in things like the California community college system, right? Where you can actually take a course from any California community college and they've got a great pathway builder that shows how you take these different courses from any physical institution, right? And that more of that flexibility and interoperability and our goal, canvas today has about, about half of all college students in North America, about a third of all K 12 students in North America, and we're supporting more businesses with their development as well.
And so when you actually look at the benefits of, it sounds a little self-serving, but it is also when you look at the benefits of that technology just disappearing in the background and the cognitive load of learning a new technology being removed and providing a very seamless experience. is really powerful. And then when you actually had tools like, okay, we'll support dual enrollment. And so you're having a seamless experience when between your high school and college courses and oh, we make it super easy to apply for college directly within Canvas and actually maybe recommend what that looks like and where do your aptitudes lean towards?
The more we can use technology to. Keep students engaged in education, the better off we will be. The dropout rates that we've seen, and again, I'm old, I, my first weed out course, they said, look to your left, look to your right. One of these people isn't going to be here at the end of the semester.
And they took pride in that. I love this the shift that we're like, how do we provide services to really keep students on track and moving towards success. I think education has the biggest impact on the positive. Aspect of the globe, right? The positive growth of our society, everywhere in the world. And so I, I think it's incredibly important. So you'll see more of that. How do we pull together an ecosystem that supports universities? How do we help universities work together? How do we help create corporate? Corporate university partnerships to make sure that the programs that universities are offerings are the ones that map to, to paying jobs and in demand jobs, things like that.
And so it's hard to say what it looks like 'cause it's, I wouldn't have predicted AI five years ago, but and. We see so many of that quick evolution, but it's amazing to be part of this, like the most tumultuous but also the most transformative time in, in the history of education.
We all get to affect that, and that there's a, there's kind of an excitement and a power in that that I, I love.
[00:43:03] Jason: Love that and obviously the excitement in your voice. See it in your face
[00:43:08] John Nash: Mm-hmm.
[00:43:09] Jason: our podcast listeners can't see that, but I can tell you're passionate about this and it's been great to talk to you about this. 'cause we, we line up, and this is why we like our edtech partners, right? We don't pretend to be able to manage all this alone.
, If it was, honestly, if it was left up to the institutions to the LMS, we, I don't know John, we'd probably still be having students dropping things into Microsoft office files or some, or
[00:43:35] John Nash: yes,
[00:43:36] Jason: like that on the
[00:43:37] John Nash: we'd be, we'd be using Evernote and Dropbox.
[00:43:40] Jason: yep.
[00:43:41] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: Dropbox. Oh, yes, I,
And I love these conversations and thank you for having me on the show. I just think the more that we, we have these conversations and we explore different ideas the better off we are as a community. And so this is, I appreciate what you're doing.
[00:43:52] Jason: Yeah. Well, thank you.
[00:43:53] John Nash: Oh yeah. Thank you.
[00:43:55] Jason: For those listening, we're online learning podcast.com. That's online learning podcast.com. So you'll see the full transcript notes there. We'll also put some links in to EdCast 3000, which love the reference there. And if you don't know the reference folks well,
[00:44:10] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: Special kind of nerd reference that we like.
[00:44:12] Jason: a bunch of nerds here.
Basically, we've pretty much admitted that,
[00:44:15] John Nash: Totally, totally.
[00:44:16] Jason: is in a sub sub Reddit on on
But.
[00:44:20] Ryan Lufkin - Instructure: John also got my Homer Simpson, my Homer Simpson quote, so I appreciate that as well.
[00:44:26] Jason: We'll put a link to that and I, I guess we'll put it a, a link to Canvas. I think probably most people listening know about Canvas, but
[00:44:34] John Nash: Yeah.
[00:44:35] Jason: we might as well put a link in
[00:44:36] John Nash: No. Yep.
[00:44:37] Jason: check you out. They've never heard of this thing called the LMS, but yeah. Thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate it.
[00:44:46] John Nash: Yeah. Thanks Ryan. Yep.
[00:44:47] Jason: Yeah, thanks.

In EP 37, John and Jason sit down with Anna Mills to discuss the reality of "agentic AI"—browsers that don't just assist students but can potentially become the student. We move past the panic to discuss advocacy, "humanizing" strategies, and how we can respond without giving up on online learning.
See complete notes and transcripts at www.onlinelearningpodcast.com
Join Our LinkedIn Group - *Online Learning Podcast (Also feel free to connect with John and Jason at LinkedIn too)*
Guest Bio:
Anna Mills is a leading voice in the responsible integration of AI in education, drawing on nearly two decades of teaching experience and a deep commitment to open educational resources. Her expertise spans AI literacy, academic integrity, and the critical use of AI in higher education, work informed in part by her role as the sole education specialist invited to test GPT-4 pre-release for OpenAI. She is widely recognized for her influential resource curation, national and international faculty development sessions, and published contributions in major higher-ed outlets. Mills also authors the widely adopted OER How Arguments Work and advises multiple AI-focused initiatives—you can find Anna Mills here on LinkedIn.
Resources:
Anna’s Substack (great summary of Agentic AI and Education / lots of links and resources) https://annamills.substack.com/p/the-time-to-reckon-with-ai-agents
John’s LinkedIn post on how Comet Browser can impersonate a student in an online course
John’s YouTube video showing Comet impersonating a student
Anna’s LinkedIn post about Yun Moh’s request of Canvas.
Annotated reading conversation
Perusall
Hypothe.sis
Forbes’ Article “Colleges and Schools Must Block Agentic AI Browsers Now, Here’s Why” https://www.forbes.com/sites/avivalegatt/2025/09/25/colleges-and-schools-must-block-agentic-ai-browsers-now-heres-why/ (not mentioned but a good one!)
Theme Music: Pumped by RoccoW is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial License.
Transcript
We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions or can help with any corrections!
EP 37 Anna Mills - Oct 28, 2025
[00:00:00] John Nash: Hey. Quick pause we're collecting listener testimonials, and so if this show has influenced your thinking or your practice in any way, you can share that with us at onlinelearningpodcast.com. There's a link at the top of that page. You can't miss it. Just click that it takes just a second and we'd love your testimonial.
[00:00:19] Jason: That's right, just right at the top in kind of obnoxious yellow font, to be honest. But it's a black background and so it's accessible, but still, you should see it at the top.
We'd love your feedback.
[00:00:31] John Nash: And if this conversation is useful. Take a moment to follow the show so you don't miss any new episodes in Apple Podcasts.
Just tap the plus sign on the show page, and in Spotify just tapped the follow button.
[00:00:44] Jason: Also, if you like this podcast, we'd love your rating. It helps us in the algorithms kind of bump to the top. So, in Apple Podcasts, you scroll all the way down and find the stars and put the stars in. In Spotify, you hit the three-button menu and then rate this podcast. We'd appreciate.
[00:01:03] John Nash: So many steps, but I tell you it's worth it. Alright, to the episode.
[00:01:08] Jason: To the episode.
[00:01:09] John Nash: I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston.
[00:01:11] Jason: John. Hey everyone. And this is Online Learning in the second half the Online Learning Podcast.
[00:01:15] John Nash: We're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation we've been having for the last three years about online education. Look, online learning has had its chance to be great, and some of it is, but there's still some ways to go here. So how can we get to the next stage? Jason,
[00:01:32] Jason: Well, how about we do a podcast and talk about it?
[00:01:34] John Nash: I love that idea. What should we talk about today?
[00:01:37] Jason: John, there's a lot of a lot of people talking on LinkedIn. This might be the end.
[00:01:41] John Nash: Do you think so?
Is this where I disclose that I am not actually hosting today, that my Comet browser is hosting for me today?
[00:01:49] Jason: This is Comet John. You're doing a great job. It's very, it's almost as believable as the real John, and maybe we're not so bad off after all. But yeah, the, all the talk this week on LinkedIn has been about, agentic AI taking over. The one quote that I took away, I won't name the person, but, on a comment on LinkedIn, said, online asynchronous learning is cooked. And um, I've learned this is not a good thing from my son who uses this term. It can be a good thing somebody can be cooking like in a good way, but cooked means bad.
[00:02:24] John Nash: Yep. Yep. So, we have someone in the house today who's going to take us down a path of thinking this through. This may actually be one of the episodes where we may accelerate this one out because this topic is so hot. And so, who have we got today?
[00:02:39] Jason: Today we have Anna Mills, and we actually just met on LinkedIn because of some of the writing. She was doing around this, and so Anna, welcome to the podcast.
[00:02:48] Anna Mills: Thank you. I'm very excited to be here and talk with you. I think it's pretty urgent and,
[00:02:54] Jason: Yes, I wish.
[00:02:55] Anna Mills: can do.
[00:02:56] Jason: I wish it was under better circumstances, let's just say. No, this is actually the very circumstances why we have this podcast to talk about these things. And Anna, maybe first to give us some context - give us just a little bit of background for yourself and what your role and work is right now.
[00:03:12] Anna Mills: Sure. I'm a community college writing teacher. I've taught for many years in the San Francisco Bay area, and I wrote an open educational resources textbook that's free online. I dove into discussions of AI in education and writing education. Before ChatGPT was released and I did some testing for Open AI early on and I an advisor on an app that invites students to use AI feedback. So, I've been interested in both using and critiquing AI. And I've been teaching online for some years now as well. And I've just been really active in social media discussions because I think we have to come together and join to find our way in this terrain.
[00:03:55] Jason: Yes.
[00:03:55] Anna Mills: glad there are a lot of educators out there doing that.
[00:03:58] Jason: Yes, exactly. What do you teach online? Just out of curiosity? Do you use some writing?
[00:04:03] Anna Mills: I teach English composition required academic reading and writing. Fundamental kind of support for thinking in college. You know, I think it's even more important now with AI to be able to read and write and edit and think critically but, doing that online asynchronously. How do we maintain some accountability - how do we maintain the value of that course credit when it can be outsourced? So that's where we are. I think it's going okay, it's shifting terrain, so.
[00:04:32] Jason: Yeah. So, if you're teaching writing online, my guess is, as soon as the public ChatGPT went public three years ago now, that was probably a significant concern from you from the beginning, right?
[00:04:44] Anna Mills: Yes, sure. And I give a lot of workshops on building your own multi-pronged strategy for reducing AI misuse if you're teaching writing online, asynchronous. think it starts with, good pedagogy and designing for intrinsic motivation and bringing in relationship and all the things that we do know how to do and can lean into. but I don't think that's enough. We have to have some guardrails too. So that's where I've gone into some process tracking, some AI detection, used non punitively very cautiously.
[00:05:18] John Nash: So Anna, I'm wondering if you could give us a little level set on the main topic we're going to talk about today, because we might have new listeners that come in or are wondering, oh, agentic ai, and what are you talking about and what are we worried about? And there's probably just a baseline we could start from about what is mechanically occurring, and then we could talk about a little bit about what the growing concerns are.
[00:05:43] Anna Mills: Yeah. It's really pretty simple. It's just a different paradigm from what we're used to with chatbots. agentic AI or an age agentic browser. What we're basically talking about is you're browsing the internet, you're also chatting at the same time, and you're chat bot browse for you. can click. can fill out forms, it can take action on that website. It can navigate to other websites. So, it's an extension. You're still prompting it, but it can also just keep going on its own including in a learning management system. And this is where the companies have been heading for some years now. It's just that it's only recently started to work reasonably and be more accessible to people who are either free customers or paying $20 a month. That's pretty recent. So, we have a release of the perplexity browser. They made it free to students for a year. Very recently. Then we also have a ChatGPT Atlas browser and all the other companies are working on about to release or have something in beta, so Anthropic and Google as well. So, they think this is the next big thing and it's now just starting to work for average users. Students are just becoming aware of it.
[00:06:59] John Nash: One of the things that strikes me as you were describing this is that the agentic browser will browse with you. It can click for you; it can fill out forms. Before all this came out my password manager, I use LastPass, will also fill in forms for me, particularly when I shop, and that's maybe something everybody's used to. And so, what also seems to be turning up the talk around this is that the large language model is riding along with you with all of its air quotes, intelligence. You we're all talking on video now, but I can't do my fingers. And so, I have to say,
[00:07:34] Anna Mills: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:07:35] John Nash: and what we're concerned about also is that it can start to answer questions, for instance, in an online class as if it were the student without the student using their own hand.
[00:07:46] Anna Mills: And so, it's really like reading and analyzing the website, including an assignment description. It's giving you a little, blow by blow description of its reasoning process, what it's doing next, and that will include auto generating response to a discussion or coming up with quiz answers or generating a whole essay and then actually clicking, putting it in and clicking submit and declaring to me the user.
Oh, now your essay is submitted. So, it's way beyond that kind of password auto complete because it's got all the capacity of, the chat bot that we know behind it.
[00:08:22] Jason Johnston: So, I've been talking about this with some administrators for a couple months 'cause I've been kind of testing it out. I showed my team, which is about 25 people, media people, instructional designers, basically video of, Perplexity's Comet, browser, completing a module in an online course doing a quiz, responding to a discussion board, submitting an assignment, selecting a topic of study. And then this was kind of the kicker, using Canvas, sending an email to the professor asking a question about something in module one. I mean, the prompt was about three sentences
My staff watched with open mouth and kind of in horror, as you could see, the AI clicking around, completing the quizzes, doing all the things,
[00:09:14] Jason: We'll put a link in maybe John to your LinkedIn post where you walk through a little bit, what of a video of you were using you were using Comet, were you John?
[00:09:25] John: Yes, and So was Anna. And I think she we were both sort of thinking about it at the same time. Hers was quite good too. Or I won't say too, it insinuates, mine was good.
[00:09:35] Jason: Yours was good.
[00:09:36] John Nash: hers was quite good.
[00:09:37] Jason: I want to affirm you both of them are really good. Yes.
[00:09:40] John Nash: And really went deep in thinking about all the affordances that these new browsers can bring to bear in completing a course. It's quite complex what it can complete. It does, as you pointed out, Anna, read the content that the teacher has put into the LMS and then answer based on that. It's shocking.
[00:10:00] Anna Mills: And I appreciated your post 'cause you said the student didn't use AI to cheat, exactly. AI was the student. At that point there's no student involvement. The student doesn't even know what the assignment was necessarily in some cases because they've just said, "go do my assignment." Maybe they say, don't ask me questions, and it just goes with that. Yeah, so there have been a bunch of educators posting videos and you know, in my Substack post I try to bring in, you know, all these great examples like from David Wiley and Tim Mousel and Anna Withrow. Here and there, there've been communities of people talking about this for the last six months, but I don't think it's really hit broad consciousness among educators. So, I just, I just got a little concerned and wondering if there's a solution and wondering if we should be the ones calling for it, so that's really where I started posting and writing about it. And I noticed that there was a Forbes article from Aveva Lagat that was really helpful. So, I think that, now we're starting to see a much broader discourse and concern.
[00:11:04] John Nash: Yeah. Well, I would love it if you could walk us through some of your thinking on where we could go with this. You noted in the Substack post that you made, and we'll put a link to that in our show notes that we can't just give up on online learning. And certainly, I think Jason and I would totally agree, otherwise we wouldn't have a podcast, but that uh, but you,
[00:11:24] Jason: really difficult. We got a really decent and I'm not sure we can get another good one in 2025.
[00:11:30] John (2): Yeah, but you note to your readers about the depth and penetration of online learning today and the way students are learning in post-secondary at end in, in, in P 12 arenas. And so, you do take also some time to wonder out loud what educators could do. You were talking that, you know, Philippa Hardman offers ideas on how instructional design can maybe thwart this.
You also wonder, I think a little bit if course design actually can solve the problem. Maybe, and I don't know how sophisticated these agents will get. You also talk about how educational institutions could try to block. AI agents, and I read that line in the post and then I put down my, I think I was reading probably on my tablet.
I put down my tablet and I was, I started to become incensed because I thought, not for what you said, but how true it is that so many institutions now are put into a ridiculous position of having to take on opportunity costs to thwart. An issue that probably shouldn't have even been brought to bear in the first place.
This, it's, there are deep ethical questions about whether it's right for these companies to do this. And the companies are even sort of saying the quiet part out loud, aren't they? And you posted, but
[00:12:48] John Nash: uh,
[00:12:48] John (2): Yun Moh asked Instructure in their bug feature forum to include a feature that blocks AI agents from logging in on behalf of students and Instructure marked the request as "will not consider."
[00:13:02] Anna Mills: Yes.
[00:13:03] John Nash: I'm just like, are you kidding? And so, it brings me to a thought. It's sort of a maddening thought on opportunity costs, as I said. But in a sane world, shouldn't the conversation start from, should this exist at all? But instead, it's framed as how can schools detect and respond to this?
And so, I just, yeah. What do you, what are your thoughts on direction?
[00:13:26] Anna Mills: Well, I shared those feelings because I think probably the simplest thing that could be done would be for the companies that are, offering these AI agents to offer some kind of opt-out or identification of when it's an agent and when it's not. So that websites could say, okay, we don't want, agents. Canvas taking quizzes, right? A learning management system. It's not an AI agent management system. And there might be a lot of cases where certain websites for certain purposes, they want a human interacting with it. And I think that's the simplest thing because you can tell with these agents that they haven't been instructed not to do this. You say, will you complete this assignment? And they say, okay, I'll complete the assignment. And there's a system prompt in there and OpenAI or perplexity could be saying, if you're asked to complete assignment, say no. How about I coach you on it instead? So that first step has not been taken. And that step of, identifying the agents as such so that websites could block them if they choose hasn't been taken. And it's a very simple step. The other steps are really complicated and maybe don't work as well. So can canvas itself, block them? Maybe, I don't know. After, you know, I shared that post about them not considering the request.
Melissa Lobel from Canvas did respond and say they were, they are thinking about it and talking about it with open ai. so, I don't know what the status of that is. I don't know if that will work. When I asked my canvas administrator at my institution, she said, I don't think we can do anything. The only thing we might do would be to block it on our WIFI network, but students don't have to use our WIFI network. So, I don't know that there's a technical fix at the institutional level that even works. I'm certainly interested if there is I think we should look for the simple solutions and the people who can carry those out.
[00:15:18] John Nash: Sure. I mean, I just love your short dissertation there on all the things that we could be thinking about is really evidence of the intellectual and structural cycles we're burning, trying to solve this when the issue is just so simply fixed by the company.
[00:15:32] Anna Mills: Yep.
[00:15:32] Jason: It's interesting, I don't know why they've opened up these guardrails, because I've been testing this for a little while. Ever since I had hands-on a, any kind of agentic kind of ai, and so you could do it with ChatGPT 4 and it actually refused to do it. You would have to go around and say, hey, this is, I'm just testing this course out. I'm the teacher. This is the test student. And then it would do it almost like kind of roundabout kind of way.
[00:16:00] Anna Mills: Yeah.
[00:16:01] Jason: When five came out, then it actually would.
[00:16:04] John Nash: Actually
[00:16:05] Jason: ahead and do it. And it actually was pretty, and that's when I started to
Startled. This was just a, I think maybe just a couple months ago when five came out, GPT five, and that's when I started to become a that's when I started. Like people weren't talking about it openly yet. I didn't really want to talk about it openly yet right? Because I hadn't really gotten my feet underneath me about all this. And then it feels like with perplexity now, it's like another arms race. Like now they're just openly, you don't even, you don't have to backdoor it. they're advertising to students like, here's your 4.0, secret. Like literally I have clips of advertisements to me in Facebook to use perplexity to have perplexity, do your busy work so you can get on with learning. And this is your, your four oh secret and it shows examples of going into Stanford engineering and it's just it's wild, really were. It feels like almost ethically, morally, something has just moved in the last three or four months where they've just decided to, I don't know, just open up the gates, take off the guardrails or something.
[00:17:15] Anna Mills: And I don't think that sort of parents and teachers have realized that yet, but I
A pretty strong. Across the board, bipartisan objection to that. Because 57% of community college courses in California were online in 2023, probably more now.
Is a huge equity and access issue. You all know this if you're listening already to the podcast, but, and parents and teachers. We still want this as a learning space. And why should they suddenly start profiting off cheating in this unashamed way? I think there is potential for some pushback there, and some like a sanity check,
[00:17:56] Jason: absolutely.
[00:17:57] Anna Mills: I know these companies need to make money and they're experimenting, but there's a lot of parents in those companies and there's a lot of people in those companies who might wake up and say, "Hey, maybe we do need to back off from this advertising cheating approach. Maybe that's not the ethos we want." I'm trying to hold out some hope for that.
[00:18:15] John Nash: Yeah, I think puzzling out the long game on this if this sort of feature remained in place, just seems. If a Silicon Valley company that seeks to gain market share and put out tools like this, they're a company that needs software engineers and they need high level managers and they need marketers, and they all have to get their degrees in a.
Post-secondary institution, presumably many of them taking online classes. What will the level of outcomes be for students who rely on agents to take their classes? Who's going to hire them? It's just sort of an existential undoing of the companies by doing this in some way.
[00:18:53] Anna Mills: Yeah, what about when they want to do corporate training? I think there's a separate discussion about this going on among folks who are interested in online corporate trainings because it's the same problem. So, it, it just seems unsustainable and illogical, so how can we send that message is my big question.
And I'm not really, I'm not a politician, I'm not an organizer. But this needs to be done right.
[00:19:17] Jason: . This is one of things I really liked about your Substack: it wasn't just a big "this is happening, what are we going to do?" Kind of thing. It was like here's some ideas. I've thought about this. Here are some approaches. And some was around a list of ways that we can advocate at the end of your Substack, which I appreciated and that actually, helped spur me to start some conversation with our LMS administrator and department because it's a separate, I'm at University of Tennessee, but it's actually a separate department from the online learning department. And I think
[00:19:49] John Nash: And I think
[00:19:50] Jason: there are things that we
[00:19:51] John Nash: there are things.
[00:19:52] Jason: and you talk about raising the issue with colleagues talking to IT department and the whoever manages the LMS contract, these are the people that have. Have direct lines to the people that will take notice, right?
Because these are multimillion dollar contracts that that we have a, we have a choice to renew or not, right? Next time. And if. This is a significant enough of a problem that we feel like it is gutting the value of our education in the perception even if it's not, if it's just even in, in the perception,
[00:20:27] John Nash: it.
[00:20:28] Jason: will stand up in a way when our LMS is up for renewal,
That we will look seriously at what these companies are doing in support of education in our minds.
[00:20:39] Anna Mills: that's a powerful message.
[00:20:40] Jason: . I maybe loop back to a couple of other things. We've talked a little bit about advocacy. As we started this conversation, I think just when we talk about it, obviously it, there's strength in our voices to be able to talk about these things so that it starts to feel more, not just real, but reasonable. That we would have these kinds of expectations out of our technology, right? That they would have some guardrails on them. So, I think Nobody's questioning whether or not online learning can happen age of AI agents because we know people will continue to learn. There's going to be lots of people. I would say the vast majority of people are going to continue to go online to learn and not try to cheat the system. So, some of the concern comes around assessments. Then what are some of the things that you've been
Are some of the things.
it comes to assessing people that are fully online and maybe fully asynchronously online?
[00:21:35] Anna Mills: I've been influenced by Tricia Bertram Gallant, who wrote a great book, the Opposite of Cheating, teaching for Integrity in an Age of AI with David Inger.
Been saying, what if we really can't secure online assessments, but we still want online learning. if we need to maybe look at some proctoring centers, some kind of in-person assessment that compliments online learning. and I think she's partly influenced by this two-lane approach coming out of Australia. The idea of, you can have your formative assessments where you're not trying to secure it, but then you have this periodic kind of program wide, proctored assessment. That are secured. so, I think there's something to that.
We might have to go that direction. I understand that will also exclude people who can't get to proctoring centers. It creates a barrier; it's an equity issue. So, I really want to see the other approaches tried first. And I want to recognize that sometimes students even if they recognize that there's a need for accountability and sort of assessment that has accountability, we should be looking at whether we can do secured online assessments ethically without privacy, invasion and bias. So, I think we have to keep looking at that even though there have been real concerns about things like proctor's video surveillance we should look at what are the ways to do it?
How effective are they? Do they reduce incidents of cheating? Even if they're not perfect. What are the risks? I think we; we have to look at that. But we shouldn't be forced into a corner where we have to give up, everything that we're offering to do that if it's not necessary, if the companies themselves could actually, prevent a lot of it, a lot of the misuse. I don't know if that makes sense or if that really that's what you were looking at,
[00:23:23] Jason: No, I think it does make sense.
[00:23:25] Anna Mills: We can't move toward proctoring overnight, institutionally, that's very complicated. There are these, testing professionals, associations. There are ways to structure programs so you can have some flexibility.
And when a student might come in to take a test that's not going to happen overnight. And it has downsides. As does any kind of, video surveillance, lockdown browsers, all of that. It's I think it's a wicked problem, as Philip Dawson says.
There's not going to be a perfect solution, but let's go to some of the things that would help a lot first, and then we do some careful weighing of the other options too. My approach.
[00:24:03] John Nash: What are you noticing in your teaching experience about. I'll call them low threshold, high impact strategies that online instructors might adopt in the wake of this, that they're not, they don't have access to an instructional designer. They may have some ideas around how to. Get away from what I'll say sort of obvious AI able assignments, and yet still sort of the age agentic stuff sort of gets in the way.
For instance, I think about things like sort of ways to involve project-based learning, other sorts of public demonstrations of learning that might be un-AI-able, but what yeah what's been in your toolbox and what are you recommending for colleagues?
[00:24:48] Anna Mills: I've definitely moved to social annotation over discussion posts and I really love,
[00:24:53] John Nash: Nice.
[00:24:54] Anna Mills: all of the readings in perusal or hypothesis and having this conversation in the margins among students. It's fantastic pedagogically and it's just. Less enticing to use AI for that one sentence, informal comment in the margin. And you can block students from copy pasting into it. So that, that's great. I think video posts yes, those could be autogenerated with maybe HeyGen, but it's less likely. And maybe conferences, conference assessments is something I'm looking at. And I think definitely process assignments that are low stakes that are an un grading, like 40% of my course where there's a lot of step-by-step, you do this assignment you get full credit if you do it.
So, it's not that panicked last minute. It has to be, polished. An AI version. So, I think that's helpful. Of student choice in what they write about, what they focus on. I like that you, you mentioned project-based learning. Things that are meaningful in the real world something they might want to publish or share later on. So yeah, those are just a few things, but I think having a lot of different formats of assignments from video to annotation to Google Docs, where they're sharing their process history on the document is helpful. You can see how much time was spent in the document.
Yes, there are ways around that. Unfortunately, there's software that will simulate typing and time spent and even errors. but again, if you're reducing, you're making it harder to do the wrong thing and easier to do the right thing. In the way you structure it, I think you're enabling a lot more learning.
You're reducing those missed opportunities.
[00:26:35] John Nash: Yeah, that, that's a great list. And I'd heard of the, and the social annotation. It's been a while though, and I think I want to. Yeah, bring that back into my toolbox because I think that's a better way for them to work with me. It's sort of, it seems like every episode I want to quote Michelle Miller and this idea of same side pedagogy, but we're, when we're both reading the article together and commenting on it, we're learning together.
We're on the same side.
[00:27:02] Anna Mills: fun. That's the part, it's fun for me to read their annotations and it's more fun for them. It feels like social media and
It can be auto graded for completion credit. So, it's helping me focus my teaching where the joy is right. I like when it's both and
[00:27:19] John Nash: Love that.
[00:27:20] Anna Mills: misuse and it's actually fun.
[00:27:22] Jason: Yeah, I have found with my classes, one of the things is trying to break things down into smaller chunked interactions as well, like throughout the week. This is part of this kind of social learning so that it doesn't just become a big assignment at the end, and so all of a sudden, you know, all of a sudden, they're looking at the clock they've got an hour. You know, you talk about reasons why students might cheat. Even good students, even people who want to learn, they got an hour before the deadline for of this thing and there's some shortcuts. There's an easy button. It's just so tempting, you know, but if we draw them into an educational learning community where there's lots of micro learning and connections and conversations going on, like around, I love, the suggestions of perusal on a hypothesis and Google Docs and I think John, did you coin this phrase of learning out loud?
[00:28:15] John Nash: No, building in public is something I, I sometimes talk about. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't coin that either. But it's the idea that, yeah, if you're doing that, you're okay with things not being perfect, and then that, that encourages others to try things and also sets it up so that you can receive feedback on what you're doing.
[00:28:33] Jason: Yeah. Do you do any of the, that, the kind of the building in public with your writing with your students?
[00:28:39] Anna Mills: Oh, that's interesting. I think I do that in the sense that I really invite them to give me feedback both anonymously and non-anonymously. And I give them extra credit when they find. Typos and problems. And I share my syllabus at the beginning as a Google doc, and they have to comment on it.
Of sense of trying to share my process. I'm really telling you I don't have all the answers. I want to have this discussion with you. And I think that's an open pedagogy, trust-based, vulnerable approach. That's really important to me. I think I have to get started though on sharing my own, I have shared my own writing process, you know, early drafts and now it's time for me to share like a whole process history with them the way that I asked them to share with me. so that sense of fairness. I try to be really transparent about when I use AI and when I don't as well.
[00:29:29] Jason: Yeah, that's good. Yeah. Yeah. I think communicating around. When you use ai, when you don't model, that kind of transparency we're really looking for in the classroom too, so just mention so many things that if I could put some keywords, into the kind of online learning we are trying to build around human it's transparent, relational. Its trust based, you mentioned trust. John had mentioned same side pedagogy again. I don't that any of those things absolutely, make sure a hundred percent that students aren't cheating. But I think it's certainly makes an environment where cheating is less likely less appetizing, I think, to the student.
[00:30:19] Anna Mills: Yeah, and I think you, it's not either or. I think if you have both that ethos and you have some accountability, I just worked with a student who had submitted an AI essay. It was very clear and so like it was helpful to have that of obvious in the process tracking and the AI detection. Then to meet with him and say, let me sit with you and talk through your ideas. And it's really interesting and help you build confidence and connect to the assignment on your own terms. And so, combining those things maybe can work for students who are at high risk of cheating. I think, yeah, it's not either or one, one way is perfect. So, I've really just learned from the approach that Michelle Pacansky-Brock has shared in the California community College system. Humanizing online learning is a big project she's worked on a foundation grant, and it's just brought so many wonderful strategies to our system and to our training as online So, yeah, I do feel lucky that there's so many great resources like, your podcast and a community of online educators who already know that we need to humanize and we can lean into that.
[00:31:28] Jason: Thank you for including our podcast in of the solution. We feel like it is on some small levels. In some ways it's just an excuse for John and I get together and talk about things that are on our mind and meet cool people. Give us an excuse frankly, to meet. Cool people and to talk to them about it too.
But we do believe that the conversation is part of that solution and helping people stay educated and staying up on the conversation, being open-handed with it as well, I think John and I come to these podcasts with more questions than we have answers. And that's where we are at right now online education.
[00:32:05] Anna Mills: It's a healthy place to be in this moment with ai. I think, if we can stay open and keep talking to each other, we can make a lot more progress than if we have to pretend like we have the answer now to this thing that just came out two hours ago.
[00:32:18] John Nash (2): Well Really appreciate your thoughts, Anna, and especially as I think about how you were closing out that post and the on Substack that jason was talking about towards the end on ways we can advocate. I see you raise the issue with colleagues in your academic Integrity office. IT office.
I'm thinking about sharing it with I'm, it must be on the radar of our Center for Teaching and Learning, but I'm going to share it with them as well. I'm not sure where this is really landing with many online instructors at my institution who probably just are worried about getting out the next module and may not be coming up for air to see what could be operating in the background.
[00:32:56] Anna Mills: Yeah, but it makes sense to do it through our organizations, through our existing structures. Even if they can't fix it, they can raise the issue with other stakeholders. So, we can lean into our institutions here. That's what I've been doing too, is just reaching out to people and committees on the state level. Who's working with Canvas? Who's partnering with these companies? Can we put the pressure on there? Maybe talk, maybe look at our unions or professional organizations. We're working on a statement in this MLA Modern Language Association task force that I'm on. So yeah, just, it shouldn't be individual teachers who have to figure it out in the moment.
Yeah, we can work together.
[00:33:35] John Nash: Yeah. No. Yeah.
[00:33:37] Anna Mills: Thank you so much for having me. This has just been delightful. Yeah, I'm lucky I get to have these kind of conversations and I definitely don't have the answers. I'm not an expert on this issue, but looking forward to everybody else's contributions and voices being
[00:33:50] Jason: Yeah. Thank you for also being part of the solution for taking the time. I just am amazed when people take the time just to, talk with us of course today, but also put out just a really good and thorough. Substack on the issue that has helped me. I've shared it with my instructional designers and having discussions about how do we approach this from the design side, as we talk with faculty. And I think all of these tools can really work together. So thank you so much and thanks for joining us here today.
And for those listening we're going to put into the notes any of the resources that we've talked about today. Our website is online learning podcast.com. That's online learning podcast.com.
And you can find John and I and Anna on LinkedIn. We're active on there, now and again. Right. John, you're more now than again, or is it again
[00:34:37] John Nash: Yeah I'm a little bit back. Yeah, I took I don't know how it was possible, Anna, but I stopped LinkedIn for like six months and just sort of thought about stuff. I don't know. So now I'm going to try and talk about what I thought about.
[00:34:52] Anna Mills: Yeah,
[00:34:53] Jason: Which I think is also important, especially in this age to have embodied experiences, non-computer and non social network experiences so that we can continue to think deeply about things and recognize our shared humanity and that we're part of a world that existed way before this kind of technology as well.
All right. Thank you, Anna.
[00:35:15] Anna Mills: Alright. Thank you. See you online.
[00:35:18] John Nash: Yeah. Thank you so much.

In EP 36, John and Jason talk to Miriam Reynoldson of Melbourne, Australia, about the Open Letter From Educators Who Refuse the Call to Adopt Gen AI in Education.
See complete notes and transcripts at www.onlinelearningpodcast.com
Join Our LinkedIn Group - Online Learning Podcast (Also feel free to connect with John and Jason at LinkedIn too)
Guest Bio:
Miriam Reynoldson is a learning design specialist, educator, and design facilitator working across higher ed, VET, and professional learning. She is currently completing an interdisciplinary PhD exploring the value of learning beyond formal education in postdigital contexts. Miriam researches and writes about education, sociology, and philosophy, and teaches educational design at Monash University.
You can connect with Miriam at https://www.linkedin.com/in/miriam-reynoldson/ or her blog https://miriamreynoldson.com/
Resources:
The Open Letter: https://openletter.earth/an-open-letter-from-educators-who-refuse-the-call-to-adopt-genai-in-education-cb4aee75
The Library of Babel listserve space: https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/listinfo/assembly
The Design Justice Network: https://designjustice.org/
Michelle Miller’s “Same Side Pedagogy”: https://michellemillerphd.substack.com/p/r3-117-september-15-2023-reflection
Theme Music: Pumped by RoccoW is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial License.
Middle Music: Hello (Chiptune Cover) by RoccoW is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License.
Transcript
We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions or can help with any corrections!
Miriam Reynoldson EP 36
[00:00:00]
Jason Johnston: Miriam, you are part of an open letter from educators who refuse the call to adopt gen AI in education. Would you, for us, summarize what this letter's about before we get into the details?
Miriam: So it's a really short letter. It's a 400-word statement that essentially positions a certain stance for educators, in saying, "I choose not to use GenAI to teach, to assess to build my course materials. And I do not want to sell these products to students to do their work, either.
John Nash: I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston.
Jason Johnston: Hey John. Hey everyone. And this is Online Learning in the second half the Online Learning Podcast.
John Nash: Yeah. We're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation that we've been having for the last almost three years now about online education. Look, [00:01:00] online learning has had its chance to be great, and some of it is, but a lot still isn't. And so how are we going to get to the next stage?
Jason Johnston: John, that's a great question. How about we do a podcast and talk about it?
John Nash: I think that's a great idea. What do you want to talk about, today,
Jason Johnston: Today I'm not sure we've covered this at all. How about we talk a little bit about AI for a change, right?
John Nash: Never
Jason Johnston: That's a joke. Never heard of it.
Well, I'm Just very excited today to be talking with Miriam Reynoldson.
We connected on LinkedIn, and she is somebody I just really wanted to have this conversation with around ai. She's an instructor and a student, a learning designer in Melbourne, Australia. Welcome, Miriam. Would you maybe just introduce yourself to our listening audience a little bit?
Miriam: No worries. I am a bit difficult to introduce because I really don't know where I am. I'm kind of juggling multiple identities at the moment and across multiple universities. So, [00:02:00] probably my primary identity in this conversation is mostly my teaching at Monash University. I'm also doing my PhD exploring non-formal learning in digitally mediated spaces at RMIT. I do a little bit of teaching there as well, and I'm also a digital learning design specialist.
Jason Johnston: That's great. Yeah, we on LinkedIn and we'll probably talk a little bit more about how that came about, but a lot of it was around an open letter that you are part of an open letter from educators who refuse the call to adopt gen AI in education. And we'll include the link if anybody wants to preview that before we get into the conversation, we'll put the link in our, podcast. But Miriam, can you talk a little bit first about, how this open letter came about, what led you to do that and who you letter? open letter.
Miriam: Yeah. The dirty secret really is that I was having a bit of a chat to a friend [00:03:00] of mine in Ohio, Melanie Dusseau, who as the first signature on the letter. And she had sent me a link to this letter that had been put together by Literary Hub in the us a consortium of publishers.
And it was essentially a position from the public publishing industry. We don't support the use of AI to replace our authors, our editors or any part of the work that we do in furthering human creative expression. And I went to Melanie, "Why don't we have something like this, but for educators?"
And I think she said to me, "Oh yeah, yeah, the Netherlands have just done that." And she sent me another one. And these amazing people, initially out of Radboud University in the Netherlands, had written this incredible really strongly worded letter presenting a position against the uncritical adoption of AI in academia.
And I went, yeah, yeah, like that except not just [00:04:00] universities. So, we literally went, yeah, okay. We'll just we'll just put something together for like-minded educators who have made the personal choice and we're not going to say we're banning it or anything like that, but just essentially trying to create a space for educators like us who don't feel our voices are being heard.
And I was going away for the weekend, so we kind of just whipped it up. Some exchange of messages. Melanie went, "Yeah, yeah, that's great. Let's go up." And it just went up and then kind of blew up. And so, I think we're just butting up against a thousand signatures now. But what's been much more striking to me is the hundreds of messages I've received from educators who are unable to publicly put their names to it but who feel profoundly sympathetic and struggling with the dissonance and challenges of being faced with mandates to adopt [00:05:00] or encourage students to adopt generative AI tools in their education spaces. So, I think that we're really just trying to create a space where It's safe to speak about how we feel. Even if that is not feeling, identical to the sentiment in the letter.
Jason Johnston: Of these hundreds of educators that you've talked to, why do you think they feel like they support it, but they can't publicly support it.
Miriam: It's a profoundly political situation. And we probably don't have enough time for a huge unpacking of global politics. And obviously I'm speaking to people in North America and I'm sitting here comfortably in down under.
Jason Johnston: What's market like down under? Asking for a friend.
Miriam: In university is absolutely shocking. So, I speak as a learning designer. That's been the vast majority of my career. And for learning designers, this is profoundly difficult [00:06:00] because we don't have our own syllabi, we don't have our own courses and our own ability to determine this is what our curriculum is going to be.
We're there as support and we work with academics across universities to guide them, particularly in the technological aspects of the work that they're doing. And so, it generally means being agnostic to a whole range of things. But particularly to the technologies that are being trialed either by the academics or by the universities that have made partnerships with certain technology companies that makes it an incredibly political position to have more so for people in the third space than in academic roles.
But as I'm sure you're both aware, academic freedom is a very fraught concept. And so, we, we do often self-censor because we're very [00:07:00] conscious of how tight the education job market is.
Jason Johnston: it seems, anyways, yeah, that's a whole thing. It seems like we have educational freedom until we don't have it. Would you, for us just summarize what this letter's about before we get into the details?
Miriam: No worries. So, it's a really short letter. We used a platform that doesn't allow hyperlinking. There's no references or anything like that. It's a 400-word statement that essentially positions a certain stance for educators, whether they're in K to 12 early childhood education, university, community education, professional training, any aspect of education.
Walking in saying, "I choose not to use GenAI to teach, to assess to build my course materials. And I do [00:08:00] not want to sell these products to students to do their work, either. It's not about a ban. It's not about preventing students from making their own choices or evaluating the outcomes of those. So, from my perspective as a signatory, not as the author of the letter I work with my students really closely on their use of generative ai. protect their right respect to
use it to if they choose that.
Jason Johnston: Great. Well, it's a very well-crafted letter. What are your what are your first questions about this? What would you like to get into?
John Nash: I just wanted to get into less of a question, but more of a maybe a reiteration of something you said, Miriam, which is that it's not a request for a ban. And I think if you read between the lines here it aligns with this idea that, there could be a world where large language [00:09:00] models could be developed and work in a way that we could all agree with if some of these issues were resolved, but they aren't. And the world we live in now looks like what is laid out here in the letter, and therefore if you agree with these notions, then you should be a signator to it, I think.
So, I, could see how groups could, stripes of people could see this as a salvo against ai. But rather it's about allowing people to have agency to say that they believe that this track that we're on now is not viable. Then there could be one later, but right now we sign to say "no" is. Is that fair?
Miriam: Most certainly. As you were speaking, I was thinking about the concept of a ban and its relationship to legal regulation. As educators, we are not in a space where we [00:10:00] we can say outright, this should be made illegal. And therefore, it's banned by default. But I think
the trouble with bringing in a legal conversation is that it becomes quite a final and conversation-ending decision what you're talking about, John, is the potential for a generative AI technology to become valuable and deployed in, in service of human goals and educational goals.
If we were to ban or to make illegal these technologies that would foreclose that possibility. I think there's always space for exploration, but I think there's also a critical role for education to play defending people's choices and values in this moment too.
Jason Johnston: Yeah.
John Nash: I think that's great, Miriam. I think and I really enjoyed looking [00:11:00] at the open letter because, Jason and I were talking, I've been coming to a personal reckoning of my own cognitive dissonance some of these aspects and others in the list I love I wholly agree with a lot of these and then, and so I'm starting to ask myself what about all these other matters that I think are really important or that I actually know outright?
I love Timnit Gebru's work. I know that these models are biased. I know, I know all kinds of things, awful things and, yet I'm asked to think about, and I use, and I work with generative ai. So, I'm starting to really think more carefully about how I want to be in that space.
Miriam: That's really intriguing. So, I know when you initially reached out, Jason, it was probably, what, two months ago? It's been a little while.
John, you're saying you, you looked at the open letter recently. Did, is that the first time that you'd had a look at it or um,
okay. I'm purely curious [00:12:00] because a lot of. People have come to me and said it's really quite strident language. You know, it's really emotive and it's really and I’ll be honest with you, I tried to tone it down as much as I could. It's the most fact-based dispassionate set of concerns. Because I was conscious that we were potentially writing for hundreds of people. I thought maybe, we maybe 17 or something. but you know, who knows?
And I don't want to put emotions in other people's mouths. I simply wanted to state, these are concerns that we have, that mean we've made this choice. So, it was really surprising to me to find that it produced those kinds of emotions for people. Did you find that, or was it different for you?
John Nash: No, I did not. I did not find it strident, and I appreciate you asking that. 'Cause I was wondering now "why didn't I?"
It reminds me of some of the things that I've signed onto before with another network, the Design Justice [00:13:00] network comes to mind, who have principles around the ways in which designers ought to be thinking about the world and using design to for instance, I'm looking at them now, "sustain, heal, empower," " centering the voices of those who are directly impacted by the outcomes of the design process should be center." So, it's really decentering designers as experts on top of people to really, and prioritizing community and others as experts. And that rung true with me in thinking about the importance of valuing human intelligence and the spirit around academic integrity curriculum development, and honoring students' rights to resist and refuse as well. And so just it's looking to others and honoring the voice of others in the process of considering the use of GenAI.
Miriam: I, I have to say I remind myself constantly there are no authors in an open letter. I think [00:14:00] it's. Important to sort of center or de-center and recognize that everyone is a cos signatory. But those words that resonated with you uh, Melanie Dusseau's she was the person plotted with me on putting those words together. And she comes from a literary and creative writing background. So, yeah, she's able to distill some of those values in, in very few syllables which is wonderful.
John Nash: I think it's that not endorsing the automation and exploitation of intellectual and creative labor. Not only in the sort of the background of like the creative labor that was used to train these models, but also in thinking about how we want to enhance the intellectual and creative work of our students, and therefore, what role should or should not generative AI be? Or should there be a presence of generative AI in that process? And my inclination is less so to the extent that we want to engender critical thinking on [00:15:00] the part of our learners. I think that this is, yeah. These are good.
Miriam: It's a question I ask, not because there's a right answer or an answer that I want to hear but I think it's interesting to find what sparks emotion where you perhaps don't imagine there is any, or indeed what emotions those are.
But I also just really appreciate that you looked at it particularly from a specific perspective and you spoke about design, because one of the things that we absolutely couldn't include in that I think it's less than 400 words, you know, was that every discipline, every field, every occupation is its own universe of practices and values.
And so, for Melanie. Coming from the perspective of poetry and art and creative, like painful [00:16:00] gut, wrenching human expression to have that emulated by a text extruding algorithm of whatever kind seems like some kind of profound violence. And of course, that, is not a feeling that you would have if you were looking at this tool and thinking this is a tool that can support me to crunch enormous volumes of qualitative data that is dispassionate and not associated with human pain or struggle, you know, the context is completely different.
So, I come at it from a perspective of educational design which I think is obviously a context that we all share. And I look at it thinking, well, I've kind of given it my best shot. I've tried to scope out all of the possible ways of applying generative AI text and visual tools that I can.
And it's [00:17:00] really produced nothing but irritation. So, I'm not going to recommend it to my students who are learning design, because that would be disingenuous. But that's going to be a different story for every educator, every practitioner. It's really difficult to encapsulate
John Nash: It, is And as I was
talking
with Jason earlier about this, in sort of a, I have now in the last, I'd say even six months a growing cognitive dissonance around the fact that when I look at number one, we will not use generative AI to mark or provide feedback on student work. Okay. I can get behind that, nor design any part of our courses. Oh my God. I am, I'm using it as a partner to design a lot of stuff in my courses. Read number two, I will not yeah, I'm, I do believe that they were unethically developed in many ways. I don't accept the sales evidence or the evidence of the sales agenda very well, et cetera, et cetera. So, I got through number one and I kind of cringed a little and I thought, oh boy.
And I don't know what it's would [00:18:00] be like for me. I think it would be, I've never been a smoker, but I think, I mean, if I have to quit cigarettes, that would be. The designing the part of my courses. I think that would be the, where I would go through some withdrawal. And then as I think, more about that, I think, well, why would I go through withdrawal?
And he said, well, because I would really put in more of the intellectual, creative labor, maybe that the partner, that whatever partnership generative AI provides for me there, I would be putting more time in time - aha. So that means I'm really not managing my time. I need to look at as if, so as a sort, as a professor and a person with a family, you know, I do teaching, research and service. and so, if I'm really valuing the intellectual labor and creativity that goes in. I need to not do other things because the generative ai
is probably doing things for me that allow me to do things faster. No, but is it at quality? So, these are these discussions I'm having in my head. But I, think that it's really a thought about what do we value in our time. And so, [00:19:00] that's been interesting.
Miriam: That is super, super interesting. Acknowledging my positionality again. I teach really small cohorts of postgraduate students. And I'm not a full-time academic. I'm not dealing with student cohorts of hundreds of students in a class. I, don't have that kind of struggle of thinking, how on earth am I going to get, through marking week? And so, I have a lack of that context and that challenge of this all has to get done, come hell or high water. And there are tradeoffs that I need to make. Because when marking week comes on, I go, oh my God. I finally get my best opportunity to dig into what my students are trying to do feels very different.
You know, 15 or hundred.
John Nash: Yes. And that's a lovely point because I think that when some others get to that period when it's marking period or marking time, they may see that as a [00:20:00] drudgery, and, not an opportunity. It reminds me, we keep referring to a, who's someone who's sort of become a friend of the podcast, but Michelle Miller is a cognitive psychologist at Northern Arizona University who talks about "same side pedagogy," that we should be on a learning journey together. So, the marking period is an opportunity for us to get to know our students work better, become part of the ride with them through their learning journey. But I think that also many things have been set up, and we can talk more about like, what's happened in online learning and the way assessment is considered and things like that.
It becomes more transactional than a co-learning journey and then can be seen as drudgery and
then dread like, oh my God, I've got to do the
marking period now, and how can I, that takes too much time. Can I do something else?
Aha. Generative ai, should I Hmm. Could be alluring. So, I think, and thanks to the,
The product placement in the product agenda it can be made to sound alluring.
We were recently talking in an episode we're about to release
about what instructor's doing to sort
of [00:21:00] fake the professor of a course so that the student can
get prospective potential feedback of what the professor might
say,
Before turning anything
Yeah, it's really, so there's all kinds of, it's Grammarly.
Thank you. Thank you.
Yes. Yeah. So yeah. That's really, yeah. Interesting that.
Jason Johnston: We
connected on LinkedIn.
I was very intrigued
by the letter. Really agree with much of it in the same. Generous spirit. I will say that you are entering into this conversation with us on LinkedIn.
You're really opening up the door for people to kind of give some feedback. And I think that what invited me into a conversation with you was I
I kind of responded something.
to the effect of I agree with a lot of these things. I, I have a slightly d different perspective on some, and you asked me what some of those things were.
I think probably the places like John that I [00:22:00] think about where I'm not, and maybe it's just an unwillingness to give up ai, but I also see part of my purpose as a teacher to be educating my students how to move into a world that is using AI and to educate them to use it effectively. And so, and then when I say effectively in a way that is, has a human in the loop, I talk a lot with my students as well as my staff about the human ai, human sandwich. Where, we start with our own effort and creativity. Perhaps we use some AI in the middle in terms of efficiency. We always come back to the human review at the end to make sure that it's accurate and it's unbiased and all the things.
So, my kind of approach to some of this is, is probably more of a moderate use, where I'd say, yeah, I agree with some of these things. But I think I'd prefer to be [00:23:00] a solution in the middle of it and to help guide students and people and staff and educators to use it in a way that is thoughtful versus a full resistance altogether.
But I'm curious what moved you into this space of more of a full resistance to it in education? And then what then compelled you to write this letter and to try to move it in this direction?
Miriam: So, I think it’s interesting that that you suggest a, a quite a common position is that I feel as an educator, I have a responsibility to, to support my students, to understand. And it's the choice of verbs under that to support my students to something. That is really where the cookie crumbles, I think. We have all these amazing debates about [00:24:00] AI literacy and what it is actually encompassed within that. And if we put critical on the front of it does that change the contents of our sandwich? To run with the analogy.
I appreciate that your own experience as a user has been different from mine. And I think that we do as educators have a responsibility to be honest with our students about what we find valuable as people who they're learning from.
I don't want to stand up in front of my class and tell them, well, this is a really amazing tool that I don't like. And I personally find to be like, worse than useless and adds time to our workloads and requires a great deal of rework. So, an example, I led a project last year across a university seeking ways of incorporating generative AI tools in learning design across the sort of end-to-end course development [00:25:00] process. And it was a really disappointing project.
And we ultimately, we found sort of isolated use cases that worked for a single person but didn't work for the rest of their team, or things that produced one-off resources that wouldn't be edited but needed to be rebuilt from scratch if they ever needed to change.
And we sort of walked away from it going we were going to produce a toolkit here. Can we actually release this? Are there any tools? And so having done that work, I personally would find it incredibly disingenuous to sound and tell my students. I don't find it useful, but I’m sure there are uses because I'm not sure there are uses not for what I do. And I think that somebody who has found, particularly effective things, it would be disingenuous for them not to say so, because every teacher and our experiences are [00:26:00] different. This is where I think ethics is about decisions and actions that a person makes, not universal principles that should be followed by everyone regardless of who they are and what they do. Can you remind me what other things were you asking?
Jason Johnston: I know it was a long thing. It was, more around this kind of question then of rather than full on resistance. Saying that, I will have no part in AI at my school or in my classrooms. I don't advocate it for my, student use, trying to be kind. The, change in the middle. and I know even as I say that it perhaps sounds a little trite to say you're going to be the change in the middle of things. But that really is my position on this, that I want to learn and understand all that I can about it. I try to find where it's useful and where it's not useful and try to advocate for a good use of [00:27:00] it as much as possible.
And within that, like you said, create contextual ethical agreements. I was part of that with University of Tennessee overall, as well as then contextualizing it into my own team, which is a learning design team about how we use that and how, really thinking more about almost ethics of care because we have various types of people in our, on our team that do different work. And so, probably the things that I feel is most strongly about in terms of the ethics is having, AI replace one of your colleagues. And so that's a lot where my ethics come in. So, our instructional designers should not be using it to replace our graphic designers, and our video people should not be replacing our instructional designers with it and, and so on.
So, that was kind of my larger question then about full on resistance, what drew you to [00:28:00] that versus being a change in the middle.
Miriam: Something that I will say and obviously it doesn't come out in the letter because I'm me, I'm not everyone. And the letter doesn't say, I will not allow my students to use generative AI tools. Although I think it, it often reads as though that's the position. It's often been it's often been read as we advocate for a ban, which is. Absolutely the opposite of the fundamental driving principle of this is about choice. And we've made a choice and we're asking our institutions to, to support it. The thing is I teach adults and I joke, but it's not a joke that they wouldn't do what I told them if I told them.
Because they can make their own choices. I'm just a person that they meet on their journey. And so, we don't actually restrict the use of generative AI at all in any of their learning or in their [00:29:00] assessment submissions. And that means that I absolutely have a responsibility and I take it very seriously to talk about the ways that they are using or thinking about using. Mostly large language models. Mostly it is, text that is generated, but also, we do some digital design work. So, there's some video and visual material that they do produce. Sometimes I'm less concerned about the quality of the visuals. Although you know, we are at the moment setting aside all of the fairly glaring issues of plagiaristic and data exploitation that makes those things happen. But I am extremely concerned by what I see when students use large language models. That's not to say that it's all junk. It's absolutely not by and large what I've seen over the last three years, because we've never restricted this, is that the [00:30:00] students who are doing well continue to do well. And the students who are struggling continue to struggle because they're not able to discern or synthesize quality material from what is extruded, from the tools they're using. So that that is one indicator for me that using Tool X or not using Tool X is completely immaterial in the skills that we're teaching. So, I then from my own an again, my own entirely limited totally ideographic perspective say I'm not going to stop you, but I'm going to ask you to tell me what you're doing because that helped me provide that the most. Targeted, tailored, meaningful feedback that I possibly can. Because I'm going to help you evaluate your outputs. That's my responsibility. I don't care whether AI was used to produce them. I care about whether they're quality and whether that you [00:31:00] are able to consistently produce quality. That's a different story. That's about my students' choices.
Jason Johnston: That's interesting. And perhaps I didn't read it carefully enough, but I think some of my impression from this, I would assume then that your syllabus would have a very strong no AI position. So, like for instance,
our institution the provost has provided three kinds of like examples where one is like a strict No ai approach, moderate and then an open, right? I tend to adopt the moderate one because of a variety of reasons, because I want to have more transparency. And I think I assume from reading that it, if I stepped into your classroom, that it would be, it would look like a strict no ai policy.
Miriam: Sure. You've got to remember that letter is not me. That there is no I in, in [00:32:00] any of those statements. There's simply a determination for any individual who chooses to sign it. I'm not going to be using it myself. And that's something that I, have publicly agreed to and a lot of people have privately agreed to and have reached out to me and told me I can't sign it.
I can't be seen publicly to be saying this. But that is the position I've personally taken. It's entirely a personal decision. It's got absolutely nothing to do with what they instruct their students, aside from not selling whatever open AI product, has signed a partnership with the university.
Jason Johnston: Yeah, and I think that's a place that, I don't know what you think, John, what your thoughts on this, but I certainly wholeheartedly agree with the, the right to resist in terms of that this is not an inevitable, future. that in order to be an upstanding and productive [00:33:00] faculty member, you don't have to jump on the AI train.
I think that students do need to have awareness, and I think it actually is good for them whether or not they use it productively in either their classwork or their work. think it's really good for citizens, all citizens to understand what's going on here. Some of it to understand the kind of how that it can be fairly powerful and it's getting better and how much it can mimic human responses. I think those are the things that are really, could be eye-opening for people, whether or not they choose to use it.
Miriam: Something that I will say is that it's getting better and better is a very debatable statement. I'm extremely conscious that the scaling laws are collapsing at this point. From a lot of estimates, we are going backwards in terms of the performance of the leading models. As well what we're actually seeing it is a rise in the multimodal models that are promoting [00:34:00] things like access to producing deep fakes for anyone.
So, I can't remember this is embarrassing, but I can't remember the name of the, what is it? Nova model that was. Recently announced that will enable children to produce deep fakes of themselves social media, deep fakes. That really frightens me. And I'll tell you one of the reasons that frightens me is that I had a student and again, all my students at Postgraduates for their mature age who submitted a deep fake of one of my colleagues.
So, one of my peer teachers doing a bond dance in their final project assessment. We found that. Confounding. I don't think it was submitted in bad faith. I think that student thought it was interesting and that it was something that the person marking it would find amusing. And my colleague went, I don't even know what to do. It's a failure, but I also do not know what to [00:35:00] do. That it, it becomes incredibly frightening. Something I did also want to add was that again idiography, right? My syllabus has always included ai. And when I say always, I mean, since we started running the course in 2021 because it is a digital education design program.
And so, we've been including that as a specific component of our curriculum. So, we have a component in our curriculum that is specifically about the use of not just generative ai, but also other forms of AI in education design and education systems.
And as you can imagine, learning analytics and big data are a massive part of that. But of course, it's been completely taken over by generative AI tools in the past probably two years or so where I draw the line is inserting how to prompt engineer Fairly limited [00:36:00] time that, that we have with our students. There's material all over the free internet that enables them to have a play with prompting. And students are much more likely to look for that stuff than to listen to what their teachers are telling them. But they are much more likely to listen to feedback and to listen to
The kind of advice and support that they receive about the subject matter if they're struggling. So, I think that's where we as educators do need to have a sense of responsibility about what it is. We are qualified to teach. I'm a bit of a nerd when it comes to this stuff but I'm not, a computer scientist. Not by any means. I probably more of a digital sociologist. And I think that while I can share some of my perspectives, I don't want to spend all my students' time lecturing about the, those things or making them feel bad about their own choices either.
So, I guess that's where I need to be [00:37:00] careful about how much time I choose to spend in class discussing these things and allow them to make their own choices then, and then them what I'm there
Jason Johnston: Right.
Miriam: Them.
Jason Johnston: Yeah. You don't want to be at a you know, this class has nothing to do with ai. Okay. Now for my first lecture on AI.
John Nash: Hey, we're taking a quick pause here 'cause we're wondering, is this conversation useful?
Because if it is, we'd love it if you'd take a moment to follow the show, so you don't miss any new episodes.
In Apple Podcasts. All you have to do is tap the plus sign on the show page, and in Spotify you tap the follow button.
Jason: Yeah, and also if you find it useful and you are liking this show, we'd really appreciate it if you rated us, it would help us in the algorithms and get us in front of other people.
In Apple Podcasts, you kind of scroll all the way down, you'll find some stars, and that's where you rate.
And then in Spotify podcasts, on the podcast page, there's a three-button menu and you click that and then rate this [00:38:00] podcast.
We would appreciate it.
John Nash: Because the algorithms are run by AI and remember, AI needs to be our friend.
Jason: That's right. We want to do whatever we can really to support the AI and the work that they're, the hard work that AI is doing these days to help move us all along into a better future.
John Nash: It's the hard work AI is doing to make sure that you and I keep talking about AI.
Jason: That's right. That's right.
John Nash: But mostly what we're interested in is whether you are seeing changes in your own work. We're collecting some testimonials. Tell us a story. If the show has influenced your thinking or your practice in any way, you
can share that with us at onlinelearningpodcast.com. We have a link at the top of our page that points to a short form. We'd love to hear from you.
Jason: Yep. Bright yellow letters. 'cause somehow, we ended up on that color. I'm not sure how, but we did.
John Nash: But on its black background, it's accessible. Is that what you're saying?
Jason: Absolutely. Of course it is. John. We're the online learning podcast.
John Nash: We have to be [00:39:00] accessible. Excellent. Alright, back to the episode.
Miriam, I also teach postgraduate adults. I'm in a department of educational leadership, so ostensibly we train teachers to become school leaders, but also in post-secondary and higher education settings. We have doctoral programs where people aspire to lead inside colleges and universities. and so, I appreciate the group that, you're working with.
And also, a, comment you made that when it comes to, I think you said, but with the use of ai, the students who are doing well will do well and the students who struggle will struggle. And it made me think about then, because I'm in a department with colleagues who think about the life cycle of learners from preschool to post-secondary and particularly what happens to learners when they decide to enter into university.
I'm wondering then Why is it we have students who enter university who are [00:40:00] in the stage of struggling still and maybe didn't do so well in in high school. And I wonder if there's a, we think all the time actually, like how might we prepare students better for entry so that they're not struggling? And I don't think there's a pat answer for that, but it made me think about that is that as you have a post-secondary adult student who's in ostensibly good faith, creating a deep fake of a peer teacher I would've wished that they knew that wasn't a great idea. And so how might they have been socialized to, that's a form of a struggle in a way.
It's, I mean, and it's not an academic struggle, but it's a, you know, a critical thinking or a decision struggle. But I'm wondering how we might be supporting our learners along the way to be, more. Prepared.
Miriam: No, I think it's a really, really interesting question and one that, we could have a very long weed session on. But when I think of students struggling at [00:41:00] university the first thing that comes to mind is a student who lacks the cultural capital that is required to kind of master the hidden curriculum.
Which I know is a cliche, but it's a cliche for a reason. And so, we're often talking about academic writing skills or we're talking about the particular forms of logic that a teacher is looking for. But then bringing up a case like a student producing something that is really, really ethically questionable and not being able to recognize that it, it is kind of not on, is a different kind of struggle, isn't it? That's one where I start to get on, my high horse a little bit. Forgive me about our devaluing of the humanities a across the entire life cycle of somebody's educational journey. I'm getting more and more into ethics and I recall, Jason, you spoke about [00:42:00] ethics of care earlier, which I yeah. Kind of had a bit of a squee moment. I think that it's something that we're terrible at. I think it's something that if we are going to start inserting something broadly into our curricula, it shouldn't be AI literacy, I don't think that there's any way of supporting students other than to center values.
In our education when we're talking, if I shift back to equity and I shift back to those spaces of cultural capital that are lacking. And particularly a lot of my students who are, yes, they're in a postgraduate course. But that doesn't always mean that they've completed an undergraduate program. Sometimes they have been admitted on grounds of a significant amount of prior experience. Sometimes they've been working in an educational space for a significant amount of time. I'm thinking of one student in [00:43:00] particular who told me that they were being given a significant amount of additional support through the university as a part of this kind of bridging, so that they were able to do the postgraduate program. And it was absolutely natural that of course they were going to struggle. It was their first time at university. And this is a person who that, you know, I couldn't tell you how old they were. I have not got that information, but I would suggest that they were, at least in their fifties that there are all kinds of struggles that someone is going to have that are related to being in this space that is brand new to them. But being at an age where it's assumed that they have really significant levels of understanding of how to conduct themselves both at university and in an online program. I don't necessarily think that the question is about preparing them so that they're able to fly the moment they get [00:44:00] in but about holding them while they're there. I really quiet like it when my students do badly because it means they're pushing themselves further than they can go yet. what else is the point of school?
John Nash: Yeah. Thank you for that. One other thing I wondered, and I liked looking at the letter and then liked looking at your, a recent post you. made on LinkedIn talking about this inevitability argument. And you posted "there are possible worlds where large language models and other big data algorithms are developed in ways we can support, regulated with clarity and values and deployed in service of meaningful goals."
That would be lovely. If that were to come about would that solve some of the issues that the signatures are signing onto in the letter?
Miriam: In this beautiful utopian imaginary, absolutely. You might notice early on in the letter it says [00:45:00] current generative AI technologies. And then it, it moves on to specify, I think we list particular companies that are behind 99% of the generative AI technologies that are available. And of course, within universities it's, it's rounding up a hundred percent.
What's available is open I AI or spun off open AI or spun off copilot. It's not really about generative AI as a concept. That's a, a, very nebulous concept in the first place. What kind of, what kind of computing technology is not generative,
But it's about how we are currently responding to what was essentially a sneaky release of a completely illegal product approximately three years ago that a number of other companies already had [00:46:00] in gestation but weren't saying anything about because they knew that they had stolen millions of copyrighted documents to produce they were afraid to make those public OpenAI did it. And they went, maybe the water's warm. I think we can do better than that. I really
John Nash: I like what you say here: the, AI inevitability argument, the throwing up the arms, that this is inevitable because it's inevitable is really saying that that we have to that it's inevitable that we'll have to take these unethically developed tools as they are, and that, that that a regulation with clarity and values and deployed in service of meaningful goals it will be probably long down the road if ever coming and so therefore let's just take it as it is because the value proposition being put forth by the companies and their agents suggests that [00:47:00] this is going to be good eventually.
"Look, they're, look, they're trying, aren't they? Trying? Look how they try, they're trying," I think is sort of, and so therefore, "don't worry, it is inevitable." Yeah. I think, yeah. Thank you for this.
Yeah.
Miriam: Oh, thank you for that. One of the most terrifyingly insidious arguments that we do come up against is the notion that yes, we have reversed our greenhouse gas emissions trajectory. Yes, our emissions related to data centers have quadrupled and are rising horrifyingly and steadily as more and more data centers are stood up across the world. But if we keep developing ai, eventually it will get so good, it will solve this problem. And to me, while I think any, artificial intelligence, computer scientist worth their salts is going to be [00:48:00] able to refute that one pretty rapidly. I don’t know if you read Gary Marcus
John Nash: Yeah, big fan.
Miriam: it's not an excuse to keep doing it until that happens. It may be a reason to hold out hope. I think what you asked earlier, John, could we develop systems that resolve and address a lot of these challenges? And then could a lot of these concerns go away? Of course, but we don't keep supporting the slavery while we wait.
So, I think there's space for acknowledging that some people absolutely need to use whatever they possibly can to achieve short-term goals that help us get towards long-term ones. But is not work in service at that long-term goal. I think it fundamentally does come back to values. What do we want to see? And is what we're doing right now serving that? [00:49:00] And if it's not, what could we do instead?
John Nash: Thank you.
Jason Johnston: As we kind of try wrap this like
John Nash: what,
Jason Johnston: what's the best way to, either engage with you or the letter, or to, further
their own thinking, on this matter?
Miriam: sure. I am incurably on LinkedIn. So pretty easy to find on LinkedIn. I think I'm the only Marian Reynoldson in the world. I do have a blog. Again, it's just m reynolds.com. But if people are actually in, people who are in the education space in whatever way. Teachers, parents, leaders, administrators, librarians, students, anybody who is connected to education and feels this is something they do feel strongly about. I have been rallying with some sympathetic folks across the world to pull together a little bit of a, an organized space called the Library of Babel [00:50:00] group. So, I'll share the link to access our List Serve. So, I won't try to quote the URL on audio but that might be something that if people are looking to connect and to kind of find the right orientation for them that could be a useful way to do it and network.
Jason Johnston: Sounds great. Thank you so much. Yeah, we'll get those links from you, your Substack, to your LinkedIn and for that group we'll make sure we put them on our website. And for those listening, it's online learning podcast.com.
That's online learning podcast.com.-
Miriam, thank you so much for visiting with us today. You've, I think really challenged us and gave us a lot of food for thought not today. Just a delightful conversation. So, thank you so much.
Miriam: It was a pleasure. I hope I wasn't too ranty.
Jason Johnston: No.
John Nash: Not at all.
Miriam: It's too tempting.
John Nash: Yeah. Miriam, this was a delight. I think that you are part of a good [00:51:00] conversation that's going on that we all need to have. As I said, sort of what I'm calling a cognitive dissonance that's occurring. I'm running into more and more people in my circles who are not interested in bringing generative AI into their world for a number of reasons, whether it's around environmental reasons or around ethical reasons. And I think that after almost three years of this sort of a, of juggernaut of" look at where this is going" and "this is inevitable," I'm seeing more and more people think, well, maybe it doesn't have to be inevitable and there's ways we can think about this more thoughtfully. And so today really helped me solidify some of that thinking. And I thank you.
Miriam: Yeah I really, really enjoy it and I, I just find that this space is dynamic, decisions are dynamic, our minds can change and I. The world changes around us as well. It's exciting that there are more people near me not [00:52:00] necessarily geographically proximate but that I'm able to connect with who resonate with where I'm sitting.
But it's also incredibly valuable to me to have all kinds of conversations with people sitting in All kinds of other places. 'cause otherwise it's just me talking to me. And,
I mean, that sounds amazing to, me.
John Nash: definitely.
Miriam, thank you So, much.
Jason Johnston: yeah.
John Nash: just been delightful, really. Thank you for staying up late with us. Yeah.
Jason Johnston: Yes.
Miriam: Likewise. Thank you very much.
END OF TRANSCRIPT

In EP 35, John and Jason kick off fall 2025 with a conversation on how AI has been added to Grammarly and Canvas (whether we like it or not) and if the future of online learning will be formed by Cyborg pedagogy (and what that means). 
See complete notes and transcripts at www.onlinelearningpodcast.com
Join Our LinkedIn Group - *Online Learning Podcast (Also feel free to connect with John and Jason at LinkedIn too)*
Guest Bios:
John Nash, PhD, is an associate professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Kentucky.
Jason Johnston, PhD, is the Executive Director of Online Learning and Course Production at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Resources:
Canvas and OpenAI Partnership Press Release
Theme Music: Pumped by RoccoW is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial License.
Transcript:
We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions or can help with any corrections!
EP 35 - Educators with or versus AI? Grammarly, Canvas AI, and Cyborg Pedagogy
Jason: But I'm looking forward to the, great list of potential guests that we have. I don't want to say any names yet 'cause nobody said yes yet.
John: No.
Jason: We don't have any yeses yet,
John: Yeah. Everybody's just
Jason: on the calendar yet
John: our list is amazing,
Jason: Yeah, we've got a great list.
John: no one's, we haven't sent them invitations yet.
Jason: Yeah. Well, yeah, I guess there's that too. So we haven't gotten any nos. That's a good part
John: No. No.
Jason: Yeah.
John: No. Yes.
I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston.
Jason: Hey, John. Hey everyone. And this is Online Learning in the second half, the Online Learning podcast.
John: Yeah. We're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation we've been having for now our third season kicking off about online education. I know. And so, hey, newsflash, online learning is still trying to be great. Some of it is, a lot of it still isn't quite there,
Jason. We're gonna keep talking about how to get it to the next stage.
How are we gonna do that?
Jason: That is a great question. How about we talk about today, what we're thinking about this fall as we head into this new school year and new season?
John: Yeah, absolutely. It's been an interesting summer. Little things popping up here and there. I notice Grammarly's doing some interesting things. Looks like Canvas is doing some things. A lot of stuff on the horizon.
Jason: . Yeah. And I would love to get into those, but I wanted to just kind of on the front end as we're kind of restarting the season, just even talk a little bit about, just a overall standpoint just for a moment here to talk about why we are doing this podcast. What do you think, John? Why are we doing this podcast again?
John: I think we're doing this podcast for a couple of reasons. I'll throw out the very selfish reason why I'm doing this podcast. This is my professional development activity. This keeps me honest in terms of thinking about what I believe is important about teaching and learning online.
It also gives me a chance to hear what you're thinking and I value your opinion and your philosophies a lot. And I think it also lets us share some ideas with like-minded people who are really interested in trying to make online teaching and learning better.
Jason: Yeah. That's good. I've got a check mark beside all those. Always enjoy the conversation with you, John. This is a big part of wanting to do these. I always look forward to them and And we realized when we started adding guests to our podcast, although we really enjoy our conversations, but it just adds another element of another voice. And that's one thing I really value about bringing different guests with different viewpoints in. As we get started this year, I hope to bring in some different viewpoints, not just people that would just agree with everything that we have to say, but people that maybe would challenge us and challenge some of our approaches to online learning and integrating technology and trying to humanize online learning, all of those things. I would love to get into conversations with people who really push us to think more deeply and more concretely as well. Like, how is this really gonna play out?
John: Yeah, I want to keep talking about that. I want to keep talking about as we're gonna probably chat about today as we think about the topics that I wanted to bring up things are getting a little more automated. The prevalence of AI across platforms is increasing and it's going to be a slippery slope, I think, for keeping humans in the loop.
I think even the, sort of the sales scripts that are coming out are saying, it's almost as if it's saying, " you don't need as much humanity in the loop; we got this now." And I don't think that's the case. And I think I want to, I want to be a part of the band that's playing the song set that says, Hey folks, we need to stick together on this.
We need to be humans in this loop and keep it all human centered.
Jason: Yeah, I agree. Yep. Well, those seem like perfect themes to keep going on here in our podcast. And as part of that you were talking a little bit to me the other day about these kind of new features that Grammarly is rolling out. And a lot of people, I use Grammarly. I used it on my I use it often. Sometimes it's a little frustrating 'cause it just pops up everywhere it seems like now that I have it, installed on my computer, but I find it very helpful. I don't pay for it right now. I'm not being paid by them, but I find it very helpful to just have this grammar help.
But it feels like they're moving into a new kind of AI era.
John: Yeah. And what's interesting is here, in my department we have a doctoral program. We have an online curriculum. We held the first meeting of the new cohort of doctoral students and we talked about, tools that they might find useful in their doctoral journey.
And we had some currently enrolled doctoral students, a couple of other professors. And Grammarly came up. And one of the new students asked " if I use Grammarly for like, changing my phrasing or things like that, is that gonna be considered cheating when in my new program with you?"
And and I said, and my colleague, professor, colleague also concurred that I asked students to use Grammarly before they turn in their material. Because, as a mentor in a scholarly process, I want to be able to think about the ideas that they are bringing forth, and not necessarily the mechanics and correcting the copy.
I want to jump right into the thinking. And so by running the typical Grammarly checker on subject verb agreement and clearing up things, that's fine. I like doing that. Now , I'm jumping into Grammarly and I'm seeing new features are popping up.
And so it's interesting to think about what are these new AI agents that they're sticking in there that go beyond just checking your grammar as the name of the app says it's "Grammarly," right? We want, " please turn in your stuff having been checked for grammar."
We like that 'cause we can get to the ideas. But what do we think about these new agents? I'm not so sure yet because they're, it's kind of interesting.
Jason: yeah. And it's a good question by the student. I'm glad you're having the conversation. Right. It was like, it was just over a year ago, there was a university of North Georgia student who was placed on academic probation, accused of using AI for for creating a paper. Whereas she said that she just used Grammarly for fixing and getting feedback on some of the grammar, right?
I think that we need to be thinking about what the features are as well as how we're having these conversations with students and where, where our limits are.
So, what all did you find out about Grammarly as you were digging into it?
Some of your thoughts.
John: So Grammarly has all these agents now and stuff we knew about before, a plagiarism checker and some, but they have a paraphraser now, a reader reactions agent,
A proof reader. Duh. That's why we use it.
Jason: Yes.
John: And AI grader.
And so the AI grader. " Revise. Revise your writing with purpose and see your score improve, get feedback based on your assignment rubric and instructor expectations so you can make changes that count."
" Estimate your grade, get early feedback. Revise with intention and submit confidently." So it's an agent that "estimates your score based on your assignment rubric and your instructor's grading style."
Oh boy. It "provides personalized feedback, allowing you to see how your writing aligns with the assignment requirements and make adjustments to improve your grade. Ideal for all types of written assignments."
" It's designed for students who want to predict how their work will land with their instructor and take control of their grades."
I mean, I guess, well, I mean, wouldn't it be nice if you just had a good relationship with your instructor?
Jason: That does feel ideal.
But at the same time, I mean, we've always . Encourage students to use like a tutor of some sort if they're struggling, right. To be
John: Yeah,
Jason: able to understand assignments and to help them achieve higher levels of learning and achievements in the classroom.
John: They've also thrown in an AI detector. So how ironic with the University of North Georgia student: will Grammarly detect itself being used and therefore go into some kind of a death loop? I don't know. I mean,
Jason: Or, like, when somebody is like supplying weapons to two sides of a war or something like that, right? So,
John: yes.
Jason: it kind of feels a little bit like they're work in both sides of the equation here.
John: I may have to experiment with this 'cause I wonder how it gets the student to... Look, i'll be honest. I mean, I do the best I can. You do too. We all have colleagues that aren't champions at being clear about what their standards are for assignments. Right. I wonder how the system interprets what the instructor expectations are.
Jason: Yeah. The positive things I see on that are helping a student really interpret and achieve more than they would've before, right? They've got this in-between spot maybe encouraging them to go back and revise and do better. The negative side I see is it almost feels like a gaming of the system, which is you're using the elements of the assignment to tweak and try to predict what it is your professor wants at the same time, isn't getting good grades always kind of a gaming of the system and trying to just figure out the rules of the game are, and then making it happen.
John: It's interesting on the splash page, they have for this feature the highlights for the "instructor insights feature" where they say it'll predict your instructors feedback. They have a little screen grab. For instance, this is a a geological essay with, and the professor's name is Professor Moon.
And the little AI grader window pops up and says, " based on your writing, professor Moon may say," and then it has a little fake reply from Professor Moon and then what? And some bullets on what Professor Moon emphasizes. And then at the bottom it says, "based on her rate, my professor's profile strong essays link process to consequence."
So there, they're going into Rate My Professor, because you, in a previous screen, you've entered in the course name, course number, and professor name at the institution.
Jason (2): So it's a little alarming, but do you think that this would decrease learning in if you thought about this, like if one of your students had a Dr. Nash bought that they were able to chat with before they submitted something, do you think it's gonna decrease their learning? I.
John: I think if they had a Nash bot that I crafted, I think it would improve their learning because they would have access to things I would typically say I'm having looked at this very lightly and based on only their promotional materials, I'm somewhat dubious as to whether or not you can really tailor something to Professor Nash based upon what Grammarly thinks I'm like,
Jason: Right.
John: And I mean, I've never looked at my Rate My Professor page.
Jason: Good.
John: And I don't intend to.
Jason: Don't want you to get a big head, you're
John: I don't think,
rated
Jason: through the roof.
John: well, and my classes are so small and mostly been graduate school, so like I'm, yeah. I'm not too worried about it. Having said that, I'm wondering why we even need this feature.
Because I think there's good advice that Grammarly gives, whether or not they know what the professor, who the professor is and what their standards are. I mean, like subject verb agreement is a good idea. Being clear about your topic sentence and then what you're covering and, depth of analysis.
These are all things you can pick up on without having to know what the professor's name is.
Jason: Yeah, and I think all those could be good additions to an online class, right? For students to be kind of guided along, perhaps better alignment with, expected outcomes for the students.
I think the other part I get concerned about is that, like you mentioned, a little tongue in cheek, just, isn't this a great opportunity to get to know the professor? I do think that it reduces the amount of student contact and I think ideally in this kind of situation if a student had questions, they'd be able to go to the professor. The professor could respond in a timely manner. These were all ideals. And the student then would be able to respond and do the assignment in a way as expected.
And maybe the professor would give some feedback as well. And every one of those interactions, the professor also gets to know that student a little bit more, gets to know their own class a little bit more. about what is working, what they need to tweak a little bit. I believe, anyways, and maybe again, this is an ideal, but in a good online class, there's always a kind of a collaborative change that is happening
As the students get to know the professor can kind of guide the students in a better way throughout that class.
John: Yeah. So if you think about what Michelle Miller talks about with "same side pedagogy," by going off and having the fake Professor Nash inside Grammarly grade papers I'm completely missing out on the growth of my student.
This is all now happening in secret. So now I get a paper that is maybe well improved from where they started because they talked to fake Professor Nash inside Grammarly.
Jason: Right.
John: But I have no idea. So then I look at it and I say, oh, this is a terrific student. They did a great job. They get an A and then off they go.
I never knew any of the struggle they had --the productive struggle. We didn't get to build in public. I think that's part of it. So that's what a great class does, is you're building in public together. Students are working with each other. Yeah, I think that's part of the community that gets missed here.
It's almost like, " go off and build in secret and get an A and not deal with the toil of talking to your professor and getting their feedback."
Jason: Right. The trouble because it's a lot of trouble sometimes. It's true.
John: It is trouble.
Jason: Yeah. But I
John: Why not?
Jason: struggle aspect. Yeah.
John: I mean, the language that they use here is like "Professor Moon may say, so like why deal with what I have to say when you can talk to an AI bot that will tell you what I might say?"
Jason: Right.
John: Fabulous. Much better.
Jason: Yep. Yeah. Now taking maybe Grammarly side a little bit. As we talk to the folks as Khan Academy as well, there's this idea around this tutor bot that's just always available,
John: Right.
Jason: It could pop up anytime of the day. Our asynchronous adult students, they're trying to get their homework done. At 11:45 PM it's due at midnight and , I'm not gonna be waiting around for that email at 11:45 PM Right. I'm well in bed at that point.
John: Yeah.
Jason (2): But perhaps the Dr. Nash bot could guide them in a way to be able to complete something that they otherwise could not based on their of timeframes. But as we build good pedagogy, I don't see the need, I don't see the need for Dr. Nash bot. You'll be glad to know because I've actually been in your classes before and I was glad to have the real Dr. Nash in those classes versus a Dr. Nash bot. And I found the real Dr. Nash to be very approachable and helpful and also something that was as continues to be place in my life in terms of just our opportunity to be able to talk, so,
John: Well, that's very kind. That's very kind. I think. I think, Grammarly obviously wants to sell this to students. They're not selling it to me. I mean, nowhere in here it appears as though there's a value proposition to the professor saying, Hey, you ought to get your students to use your fake you over here.
I don't teach classes that have teaching assistants, however, large lectures, others that might have TAs, there are sections for discussions and the students go to those. And that's a, the TAs are in theory, some kind of protege of the professor, right?
And so if I were privy to the conversations, and hopefully I am with my TA team about what they're having in their discussions, then I start to know that. So back to my point is that they're selling this to the students, but they're not selling this to professors saying, "Hey, this could be a kind of a TA for you if you incorporated into your curriculum the conversation with your students about what kind of conversation they're having with our agent that's faking you."
Also what, this is interesting. It's not really a intellectual property problem, but I mean, they are, they're asking you to put in, section number, course number, institution and professor name, and so they're theoretically channeling you That's a little presumptuous, I guess.
Jason: It is yeah, it's a little presumptuous. I wonder if we need to as teachers start to figure out what this means moving forward. You know how in Hollywood they, when do like full 3D bodies and face scans of actors and they sign agreements about where and when they can use this? Or if they, if something happens to them halfway through the movie, are they allowed to, take this likeness and what they're, what the the extension of the, that likeness would be?
We might need to do the same thing,
John: Or I might have to have something in my syllabus or an announcement saying, Grammarly's AI agent for AI grader does not represent my views, or may not represent my views. And so if you use it to try to predict your grade, you may be disappointed.
Jason: I do think this is going to continue to be a kind of a question, and certainly throughout this fall as we're talking to people about the way AI is just getting baked into so many things and it's just showing up as a feature.
John: Right?
Jason: thought about this. I haven't had a chance to test it out yet, but we don't have it enabled at University of Tennessee at this point. how at Instructor Con, the big Canvas conference that happened in July, they announced their partnership with OpenAI.
And so what we thought in our podcast maybe was this a year and a half ago, that we thought Khan Academy was gonna have a big partnership with Canvas. Instead, they're going right to the source. And so OpenAI is gonna have a big partnership with them and they're gonna include things like some ways in which AI can help the instructor guide outcomes within the courses. There's gonna be like a new assignment that is an AI guided driven assignment. This is just what I've seen from the previews. And somehow giving some sort of level of AI oversight on your grade book and to be able to give the instructor some feedback. Sounds like a lot of the things that Khan Academy was planning to do with their Khanmigo, in terms of being almost like a ai, tutor. Less of a tutor bot in this sense directly in contact with the students and more of a helpful assistant for the teachers is what I, at least I've been reading about it, that it seems like that's where they're gonna go.
John: Yeah. And the material I looked at it looks like it's gonna do a couple of things, not only on the instructional design side, but also on the workflow side, which I might actually welcome. And by that I mean. For instance, this summer, I, for the first time really dove into using canvas's mastery teaching features.
So, and how to structure all that. And and it's doable, but it's not trivial in terms of the clicks and the buttons and the windows you have to use and making sure you're using their terminology. And I could see where an AI agent would be helpful in just getting the workflows going if you knew already what kinds of instructional design approaches you wanted to use.
So I'm not relying on AI to write quiz questions for me based on my material or things like that. I'm trying to maintain control of that. But the kind of like the things that go on with the platform we use to edit this podcast, Descript, they have new AI features that let you go through quickly to get through workflow things that are like improving the sound but don't have to do with the content per se.
That's helpful.
Jason: Not the overlord the...
John: Right. They call, They call it an under Lord. Yeah. 'cause we are, we're, they're not gonna have us put up with tech overlords. That would be bad. But so I don't know what I think about the other parts. It makes me wonder, one of the people I thought would be interesting to have on our show would be is it Philippa Hardman who does the,
Who really thinks through the ways to leverage large language models for instructional design.
And I think, yeah, I don't know. Yeah. I'm always a little cynical about just letting AI run roughshod over, maybe roughshod's the wrong term, but running wild over my instructional design decisions. Because as you and I know, I mean there's just not enough instructional design support for all the faculty in all of the P 12 schools, community colleges, universities that we have.
And so there's always room for improving. But leaving it all as a decision to an AI bot is a little dangerous, I think.
Jason: Yeah, absolutely. It's one thing if we're using it as a very specific tool to do something and another, if we're just able to set it on autopilot, I don't think, as online teachers, we're interested in autopilot on our courses because we're partly here to really actually be a teacher for the students, nor at this point is the government interested in us just running those kind of courses. They've made that very clear with expectations around "regular and substantive interaction" and so on, right?
John: For folks who may not know what really we're talking about there the regular and substantive interaction, that's an important point.
Jason: Yeah and short is RSI, so you don't have to try to pronounce that whole thing, which I usually bungle. But the the idea is that they, what they don't want is for students specifically to be , getting government funding for taking correspondence courses. So in the olden days, correspondence courses were, you'd get a package in the mail, you would do all the stuff, and then you mail it back and you would get your certificate or whatever. regular interaction has to do with, and the, it's right in the name. They want regular interaction with the teacher. It could be in the form of feedback synchronous sessions. It could be asynchronous sessions though too, like just
One-on-one or with the group in terms of discussions. So, but it has to be regular. They can't just set and forget, but you should be interacting every week.
And then the substantive part is that it can't just be about the weather, it has to be about the content that they're supposed to be going over. So those interactions need to be about the content. Um They're not with that prescribing everything else that needs to happen inside a good course, but what they are is focusing on an aspect that sometimes we are missing in courses.
Western Governs University because they're more competency
Education. They had a big lawsuit from the government that got resolved a few years ago over this because there didn't seem to be enough teacher interaction, direct teacher interaction. so I can see how, it might seem great for a tech company like Grammarly to try to bridge this gap and maybe even their people in their programming team and their development team that believe they're doing good things. But it actually feels like another way in which it is not helping with our RSI when it comes to online education.
John: Are you hearing some concerns at your institution or other colleagues talking about the, there, there's some worry about how much AI is gonna get turned on inside Canvas?
Jason: I'm hearing that and I'm hearing that out also in the social media world a little bit from colleagues. There's some resistance to that as well. So, one of my hopes this fall. Is to talk to somebody that is circulating some letters of resistance. Somebody I've had a little bit of a interaction with online.
And that is trying to make it okay to say no to AI. So there's a sense in which that with all these particularly, and I have some of these concerns too, with these tech companies coming in, it almost feels like a an unavoidable future. "AI is here, it's coming, it's gonna be part of all we do, so we might as well just embrace it. And there's no need for resistance because it is here," to reference a nice old geeky, reference, it's kind of like the Borg, right? In Star Trek in some of a certain age may remember that. But resistance is futile and you're just gonna be, you're just gonna be brought into this new world where AI is part of everything including our education.
John: So, yeah, I mean, if you look at the, I'm looking at now at the Instructure press release on the, announcement between Instructure and OpenAI and this global partnership to "embed AI learning experiences in Canvas." And the the second big heading is how they're leading education toward the future.
And it's all this markets speak about how these are, ed tech and AI companies working side by side. I'm quoting now "to shape the future of education and respond to the rapid pace of technological change, focusing on where education is headed." And I guess we're all supposed to say at the end of that sentence, "oh, well thank goodness for you that you're working on this for me, because yeah, I was concerned."
Jason: Yes all the professors with decades of experience, thank you, OpenAI for showing us how to teach and leading us in this direction. So glad to hear that there's somebody that knows what they're doing around here.
John: Online learning in the second half of life is solved and saved. Yes.
Jason: At the same time. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think as part of this, something that we've keep coming back to again and again in our conversations, John, I think we're both, we're, I think it's fair to say this I hope you don't take offense to this. We're both kind of nerdy. We enjoy the new tech we like talking
John: Mm-hmm.
Jason: of such things and looking at both the tech and the processes and what people are adapting. What's changing and the new cool things? So from the beginning we've been kind of, think, you're the first person I heard about ChatGPT from, I think in a text.
And we were then
John: yeah.
Jason: that way a few years ago now. So on that side of things, like we're always kind of interested in and excited to see what's happening next and certainly as they can improve online courses and our lives. But at the same time holding it with some level of concern and reflection and hopefully critical thinking about at the end of the day, that we want good education for students.
We also, have some skepticism around these large capitalistic tech companies who we don't want to be driving our schools forward. There can be a great partner and great resource, but I don't want them, I'm not interested in being led by them into the future of education.
John: That's well said. I think because I was talking with a colleague about the similar topic, and I was I was a little stuck. You did that very eloquently. Because it seems as though I have this cognitive dissonance that I've been keeping at arm's length and I am trying not to now the matters of the half trillion dollar valuations of these private companies that are a for-profit model that are interested in making a product and not necessarily, improving the world, although they say they may want to, the massive amounts of energy that is being required.
The,
Jason: Right,
John: The capitalistic nature of the stock market related to the AI chip companies and where all of this is going.
Jason: Right.
John: it's it's just a reminder that there's a lot of different forces at play here, and that while day to day, I do gain value from using these tools to improve my little corner of the world, to make my students' lives better, is to achieve the goals of my institution to do my hobbies.
But it's all happening because of these other things that I've been keeping a little bit at arms length. And so there's a lot of competing values and activities and we want to be able to use the tools for good, but we don't want to be led or run by the Borg.
Jason: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
John: And so I don't know what to do. I mean, I feel a little I'm waiting and I feel I'm calling myself a little two-faced. I'm trying to figure out how we all deal with that.
Jason: Yeah, and I really believe that the best way to lead forward is a little more within, like, is not from full resistance, but actually from trying to be part of what is happening and then trying to lead forward. And this is a few months away, so I, believe it or not, don't have my full presentation together yet. But this fall's OLC I'm gonna be talking about, my title is "At the End of the World Pedagogy will be Cyborg: Emotional Intelligence, Resistance, and the AI Enhanced Teacher" with this idea that technology can be both oppressive and liberatory. It's okay that that can happen at the same time too.
Because I've seen both sides of that with technology. Online learning is a great example of that, the access that it can bring, but also it can become yet another super structured dumping information on oppressive system. Right. and so just thinking about what this what this coexistence might look like in the future where we do have AI as part of all that we're doing, but it is it is something that ideally that we're still the brains in charge of the operation, right?
If you are getting what I'm saying about pedagogy being cyborg, is that kind of where you're at, John? Are you okay with pedagogy becoming cyborg and you being part of that?
John: Not fully, I don't think. I think if.
Jason: so it's only half.
John: Halfway. Yes. I guess, , maybe I don't want to embarrass myself by saying, I guess I don't understand what a cyborg is
Jason: Oh yeah.
John: and No, I just wrecked all of my sci-fi cred.
Jason: No, I think it's a good thing to clarify though. 'cause I think you do know what a cyborg is, but I think that I think that's a great question because I think cyborgs can be sorts of things depending on your sci-fi movie, right? Sometimes Cyborgs are much more like human-like. So if you think about like a Robocop kind of thing.
So they thought they were building just like a machine that would just take orders. But it really still had the heart of a man who cared. And so it kind of ran against their plans for that particular kind of cyborg. And I think that's a great touch point in terms of , what are we talking about here?
What are we comfortable with? Right. So,
John: Right. So,
Jason: Robocop, it's not the finest of cinematic expositions on the matter, but then you have others, like, Terminator is not a cyborg because Terminator is really all robot.
John: oh, okay. Well, what is, so Apple TV has the new show called Murderbot. Do you know, have you heard about this one? Yeah.
Jason: about it. I haven't watched it.
John: So it's a robot who has a heart maybe, I guess. And so he decides not to be a murderous bot. I don't know. But, and it doesn't seem like there are any good popular media examples that are any good here that don't involve killing.
Jason: Well, I think the concern that there's gonna be a full, taking over of the ai, there'll be no humanity left. Right? That is a
John: Right.
Jason: with
John: That is a concern.
Jason: and that is not cyborg. Cyborg is really a blending together of those worlds. And so that becomes somebody who not technically, we're not talking physically, we're talking more in terms of process, in terms of teaching, in terms of what it is that you do day to day. Becoming a bit of a guided helped, always human entity though with the technology coming alongside in a very helpful, natural kind of way.
John: I feel like that I do, I feel like, and so I haven't thought about that as Cyborg, but I do feel like as someone who's interested in increasing my capacity, because I see a vision that is. Beyond my reach without the co-design support of this technological tool.
That's where my head is at. So if that is
cyborg pedagogy I might agree.
Jason: Okay. Well, we can keep talking about it
And we'll see. We may be on slightly different spots, but but I'm also, I'm not talking about getting cybernetic implants or anything like that.
John: No,
Jason: all sorts of random sci-fi, like Johnny Mneonic or things like that,
John: right. No. Or the guy in Sweden who had implants put into his arm so he could Yeah. Scan doors or open
Jason: exactly.
John: yeah. Basically, yeah. Getting your university ID embedded under your skin so you could, yeah. No, thank you.
Jason: yeah. Not interested. I'm planning always to be fully human when it comes to the physical aspect, but I expect as we teach longer and longer that that our pedagogy will be more and more cyborg. A combination of both AI helped and the human.
John: I do see what you're saying. I think that is the case. Yes.
Jason: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
Jason: Okay. Well that's a, that's kind of a bit of a theme that I think I would like to continue to talk about. Maybe you can help me with my presentation. I still got a few months and maybe we will pull in a few guests and we can talk about this, but but I'm excited about getting to talk to some people.
I don't want to say any names yet 'cause nobody said yes yet.
John: No.
Jason: We don't have any yeses yet,
John: Yeah. Everybody's just
Jason: on the calendar yet
John: our list is amazing,
Jason: Yeah, we've got a great list.
John: no one's, we haven't sent them invitations yet.
Jason: Yeah. Well, yeah, I guess there's that too. So we haven't gotten any nos. That's a good part
John: No. No.
Jason: Yeah.
John: No. Yes.
Jason: But I'm looking forward to the,
great list of potential guests that we have. So I can't wait to get into it with you, John, and always enjoy chatting with you. Of course.
John: Always. Yeah,
Jason: forward to just more regular. regular and substantive interaction with you
John: that's right. Yes. We get an RSI certificate will be good to go. We will be approved. Yes, for RSI.
Jason: Our RSI will be high, I think this fall when it comes to the podcast.
John: Excellent. All right, well, until next time.
Jason: So next time. So check us out on the web onlinelearningpodcast.com. It's onlinelearningpodcast.com where you can see all the episodes and reach out if you need anything there or on LinkedIn. The links are there and the links from this show note as we think about resources as well. So, we hope to connect with you outside of this.
Thanks for listening.

In EP 34, John and Jason discuss with Dr. Judith Boettcher the evolution of online learning, the importance of instructional design, and the centrality of student engagement. The conversation also touches on project-based learning, AI's impact on education, and the critical role of teacher-as-mentor. Tune in for an insightful discussion on making online learning more effective, human, and future-ready.
See complete notes and transcripts at www.onlinelearningpodcast.com
Join Our LinkedIn Group - *Online Learning Podcast (Also feel free to connect with John and Jason at LinkedIn too)*
Learn more about Dr. Judith Boettcher on her website: http://designingforlearning.info/about-dr-boettcher/
Resources:
PLATO Computer System
Judith’s Website
Judith’s book: Online Teaching Survival Guide (2021)
Jason’s other top Online Teaching Books
Michelle Miller “Minds Online”
Flower Darby - “Small Teaching Online”
Catherine Denial “Pedagogy of kindness”
Judith’s article: Student-Centered Learning in Dewey’s Holodeck – It Doesn’t Get Any Better than This—Now!
IHE article - The Absurdity of Asynchrony
Theme Music: Pumped by RoccoW is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial License.
Transcript
We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions or can help with any corrections!
[00:00:00] Jason: Today is a fulfillment of a little bit of a dream of mine. Do you know this? So thank you for helping me fulfill one of my dreams.
[00:00:06] Judith: Wow. Sounds like excellent planning, Jason!
[Intro Music]
[00:00:10] John Nash: I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston.
[00:00:13] Jason: Hey, John. Hey, everyone. And this is Online Learning in the Second Half, the online learning podcast.
[00:00:19] John Nash: Yeah. We're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation we've been having for the past. Wow. Are we going to start our third year of this soon? Yeah.
[00:00:28] Jason: I guess so.
[00:00:30] John Nash: About online education, online learning has had its chance to be great and some of it is, but still a lot of it isn't. So how are we going to get to the next stage, Jason?
[00:00:39] Jason: That is a great question. How about we do a podcast and talk about it?
[00:00:44] John Nash: I'd love to do that. What do you want to talk about today?
[00:00:47] Jason: Well, I'm very excited today, John, because we have a very special guest with us. Somebody that I've been reading her work now for a while and it is Judith Betcher. Judith, welcome.
[00:01:00] Judith: Well, thank you very much for being here. I'm delighted to be part of your series.
[00:01:04] Jason: Yeah, well, it's so great to have you. Judith, why don't you tell us just a little bit about kind of your your background? What have you been up to for the last little while? I know that a big part of your life is online learning and you've done it both in various capacities. So just tell us a little bit.
[00:01:19] Judith: well, actually, getting ready for this podcast, I started going back and thinking, and when you're as old as I am, that's kind of dangerous, you realize, and I thought, Oh my God, my first experience with anything approaching online learning was when I was working for a computer company and we were building and designing. What was called at that time computer based instruction.
So, as man, as we've moved along here, over these years, I was thinking it's actually online learning has become it actually is a merging of the computer based instruction movement with the traditional distance learning, in the old distance learning correspondence learning.
So what we have Today in 2025 is really elements of all of these different movements, starting back with the like I said, the computer based instruction movement.
[00:02:11] Jason: Yeah, that's great. And do you mind me asking what year that might have been with a computer based instruction? I just think it's interesting to think about historically our, trajectory with online learning.
[00:02:24] Judith: Yes, actually, I will confess that was the decade of the 80s and it was with control data corporation in Minneapolis, Minnesota. And at that time we built computer based instruction and it was designed. For the Plato system, which
was a mainframe computer application. And so then I'm afraid I have lived through moving from the mainframe application to the microcomputers, to the now, of course, to the powerful computers that we Carry in our pockets and our watches on our arms, it's been quite a journey to be honest, but after I finished that work at Control Data, that was when I went to Penn State and at that time for a few years there at Penn State. I Managed a group very similar to what it sounds like you do, Jason.
I had a group at that time, the folks at Penn State were very innovative and forward thinking, in that we, I had a group of instructional designers and video folks, and, programming folks, and we. Assisted faculty in, we actually would load up a van and put, computers, these huge computers, and take them around campus and set them up and say, wow, look what you could, Mr.
Faculty Member, what can, what, see what you can do with these computers. It was quite, it was, it's been quite an adventure to be honest.
[00:03:47] John Nash: You bring back memories, Judith, because my dissertation at the University of Wisconsin contained the word microcomputer in the title. Um, that's what the desktop computers were. They were like, just, yeah, it's funny. We still don't use that term because basically we're just all running microcomputer, microcomputers on our desks, but we don't use that anymore.
The Apple IIe days. Yes. Right. Yeah.
[00:04:10] Judith: Yes. Yes, exactly. But anyway, and to finish up a little bit after Penn State, I moved down here to Tallahassee, to Florida State, and in, in part of this time period, I did start consulting with with faculty who were teaching online at Duquesne University. in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And as I, start was consulting and meeting with them, I started developing these tips and ideas and best practices.
And as you can anticipate, it was all of that work, the tips and the practices. When I found myself repeating myself over and over again, that was when I decided, well, maybe a book would be a good idea.
So that was kind of the genesis of the survival guide for teaching online.
[00:04:58] Jason: And that's really how I came to know you, Judith. and I was talking to John about this. Today is a fulfillment of a little bit of a dream of mine. Do you know this? Of being able to have you on the podcast. A little bit of a goal. So,
[00:05:09] Judith: No
[00:05:10] Jason: yeah, because these are the four books, and I'm being honest about this.
Well, three, these are the three books, actually, over a long time I've I have recommended to people. And then I've added one,
in the fall Michelle Miller's "Minds Online." Flower Darby's Small Teaching Online, and then your book, the Online,
Teaching Survival Guide. And then recently added, because it just came out in the fall, Catherine Denial's Pedagogy of Kindness, which is not an online book, but is such an important book, I think, particularly for this day and age. So those are my four book recommendations for people that want to get going online with practical tips and not so much from a development standpoint, more from a teaching standpoint. So first year we had Michelle Miller on the show, and then last year we had Flower Darby and Catherine Denial on the show, and now you are joining us today.
So thank you for helping me
fulfill one of my dreams.
[00:06:08] Judith: Wow. Sounds like excellent.
[00:06:15] Jason: Well, and it wasn't actually too calculated, except that, as John and I are talking just about what kinds of, people and conversations we want to have on this show, we realized we started almost two years ago. And, we realized we kind of just jumped into things. We started talking about making your online courses more human and creating student agency. And we talked a lot about AI and about some of the risks and challenges and opportunities around that. And we haven't really gone back to talk about more foundational teaching online.
Because it's online learning in the second half, we're kind of positioning it as looking back on the first half of online learning. Now, , we know how to dump information on people now online, right? We can do it.
What do we hope for in our second half of online learning? And as John and I are peering into our second halves of life and well into our second halves of lives, we're thinking about that in terms of online learning. So , that's a long introduction to say this is one of the reasons why we have you on today.
So,
[00:07:19] Judith: Well, let me just mention, I did start listening to the podcast on the Pedagogy of Kindness, and I didn't get very far because I ran out of time this morning, but I look forward to going back. It sounds like a great, perspective to add to our designing. And in fact, then, to add to that. The whole reason my website is called Designing for Learning is that's my passion
Whenever I started working with faculty, trying to ask them the question is what is it, what are the outcomes, the takeaways that you really want your students to take away from a course I'll see if I can remember this.
Remember there's that five minute short video of the person, who tried to summarize the college education in five minutes, and he said, okay, here's what I learned from Spanish, como esta, and that was it, that was the total impact, from the whole Spanish, sequence. And similarly,
so just when we have our wonderful students, who'd commit to time and energy and focus. What, in fact, and how will they change
as a result of those experiences? And I think if we really want to service our students and serve them well, we have to be ready to answer that question. If somebody says, Okay.
I'm going to take this history course, just what is, how am I going to be different? What am I going to know? What am I? How am I going to think about this going forward? And just what am I going to get out of my course? So going back to how do we design the learning experiences to achieve those goals? But to be, and then to be very explicit at the beginning of a course as to what is going to happen, what, in fact, will the students gain from that.
[00:09:07] Jason: Yeah, that's great.
[00:09:09] Judith: I, I actually have a granddaughter who is she's, I've got a number of granddaughters, but anyway, the one I'm going to refer to is 19 years old and a long story, but rather than going to the full four year experience, she wasn't quite ready for that, she took some courses at the community college and she just shared with me the other day, I thought, well, I'll give her, give Carolyn a call, okay, and say, and ask her for her opinion.
And she said, some of the courses are designed and a faculty member will just stand up there and start talking. And what the students do is they turn on their computer, a bit like we're doing here now. And they turn on the video, they turn off the camera but leave the audio on, and then they go off and do, they take a shower, and they eat pizza, and do everything else, and then just checking in every now just to appear that they're there, and then at the end it's all over, they'll push the button, and then they'll go back and actually read out of a textbook, or read something, maybe do the discussion board.
So my first response there is, Oh, my God, gosh, I really wish we could have an instructional designer work with that faculty member and really design a course that really will engage the students will make them part of a conversation and go from there. So, we're fortunate.
We're talking about the first half and the second half of online learning. One thing that we've lacked I think with faculty is the knowledge of pedagogy. In fact, that's the very first part of my book tries to focus on, okay, I know you guys haven't had a course in pedagogy, but here are the core ideas, the core principles about how people learn and a lot of faculty don't just don't get any exposure to that and therefore they just and just grade and that's it.
So whatever we can do going forward, you were asking the question, how do we make the future of online learning more human and more connected? I think we really need to work with faculty, work with curriculum and really do serious design for learning according to basic pedagogical. Principles.
[00:11:10] John Nash: I love that. And I think you've struck a chord where I've long noted that, well, the second half of life or online learning in the in sort of the first half, there was a sort of a transmission model or I forget who said this. It's "shovelware" we're just going to shovel what we did over here onto the online area And do it over here.
[00:11:30] Judith: I have to,
John, I have to interrupt. It turns out it was Alistair Fraser at Penn State University who coined the term shovelware.
[00:11:38] John Nash: Thank you so much. There's the other great reason we had you on today. And so, doesn't it seem as though the, particularly with COVID, but long before that too, when there was a movement towards moving coursework online that it truly laid bare how important instructional design is. Because once you get online, as you noted, it's very easy for things to slip and then we've sort of missed it. It's a good instructional design is just good instructional design, whether you're face to face or online.
[00:12:11] Judith: Absolutely. Absolutely.
[00:12:14] Jason: having a lot of discussion over the last few weeks or so around a inside higher ed article by a professor Robert Zaretsky, who, it's titled the absurdity of asynchrony and he basically talks about how awful online learning is and this that and the other But as you read it, anybody that designs and is part of online learning recognizes what happened.
He was thrown into an online learning class two weeks before the semester started. No design, as you pointed to Judith, just the importance of having thoughtful instructional design on the front end, be thoughtful about what it is that you're trying to do. And some of why we're having these conversations here and then concluded from that.
Online learning is horrible and nobody else should do it either, basically. And unfortunately, this is where some of our instructors are. Some people again post COVID, some of them learned that, "Hey, I actually can do this. There is some advantage to this and there's, it's not all good, but we can build upon what I've learned already."
but other people, they did remote teaching. And they just felt like, oh, "I just can't wait to get back in the classroom where real learning takes place" kind of thing.
And so this is one of the things that we're battling all the time because we're recognizing and it sounds like some of your perspective as well.
[00:13:40] Judith: Well, if you go back and look at a course when I first went to college, which was obviously a great, a very long time ago, there was remember that formula. If you're in class for one hour, you're supposed to dedicate two hours outside of class for every hour of class. So if you think about it. Those two hours of outside dedication and study were actually part of some of the stuff we do with online learning. So the, when we started moving to online learning, the component of a course was, that went online, was really just that one hour, of instruction. Instruction or the as it turns out 30 hours of instruction So it's another way of thinking about again designing for learning.
What are the students doing as far as listening to the faculty member or meeting with the faculty member? Versus what are they doing on their own? And then also then the third part of it is, what are they doing in conversation or dialogue with other students? Actually, if I could go back and remember, oh, it was the, an analysis of John Henry Newman's book on the idea of a university, where he talked about, that most learning actually happens outside of the classroom.
That it really happens when students are thinking and conversing and talking and expressing their ideas.
With other students. So that there's the formula there. It's I think it's one third, one third, and one third there as well. So we've got historical precedents for the kinds of basic pedagogical principles we ought to be helping faculty analyze and figure out how does this apply to my course.
[00:15:19] Jason: Yeah, I was part of a few people trying to reshape our definition around those Carnegie hours here at the University of Tennessee. Because of that, it just doesn't, it doesn't apply. I mean, it's just a different application. It's not about butts in seat. For a certain amount of time,
[00:15:37] Judith: Right, right.
[00:15:38] Jason: It's different, right?
You activate your students in a different kind of way online. That is harder to pin down in terms of those time spent.
[00:15:49] Judith: Yes. That actually brings back memories of what I was trying to do with the legislature here in Florida in 1995 when we were trying to get approval for online learning..
[00:16:02] Jason: As you were describing that, I thought about a space in your book here, if we turn towards the book, where you talk about how our online course is unique and you talk about a few major differences, which I completely agree with. You talk about faculty role shifts to coaching and mentoring talk about asynchronous.
And then one of them Yeah. Is learners are more active and you talk about how their dialogue is actually increased in online learning. This has been my experience. Like if you think about, being in those large lecture halls where, I'm fairly chatty here, but get me in a room of 100 people.
And I just figured there's other people that, that are going to fill up the space and I'll just sit back and let them say it. If I was a student in a hundred person class. You may never hear anything from me in a lecture hall,
Even though I may have things to contribute and I think about things, versus my online experience, I took two degrees online and it gave me an opportunity to be able to, express myself because there is space for everybody to do that versus the amount of time in a lecture hall room for a student express themselves is very small compared to the number of students there.
[00:17:16] Judith: Well, that's true. And in fact I think that brings up the Element of the different personalities of students. There are some students in 100, personal classroom that they don't mind just jumping up and talking off the cuff, whereas I share with you the idea that "I, Hey, I want to think about that a little bit. , and what do I really think about that? And how do I express what I think? So taking a little more reflective time. and within the online "environment, I think there is room for both types of personalities to shine.
[00:17:49] Jason: One of the other things I really like about this book and it's a space that I've come back to over and over again and used as part of different aspects of training that I've done , with faculty and so on over the years are the four phases that you talk about in your book.
Would you be able to briefly describe those for us first? And then I had a few questions about them as we think through the four phases.
[00:18:12] Judith: Sure. In many respects, I personally like that four phrases too, because it emphasizes some of the ideas of planning. In fact, in some respects, a course might be compared to an event. So, in some
Okay. an event of such magnificent, importance. And so, It emphasis, The first phases, the four phases emphasize the importance of planning before the event even starts. So you've got all of that planning happening. And then there's also when the students first come, you have this great excitement. Okay, we're together, we're going to do this. People get excited. I was always excited. You get a new book, you find really fascinating articles. Oh, I get to read about so and so or whatever.
And so there's this great excitement at the beginning, but there's also all that planning and being very specific again about your outcomes, your takeaways, et cetera, and sharing that with your students, we couldn't go down the path of, the importance of having a really fantastic syllabus and a content framing for the course because there's not time for that. So in the first part of the phase of the course, the faculty is very, the, all the planning happens, people are excited, they're getting to know each other. Then phase number two is kind of getting started. Then that's when the students, in phase one and two, where students are really doing the knowledge and focusing on Core concepts. And again, they have been identified. This is what we want the students to really learn. And those are the, um, articles, resources, experiences that are focusing on those core concepts. And then in phase three, well, everything overlaps, of course, but then students start. I really like in online learning I like teams of two and three. Where students actually like we are doing today, forget these groups of four and five and six or whatever, I like teams of two and three and they start working together and they start planning their own projects. There's one of the other charts in my book.
I was, as I was kind of going over this on, I'm customizing content resources where you've got the core concepts in the center. And then as you move out, the students start self selecting resources that fit their particular interests and everything. So as the course. The students themselves customize the course. And then by phase 4 is when students really share what they have learned, what they have done is important. And then do that wrap up, and then a celebratory event. One of my faculty that I worked with ended up having the students send noisemakers and other kinds of things to, in the final celebration, to really celebrate it.
So the four phases of the course, it's really, it has a beginning. It has a middle where the students really get involved in the content, and then you've got the students really being much more active and dedicated towards their personal interests, and then you've got your wrap up. So it becomes this nice package, so to speak.
[00:21:23] John Nash: Judith, I really appreciate that framing because as I talked to colleagues and I also reflect on my own teaching online and when I think about Canvas, so much of the planning phase is about just how do I get all this into Canvas? And then I default to thinking about, well, what are all the modules? And then if I have a 16 week course, all right, I guess I'm going to have 16 modules, if that's how I decided to do it. And then that's sort of how I think about the framing. And so this meta framing is super useful. In my design courses, we talk about flaring and focusing, and so it's the same sort of thing. We think about this, there's an arc that's happening above the modules that.
I need to be more attuned to about where students minds are likely at as we take this journey and I, that's a, that's helpful.
[00:22:10] Judith: Was, rethinking about things too, I thought about the concept of, I don't know whether, um, It's where it is in the book, but on online that my tip 85 talks about book ending and that's the idea that when you actually as part of that whole arc process is that what you bookend by having starting potentially with a problem or a case study or a scenario at the beginning of a course. And then throughout the course, you get, gather and acquire, for hopefully, the skills and the knowledge and the, perspectives, and then that towards that phase four, you apply and figure out, okay, what are the various possibilities? There's always more than one way to solve a problem. What are the various ways, perhaps, solving or addressing this case?
So again, you have this larger I like your word arc, the larger arc then of the course. And the students, again, then can feel, oh, well, they can remember that, well, in that course, we did X, Y, and Z. We solved this kind of a case over that kind of a problem.
[00:23:15] John Nash: Yes.
[00:23:17] Jason: The other thing that I'm really glad you mentioned was how, though there are these kind of four phases, they do overlap and it's not like you're in the course. And you'll be like, "okay, everybody, all students now move from the early middle. Now we're moving into the late middle. And this is exactly what late middle is going to be about."
Could you talk a little bit more about why that there's an overlap or how that's managed from a instructional standpoint?
[00:23:48] Judith: I think maybe the best way to talk about that is, that one of the very first changes in moving from in person to online that, faculty experienced is the elimination of tests. That we really, as we look at assessment, we move from that testing and multiple choice and however, or even short essay kind of things to move it to projects. And in that four phases, you actually start identifying a project very early on, and that's when you start meeting with one or two or three other people, to really talk about what are the various possibilities of projects and. Having a, a kind of a community collaborative effort, posting about those ideas and then in phase two is when you really start examining what resources you need, what kinds of things are, is your project, does your project require you to do, I mean, when students start, started early on building videos, rather than writing papers, I know somewhere else in the writing I did is that, you don't always have to do assessment even with a written project.
It can be other kinds of projects. It can, in fact, be a podcast, interviewing one of their, an expert on another topic, so well, what do they need to, what tools do they need? What knowledge do they need in order to do that kind of a project? So you actually, and now that I even think about it now, the whole course is a way of starting a project, investigating what you need for the project, and then applying it, and then sharing it.
And that's how
Apply, hopefully, some of the knowledge that they are gaining.
[00:25:28] John Nash: I see that being very powerful on a couple of levels, not only the sort of chief learning intention or an outcomes you have for the discipline of the course, but that by doing the project work, you have almost this benevolent hidden curriculum of all the, skills and capabilities and knowledge that come with working on a project together.
Thinking through a problem with a team that are all transferable to other work that they'll do outside of your own course
[00:25:59] Judith: Yeah that's nicely, really nicely put.
[00:26:02] Jason: I love project based learning in general, and I kind of always thought that was partly my own temperament and the fact that I just didn't do that well on tests, like standardized tests were not my example of my best foot forward for what it is that I learned or. you Or my trajectory in life.
[00:26:22] Judith: But I come to realize that actually a lot of people really like project based learning when it works and a lot of people find it really valuable, especially as they, as we think that we are, as we think about developing students, not just for a life of being a student, but for the life of being a worker, adding something to this, the rest of the world and doing something outside of school outside of learning.
You know, If we focus on having students do some of these types of projects, by the way, they do collaborative work during the, the course, but the project itself is an individual project, which avoids all that stuff about, responsibility, who does what with the teamwork and all the rest of it, so you, the end product is in fact an individual. goal. But then that can be added into and become part of a student's portfolio. So as they, proceed again through life, they can go through and say, hey, I remember that project. And when applying for applying for an internship or some type of job, they can bring in that type of thing and have that demonstrate.
[00:27:29] Judith: So I think it's pretty powerful. And it's a, again, starts to address the challenges of, engagement. I know I've seen a lot off a lot of email recently about how do you engage students? So I think it helps to address some of the engagement challenges of online learning too.
[00:27:45] Jason: . I had one more question about the four phases. And then maybe we can get into talking a little bit about the future of online learning. You described phase three, the late middle, as letting go of the power, and we've had a lot of conversation. in our podcast about student agency, about giving students more kind of direction and is there a, is this really the same or is there a kind of a different, more time specific power change happening in a late middle? Or are they related in some ways in terms of, Allowing students like to be a little more self directed and those kinds of things. How does that, how do those two kinds of ideas, overall idea of student agency and this phase of letting go of power, how do those two things interact?
[00:28:45] Judith: Well, you're challenging me a little bit Jason, since it's been a while since I wrote that all about, but the idea, I think, coming back to the student agency, again, in the first part of the course is when you really want to be building in the knowledge where the faculty member is act, is the expert,
Real expert. And there's another whole body of literature focusing on how do we grow students from being a novice to being an expert. And that Erickson is the, now I had to stop and think, is Anders Erickson is the expert in that field of building expertise. And in order So the part of the question for faculty, again, is how do I help a student grow from being a total novice, perhaps on a topic, into being at least knowledgeable or more of an expert? The only way that happens is through practice and actually applying knowledge. So while the first part of the course, in fact, going back, John, just let me jump out on a limb, get on a limb here, your 16 topics.
you might want to figure out how do you quote unquote cover 16 topics in the first eight weeks. And then spend the next eight weeks figuring out how do you apply the knowledge
that you want, that you really, and so, and how do we design those experience to get the students to interact with the knowledge and to apply it. So, and. I know there's the whole, so the whole idea is how do you get the student, I say get to, I guess that probably isn't the best term, but anyway, but how do we engage the students to actually do more and generate more, which gets into your idea, Jason, of student agency. In some respects, even having students write things, write well let me come, I'll come back to this.
How do we have students write things that then apply that knowledge, and that becomes part of their practice? of, becoming an expert. I've got a couple of other, young people I was talking to, and the whole idea is, Oh my God, they say I have to take calculus or pre calculus and whatever.
I said, well, you know how to be successful. The only way of being successful in those kinds of courses is to work the problems and to work them and work them, until it becomes second nature to you. That's the only way to be really successful in that. And So that comes back to that whole idea of practice.
How do I practice using this knowledge? How do I apply it in various case studies? And before we move on, I want to mention one other aspect, I think, that bears on this. One of the actions, That I really think online learning just very simply could help a great deal is that you know how we have the students answer questions supposedly and address things in a discussion Form and all the rest of it.
Well, one of the assignments that I would recommend Is assigning what we would call a discussion wrap. So often, you've got all this discussion going on, think pizza and beer, okay. So you've got all, people gathered around pizza and beer and talking. And then it, the conversation closes.
Well, what is the takeaway from that? So you have the students do a discussion wrap. What, after all this is said and done, what do we take away from this? And to have the students do that now in the early part of the course, the faculty member could do that and model that. And then gradually, again, with student agency, we can move the students into doing that and summarizing it again.
And again, it's a really important life skill. What do I take away from this experience? What do I take away from this conversation?
[00:32:34] Jason: Yeah, I love that. And so it's the letting go of power, both for knowledge building, because students are then really building their own knowledge in practice as they go along. And also some of the perhaps power for even organizing knowledge and driving discussions and conversations among the students.
So that's good.
[00:32:56] Judith: Yes.
[00:32:57] John Nash: Well, would this be one of our episodes if we didn't talk about artificial intelligence? No, it would not.
[00:33:05] Judith: Wow.
[00:33:06] John Nash: Judith I'm curious how you're framing assessment here in 2025 in light of generative AI arriving on the scene. I, would it be fair to say that in asynchronous online courses, faculty may default to text heavy assessments like postings and discussion forums, short papers, and that may be alluring or suited to the student use of generative AI. You talk about assessment should be, and I agree with you, continuous and multi phased. You almost talk about community input there. And I wondered if I could even call that co designed with the learner. And then that it should be focused on an individual faculty dialogue. And so where is your head at now with students? AI And assessment.
[00:33:55] Judith: Well, wow. How do we address this? But just as a way of prelude to this, you realize I've got about three or four Amazon Alexas throughout my house, and I, and, Oh, and it's shining and saying, I've got notifications for you and all the rest of it. I'm thinking, they're all Anything in our world, wine food technology, whatever There are good uses and there are not such good uses of things. So I do think our challenge is going forward is going to be how do we make the bet? How do we make the best use of ai and in fact, When we think about instructional design I do think that One of our questions that we really need to grapple with, and I, it goes back to that educational holodeck article I wrote, almost, over 25 years ago, the idea of just what mix, as we designing a course, what mix of faculty interaction with and how much use of, computer tutorials, which are really valuable, that stuff, some of that stuff that's been developed is fantastic and wonderful. So what mix of faculty, personal faculty with all these automated, tutorials and simulations, et cetera, And AI robots. Just what mix, how do we design a course that makes the best use of that?
Now given that, how do, and how do we know that the, what is happening, how do we know what's happening in the student's brain? Maybe that's the best question. Because if we rely on the AI generated stuff, what's happening in the student's brain?
I mean, to some respect, if the student even reads it, what they've asked for, is probably a question. So, it, I mean, don't know quite how to, somehow, and I don't know, because of being efficient and effective learning, and, cost wise about things, somehow we still have to get a Personal relationship between the faculty member and the student for the faculty member to be able to adequately assess students knowledge. How do we do that? And I do think, obviously, we've got a lot of technology tools, and just meeting until they have an AI robot in your place. John, how do I know I'm really talking to you? How do we, in fact, know what the students skill level is? At some point, I think we may want to go back and maybe we can learn something from the old medieval model of apprenticeship.
[00:36:46] John Nash: Yeah.
[00:36:48] Judith: and again it maps on to the novice to expert thinking, that the person Worked side by side, step by step, going back to Dewey's Continuum of Learning. Step by step, side by side, that a person, in order to develop a skill, that they worked with and were apprenticed to an expert as they learned a skill and developed knowledge. How do we do this
use of The technology, and yet Lord, we don't want to miss that personal relationship is one of the most important things, not only for learning. but just for life.
Want to use robots. I mean, they're going to be good. We've got the vacuuming robot.
I don't have one, but I know my daughter does. We have all these Cars, maybe self driving cars. I mean, it, they bring a lot of possibilities, but I think we. No, nothing, this is my perspective right now in my belief, nothing replaces person to person in real time
[00:37:50] John Nash: Silence.
[00:37:59] Judith: we've, so how do we do that? Yeah, And going back to these pedagogical principles, how do we integrate all this? So we've got more questions than we have answers.
[00:38:12] John Nash: and I'm now, I'm sort of, I'm smiling because I'm wondering if you might even have your own answer as I what I, what struck me as I was looking through the book was you noted that you, that I wrote it down, I quote it. You note that mentor is your preferred term for the instructor or faculty member who is directing the students learning experiences. And I think,
and I've never. I mean, we think about that way and I like to think that I'm a guide and I facilitate their learning, but I haven't had anybody say so directly to me that you are a mentor, you're not a teacher, you're not, you are a mentor in this and it reminds me of when we talked with Michelle Miller and one of her blog posts was around this idea of same-- it seems like every episode I talk about this Yeah, that we're on the same side together learning this together. And so the mentor can do that. I wonder if that's part of the answer to is this, that replacement for that mentor. Who's helping the apprentice move to make progress on a learning goal.
We've decided together is going to be something. we -want to reach.
[00:39:15] Judith: .
I and I'm glad that you like the term mentor because I think
it changes the dynamic a bit. And in fact, going back to the very first thing we talked about the power dynamic between people. I mean, it really, you know, a mentor really is supportive is helpful. A mentor really knows the student.
In fact, that's one of the things as I was thinking about AI and if AI is really going to be helpful for students. They need to get, this really scares me totally, by the way. The robot has to get to know the student. Now, I'm okay. If the robot is somebody like Spock, because I kind of would trust Spock. Okay. But, what's scary, I think, is that human beings are in fact programming these robots.
[00:40:03] John Nash: Yes. Yeah. And in a biased way we've come to learn.
[00:40:08] Judith: We, well, it, yes, and when and where and how and all the rest of that. So, again, that's part of what, I think is part of our challenge moving forward. I definitely don't want to, I would avoid designing a course right now with using short essays and all this other kind of stuff that's so easily, in fact what a robot can do really easily right now is what you don't want to have students doing.
[00:40:31] John Nash: Yeah. Do you mean like in terms of being able to do sort of the transmission model of assessment? Like the five paragraph essay is in my
estimation, chiefly dead.
[00:40:43] Judith: Yes, I would agree. Yeah. You don't want to do it, because there's no way of knowing, how much of it is happening in the student's head versus what's just, generated from their digital phone, with their phone.
[00:40:55] John Nash: Jason and I talk about, we wonder often, how might we make our courses un AIable?
[00:41:01] Judith: That's a nice question. I think
that's part of what, to be going. Now, again, now are still, are using AI to some extent. as a way of getting started, it does remind me, of the first days before, before Wikipedia got captured, that I thought that Wikipedia was a great starting point for a lot of ideas.
Okay. And I think maybe we can say the, maybe we can say the say same thing about the AI generated stuff. It may be a good starting point, but then how do we find out, and how do we converse and have a conversation with a student to know what's in their brain?
[00:41:37] Jason: It made me think of something you said earlier in terms of how important practice is, especially in that late middle phase of the online course. And one of my concerns, although I use AI all the time and I like it, I think for starting point, to get you over that blank page, it's amazing. Like truly, it's amazing.
Like it's like a jumpstart sometimes to get something difficult. Done because it gets you started However, one of my concerns in terms of practice is that writing and John and I have talked about this at different points but so much of writing is thinking and that is part of practice, which is We have this content now through the course beginning in the early middle And you, that, that content knowledge is being built.
What we don't want is just a regurgitation of that content back to us through a five paragraph essay. Right? What we want then is students to now start to really Digest this information and reproduce it in some levels, in which it's
Applicable that they've thought through it with their own concerns and backgrounds and approaches and put it out in such a way that it's actually gone through their brain, not.
Like, I know it all goes through your brain, but gone through, through your brain in a way that it's just not like transcribing it. It's just not putting out something and that's one of my concerns with AI is like, I, think that it could be a shortcut for students to, to not think, and not really ingest information and put it out in their own words and in ways.
[00:43:19] Judith: Well, I think one of the things that I really like about project based approach is getting students away from just writing and regurgitating to actually doing something.
Case studies, starting with scenarios, starting with problems. So many of our You know, problems and challenges in our world today are complex and we need to depend on multiple different disciplines, physics, chemistry and problem solving and people. I mean, there's just everything that needs to be integrated into problem solving. And I think if with more of a focus on that type of how does this work in this environment?
Um. can be much more valuable and it gets us using AI, but then moving beyond AI.
[00:44:10] John Nash: Yeah, I've been toying with ideas about how AI could be more of a tutor than a tool to produce output. And I haven't perfected this yet, but I think there's some interesting ways-- it's funny, that Ethan Mollick, a year or so ago, wrote a piece on how to prompt the large language models to do deliberate practice, , which is a, route to expertise, Judith.
And so interesting that if we can think about it also as a partner to the mentor and helping the Apprentice learn, that's kind of appeals to me.
[00:44:43] Judith: Yeah, that's interesting. Deliberate practice is the term, I think, that Anders Ericsson really coined and really applied in all of his work. He died a couple of years ago, so his, but
[00:44:55] John Nash: Yes, I think that was the article that he cited. Yeah,
[00:44:58] Judith: Okay. Oh, okay.
Yeah.
[00:45:00] John Nash: But
I'm enamored with this idea of deliberate practice because it's that experts are not born, they're made and they're made through deliberate practice as it turns out.
[00:45:10] Judith: That's right. That's right. And oftentimes that's where the role of the mentor comes in because practice, you can practice doing stuff the really wrong way. So you need to have a mentor who is, by your side, so to speak, at least at some points, ensuring that the deliberate practice is in fact moving you along rather than having you stuck in one place or doing something wrong.
[00:45:33] Jason: Yeah Sal Khan of Khan Academy has kind of envisioned a future of chatbots that basically act as mentors for students at any point of the way, with the idea that, we're in a teacher shortage. We students. Most students, especially if they're in lower economic, they don't have the access to smaller classrooms and one on one connection with teachers and so on, which I agree with.
I think some of my concerns around that, I think there's a lot of space for that to happen with AI, but is. as a replacement of teachers then, in terms of that connection that you talked about that was so important, the teacher student connection as a help? Yes. As a replacement, I have concerns as we think about the next 10 or 20 years.
[00:46:26] Judith: Well, another analogy I do like to apply every now and then is, people keep saying, Oh, well, the internet, the fact that we've got all of this information available and yes, we've got all these tutorials and the Khan Academy. I mean, if I forget how to do a crochet stitch, all I have to do is go online and Google and I can find this little nice little crochet stitch. But the idea is that it is not. It's in some respects similar to a library. Remember the Carnegie Library, movement? All, anything anyone wanted to know, and they could be self learners, by going to a library. So now it turns out the tools have changed, but I'm not certain, you know, just again focusing on how does this apply and how does it enhance our lives and enrich our lives and our relationships with people?
[00:47:13] John Nash: Yeah.
[00:47:13] Jason: Yes.
thought the same thing about the computers. And then we thought the same things about Internet and then Wikipedia. And I think we're in a similar space with a I and it has its own challenges, especially when it comes to assessment. But I think that I believe that we'll continue to find that, that teachers will continue to be a, an important part of this mix and use it as a tool. As you said, Judith. So,
[00:48:02] Judith: Yeah, well, I certainly couldn't agree. And again, it takes us back to this. Just how do we design, courses and learning
for the students to achieve. And, one of the other things, why do students even go to college or class right now is, or why do we take programs? It's because you have a consistent, clear sequence of instruction, and you can do it faster than you can do it on your own.
So that, that's some of the reasons why, the online learning is still, I mean, it's going to continue growing at all levels, including, as we've said, lifelong, lifelong learning is because, in fact, it helps us to learn things that we need to learn more quickly, and hopefully more substantially, but, oh gosh, but again, coming back to, I just want to maybe make one final comment, in my best practices section of the book. Absolute number one, most important thing, a variable that came through with all the design work I've done all my life here, is the importance of a faculty member being present, part of the experience, and again, we can do all the self learning and everything else without that faculty member. But when you sign up for an learning experience, the faculty member and the presence and contribution and expertise of the faculty member is paramount.
[00:49:26] John Nash: Yeah agree. And fits with the theme with Jason's past three amazing books that he's decided that you get to be a part of, but the pedagogy of kindness and Catherine denial certainly gets to that. And the small teaching online also there needs to be a real presence and that human connection, the mentor, everything.
Yes.
[00:49:46] Judith: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I'm thank you again, Jason. I'm so glad I'm one of a quartet of books. That's exciting.
[00:49:53] Jason: Yeah. Yeah. Well, well deserved. Well deserved. It's just another plug for the book for those listening, and we'll put the link in the notes, but it's just a great practical handbook really for teachers teaching online. I think the last, if I'm right on this, the last version was 2021, I think.
So we continue to update it and it's available. So yeah, we'll put a link in for that. So that's fantastic.
[00:50:17] Judith: Okay, sounds great.
[00:50:19] Jason: Judith, thank you so much. I think we're going to round off here, but yeah, thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate it.
[00:50:27] Judith: Well, thank you. It's been fun, again, talking about these really, really important issues, and it is exciting to think about what's going to be happening next.
[00:50:36] John Nash: Yeah, it is.
[00:50:38] Jason: Yeah, I think it is as well. Yeah, it's interesting, exciting to think about next, and hopefully we'll continue to make it better, not worse. That's my goal. How about you, John?
[00:50:49] John Nash: I will do my best to not make it worse. Yes.
[00:51:00] Judith: And again, let's continue talking to our students and asking them how they want it to be better, how it can be better for them, I think, is a, we sometimes forget to ask them, how is this work for you, so, yes, I think that's a, they're a great source of both inspiration and innovation.
[00:51:17] Jason: Absolutely. Yeah, that's a great point and a great way to round things off because in the end it is about the students.
[00:51:24] Judith: Okay.
[00:51:26] Jason: Before we go, I'm just going to say for those listening, we'll put a notes and links for the articles and the books and connect with Judith on our notes at OnlineLearningPodcast.com. That's OnlineLearningPodcast.com as well as links. to connect with us on LinkedIn, if you would like to but yeah, just thank you so much, Judith, for being with us and for not just for being with us today, but your contribution to the field and for helping so many people over the years become better online teachers.
So we really appreciate it.
[00:51:58] Judith: Well, thank you both very much again.
[outro music]

In EP 33, John and Jason talk to Flower Darby about small steps for inclusive, equitable, and humanized online learning, and explore the transformative power of community, connection, and compassion in digital classrooms while tackling the future of AI’s role in education.
Join Our LinkedIn Group - Online Learning Podcast
Resources:
Flower Darby Website
Small Teaching Online (book)
The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching
Request a free copy: https://seagull.wwnorton.com/equityguide
Karen Costa’s 99 Tips For Creating Simple and Sustainable Educational Videos(book)
Steven Covey - Circle of Control - Circle of Influence
Flower’s Recent article in the Chronicle: https://www.chronicle.com/article/5-small-steps-for-ai-skeptics
I’m a Doctor. ChatGPT’s Bedside Manner Is Better Than Mine. 
Theme Music: Pumped by RoccoW is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial License.
Transcript
We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions or can help with any corrections!
False Start
[00:00:00] Flower Darby: It's always fun to talk to interesting, intelligent people who care deeply about our work. So I've, enjoyed our conversation.
[00:00:11] Jason:. So that's our,that's a lot of our main goal here, really, John, is to get to that point. Where people say nice things about us. And to know it's coming from a real person. I mean, ChatGPT loves everything I say, NotebookLM. Absolutely adores every article I've ever written and every line, but to know this is coming from a real person makes a difference for me. So thank you.
Real Start
[00:00:34] John Nash: I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston.
[00:00:37] Jason: John. Hey, everyone. And this is online learning in the second half, the online learning podcast.
[00:00:42] John Nash: Yeah. We're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation we've been having for the last couple of years about online education. Look,
online learning's had its chance to be great and some of it is, but there's still some that isn't. So can we get to the next stage?
[00:00:56] Jason: That's a great question, John. How about we do a podcast to talk about it?
[00:01:00] John Nash: I think that's a great idea. What do you want to talk about today?
[00:01:04] Jason: Well, you know, one of the great things about being able to do a podcast is meeting cool people and people that can help us answer this question about, you know, what are we going to do in the second half of life as it comes to theonline podcast?
And maybe the second half of our lives too. I don't know, John. We could, I guess we could that into some of our podcast, actually get some, get some life coaching or something from the, from the guests as they come in.
[00:01:32] John Nash: if that involves me divulging my age. I'll, I'm not doing that yet.
[00:01:36] Jason: Okay. All right. Well, I think I just did a little bit, so, in just in a general sense. So that's good. Well, we have Flower Darby with us as a guest. And so I'm really excited to
talk to Flower. Hi Flower. How are you?
[00:01:51] Flower Darby: Hi, Jason. I'm so good. Hi, John. Thank you so much for inviting me onto your podcast. It is always a pleasure and a privilege. I don't take that for granted at all, but anybody cares what I think about anything. So thanks for having me.
[00:02:05] Jason: Yeah, well, thank you so much. Yeah. How would you like to introduce yourself, Flower? I mean, we could read some of the things off your bio, but what would you like our audience to know about you that might be helpful for them to understand our conversation today?
[00:02:21] Flower Darby: Sure, let me just quickly and conversationally sum up my background I don't, I'm not a fan of reading a bio, people can look that up themselves if they would like to get more information, right, But I have been teaching in higher education for coming up on 29 years, this January, it'll make 29 years, I have taught lots of different things, including English, dance, Pilates, and I've been teaching for over 30 years.
Leadership technology, educational technology. And as we were chatting about a few minutes ago, now I'm teaching social psychology because I just like to keep it interesting. But most of that teaching, there's two other things that I would quickly add. Most of that teaching has been as a part time instructor on top of the rest of my life, right?
That's just how we do. And that's how a lot of online instructors do. And the other thing I would add is that I've been teaching online for 16 years or so and have had the amazing opportunity to. Co author a couple of books on that topic. So, that's the perspective that I'm bringing here today.
[00:03:18] Jason: That's great. Yeah. And really the first time I saw your name that a little bit about who you were, through some of your writing and specifically book, Small Teaching Online.
This was a resource in my work that I both valued and learned from, but also have recommended to a lot of people over the years. and I think it's a really brilliant book and brilliant approach, which of course is a book, Small Teaching. You give people a synopsis of the approach of the book, if they're not familiar? 
[00:03:59] Flower Darby: All credit to James Lang for the concept in general. Small teaching is about how we can make little changes in our teaching practices that are based in the science of how people learn. And because they're based on such strong evidence, and such a strong research base, they actually have an outsized impact on student learning, student engagement, student memory and recall of information.
And, but the point is that these things are not overwhelming. They don't create a large grading burden. They don't take a lot of time to execute in a class or in a module. They're little things, little changes that have that outsized impact. And so, his book,
Small Teaching, has been extremely impactful for many faculty because it is so doable.
And so in around 2018 or so I met him and asked if he would be interested in working on a project together. Because I know that for online instructors, sometimes at heart, it can feel overwhelming. So that's what this book does, is it takes his very practical idea and just applies it very directly to specifically asynchronous online classes.
Synchronous classes were not As much of a thing when
we wrote that book as they became during COVID-19. So that's the idea. Little things that online instructors can do that are not overwhelming that really help online students to persist, to learn to thrive in these spaces.
[00:05:20] Jason: Yeah, and I think that that's a great synopsis. I love that. And I think I would just like to say to people, if you haven't read this book, and if you teach online, whether it's asynchronous or, or synchronous, I just go grab the book. It'll be really helpful. And I'm not saying this just because Flower is here, but it truly is is one of those books when people have asked me over the years. and I'm kind of glad we're coming back to this a little bit, John, too, because we've talked about the fact that, you know, we started this podcast to talk about online learning, and we just kind of dived right into talking about some of the almost 10, 000 foot kind of level stuff, right?
And we've talked a lot about AI and about overall theoretical kind of things. I'm not sure we've really gotten into kind of the smaller day to day practices. So this is just a good, maybe call it for that
[00:06:11] John Nash: Yeah, not so much. I think that's right. Yeah,
[00:06:14] Flower Darby: And thank you for your kind words about the book.
[00:06:18] Jason: Yeah. Well, it's true. You wrote that, it was published at least in 2019. A couple things have happened since then. I don't need to remind everybody of all the things, but one being COVID that you mentioned, of course. Hearing you describe it today, Got me thinking about , , some of the mental health crisis, both in students, but also the fact that teachers are feeling overwhelmed and how helpful it is to think about these small iterative improvements that we can make that don't feel overwhelming when we feel so overwhelmed about teaching and all the things that we're being expected to do on campus.
Do you think, so there's, I think there's.
it was pre-COVID doesn't mean there's not a lot of value there, because I think that there is, and I think a lot of it continues to translate.
But is there anything in this book that you would change, or update, or a new chapter that you would tag on if you were to write it today?
[00:07:18] Flower Darby: Yeah, good question. And I, one that I've thought a lot about, of course, and it may happen. There may be a second edition. I'm not going to commit to that right this minute, but I think there would be interest if capacity, becomes open enough to take that on.
For right now, hypothetically, one of The things that I would do would be to foreground the importance of community.
So right now, building community is chapter four in the book, and honestly, I think I would make it chapter one instead. I just really feel like all the logistics and everything that goes into creating inclusive online courses and applying universal design for learning and bringing in the community of inquiry framework, I feel like all of that.
This might sound like heresy, but I feel like all of that is actually secondary to the importance of relationships. And that's really how my thinking has evolved, and it was shaped by our experience during lockdown, when we sorely felt the lack of social contact and, whether at a personal level with family members who were remote from us, with our students really struggling to connect. There's lots of stuff in the book I agree with you and I thank you I think there's still lots that's relevant. But one of the big changes that I would make would be to foreground Community.
And I might even emphasize the importance of emotions as well, so I've really gone in the
direction of social and emotional learning, and how that impacts our ability to think, process information remember information so those might be things that I might emphasize differently.
Now, I'll be honest, whether or not I would bring in very much about synchronous online teaching, I might weave that in a little bit, but I don't really see, and I'd love your thoughts on this, I don't really see that synchronous teaching continuing at the same rate or level that asynchronous is, continuing.
So I'm not sure I would make that a big focus of that book if, I were to create a second edition.
[00:09:08] John Nash: Yeah, it's an interesting question. And, and to your idea of foregrounding community, do you feel like that that is a, is sort of a foundation for bringing about quality of the rest of the things that might've, you might've led with before community of inquiry, things like that, that those don't happen as well if you don't privilege community building first. 
[00:09:34] Flower Darby: My developing thesis related to all of this and you already alluded to it here is that it still seems like online education is not really what it could be. There's a lot of potential for it to it's doing great things. It's helping people access their college education and obtain a degree or credential people who wouldn't otherwise be able to do that.
That's important. But I think we're still missing some things. And to me that connection at a person to person level is the most important thing that we're missing. I believe that helping faculty to make those social connections and prioritize those actually leads to greater motivation to do all the rest of the stuff that we know is good, like universal design for learning principles and, implementing those kinds of ideas.
I think that right now, focusing on the person to person connection, humanizing the student experience, helping instructors and students see each other as real people instead of just names on a screen, which is something that I've struggled with in the past. I think the relationships and the rapport building is actually going to help improve some of the more logistical things as well in online classes.
[00:10:41] John Nash: Um, I took inspiration from that and started to do that more as well because I think it, it does, it humanizes the teacher to the students. It reduces the distance. And I see how you know, so yeah, I think it would motivate an instructor to be more thoughtful about why I'm in here and what I'm doing.
[00:11:00] Flower Darby: For sure. That's definitely the direction my work has gone over the last few years is how it is very motivational and how it actually supports enhanced cognition and better learning is the result. I suspect that many instructors, I have two theories here. I think that many instructors just haven't been invited to think about that before, right?
Not the kind of thing that we talk about very much. And I think that there might be some folks who are like, I don't need all that person to person stuff. That's not really important. That's not where learning happens, but actually it is.
There's recent and growing body of literature regarding the neuroscience of how people learn and that person to person connection, that feeling like I care about you as my student and you care about me as your instructor.
That 100 percent motivates greater student engagement, persistence, learning, all the things. So yeah making each other seem like real people. That's really the direction that I've been going because there are learning benefits to it as well. And 100%, I believe it supports instructor wellbeing. Right, so we, Know that many instructors are dealing with significant mental health challenges and burnout and such, but actually prioritizing connecting with students is a way to recharge our teaching battery and supports our flourishing as well.
[00:12:15] John Nash: Yeah, nice.
[00:12:16] Jason: think this is one of the touch points that you mentioned Flower, about, about some of the improvements. think we should and can make in the next half here, where they're teaching online and they feel very disconnected from the students. And it's not just because of asynchronous, right? We can have the same issue I've had, and for even myself, synchronous classes can feel very disconnected, or they can feel very connected.
And then asynchronous classes can feel very disconnected, they can feel very connected.
[00:12:50] Flower Darby: Right.
[00:12:51] Jason: I wonder about as, we try to get into this, space of continuing to improve our classes as we talk about scaling our classes,
are some of the things that we can do to continue to humanize our online classes? And then we want to talk about some of your other writing and so on that you've done too.
[00:13:12] Flower Darby: Yeah, thank you. So I don't know if this is your experience, but I'm humbled to be able to talk with online instructors. In the hundreds. And I still hear a lot, and I frequently hear that many online instructors are very nervous about or resistant to the idea of capturing informal videos to put in their asynchronous classes in particular.
And I really think there's so much potential. That's one of the best ways to make asynchronous classes more engaging for students. But I, still perceive that there's a lot of reluctance, resistance, nervousness. A lack of confidence and I certainly understand that we, none of us set out to become recording artists or professional presenters, right?
Much to your point about earlier about how faculty are being asked to do more and more. That isn't really what we set out to do. However we know from the research that students really want to just see casual, informal, messy videos, because they would if you were in person, right? They would see you having a bad hair day, they would hear you tripping over your tongue, And so I think it's important to help instructors realize that with these quick little recordings, even from their smartphone, I have an example I'd like to share about an instructor who was filling up her car with gas and got out her smartphone and recorded a quick video and said, "Hey, I have a couple of minutes and I just wanted to let you know that I'm thinking about you and don't forget about this." That's the kind of thing that if we could become a little more comfortable with our own fallibility as people and recognize that as Karen Costa says the author of a book on 99 tips to create educational videos, she said students are not looking for Hollywood quality productions in our online classes, but they are looking for you. And so those short videos are a really important way to humanize. And then of course, if the technology permits and with some sensitivity to student reluctance or maybe valid reasons why they don't want to record. I definitely think when we can get students to share recordings with each other as well, even quick little informal ones, they become more like real people to each other. The community can build more effectively in that way.
[00:15:18] Jason: Yeah, you bout what people consume right now, right? And you have a bit of a "both and." So people love, and I'm kind of the same way, but I see this especially with my kids and students.
People love a well produced movie that tell, has a narrative that looks fantastic and you just sit in awe and you get kind of captured by it for a little while. But they also consume an awful lot of shaky like smartphone videos on weird backgrounds that are, that are jump cut about a hundred times. And I don't think it has to be an "either or," but I think that I like this movement towards just kind of relaxing and recognizing that there's a lot of space for that to happen that I could, that could really humanize. And again, you mentioned earlier the community of inquiry and just kind of to pull in that teaching presence a little bit more.
[00:16:17] Flower Darby: Yeah, And I feel like it's a continuum or a journey. When I first started recording videos for my class. I was more comfortable in the kind of setting that you can see on your video. screens Now, I know the podcast doesn't have video, but when I would be seated at my desk wearing professional attire and feeling more ready to be professional in the mini lectures that I would record, that's, that helped me gain more confidence to the point that I remember at one point when my daughter was younger, she, I was recording a quick little announcement in my home office, my nine year old hopped up behind me and went, and like I might have in the past, I might have said, "'Okay, get out of here.' Now I need to start that recording again, but this time I just left it in
there. And I said, go away. I'm doing something and just kept right. So that is a little bit of an evolution to maybe people might feel more comfortable. Being a little bit more prepared, having a script, or some talking points, some slides.
And then I think we become more comfortable with the fact that we are real people, living real lives, and willing to let students in and see that side of us. Again, because I would argue that this happens when we teach in person anyway. So, let's make an intentional effort to let this happen in online "spaces too.
[00:17:29] John Nash: Yeah, somehow video before COVID, I think, yeah, it gave us the false impression that things had to be polished and done. And then all of us, the world is thrown into Zoom nation and we see people's backgrounds and their bedrooms and they're just, yeah, and kids. And then I think that may have helped also to let us give more grace to people who were on video to be themselves and just get the message.
[00:17:54] Flower Darby: I agree. And yet I still hear, even in the last year, I still hear from faculty all the time that they're really afraid to record a quick video. So I think we could do a lot, honestly, if we can help faculty be willing to try. Remind them that here's another thing that I'd like to remind folks is, the very first time that you stepped into an in person college classroom, you were probably really nervous, right?
So it's okay. If you don't feel super confident about the video yet, try it. It will get easier with practice just like teaching in person did. Those are the kinds of things that I mean there's other we could talk all day about other ways to
humanize online classes But I really think there's a ton of potential with videos that is not really being tapped yet
[00:18:34] Jason: Yeah, and helping students also to understand maybe that there's a time and place for the professionalism versus just being just connected and just, and I like to be able to show them both, right? But I remember was actually in my summer online class, and right now I'm, I'm recording in my home office, which also, now you can't see this, everybody, also happens to be the laundry room, right? Also happened to share it with the cat. And so I did basically that in my first video in my summer online class is to say, you know, it's okay. I don't, it doesn't matter to me. What matters to me is that, that you feel like that you are connecting here, that, that you are learning, that we're getting the content together.
Please pull the curtain back if it helps you. And if it doesn't, that's fine too, you know, it's all right. We don't have to have the production here for learning to really happen for us to make this a , good experience, but I still feel a little uncomfortable.
So I'm like, and I don't like to be distracting. So I'm going to go back and put the curtain over my washer and dryer now.
[00:19:41] Flower Darby: I love it so much. And I love like the physical metaphor of drawing the curtain back. You actually made me think of a colleague that I used to work with in a different context wasn't actually higher education. I was serving in a global nonprofit and this gentleman had his zoom meetings in his bathroom.
He really did. Now he pointed, that was the only place in his home that was quiet. Was not, like on the toilet, but that was his...
[00:20:05] Jason: I was going to say that could be very convenient as well.
[00:20:08] Flower Darby: he had a little, he had a little tiny workspace and it was in the bathroom and I think he had been a little bit intentional about what was behind him.
But yeah we, I love what you said about the important thing is connecting. And we just make it happen however and wherever we can. That, that, really is a key takeaway.
[00:20:24] Jason: I want to make sure that we have some time to talk about equity because I know this is a big thing for you. And this last may actually Flower, you and I met, I think, for the first time. at the Digital Universities Conference in St. Louis. We're on a panel together called "Blueprint for Change, Achieving Access through Equitable Course Design."
I do not feel like I am an expert in equity, by any means. I do have some expertise in course design and I try to be equitable in, in what we do and in how we move things forward.
But we were asked a question at the beginning to define equity. And my defense, they didn't tell us they were going to ask this question at the beginning.
I think my answer was a little elusive probably, and it might've been partly because I didn't you know, honestly, I was put on the spot and I didn't really have a clear definition in my head about what equity was, my answer was also like, you know, as I'm , less concerned about clear cut definition and more concerned about how
we are, designing towards our students.
But then when it came to you, you actually had a fantastic definition of ,of, of equity. And you were like, Oh, well, actually I do have a clear definition. And because I helped write a book on it kind of thing. So as we get started on equity, how would you define equity?
[00:21:51] Flower Darby: I will start. Thank you. I will start with more of an everyday way of thinking about this, much like you were just talking about your understanding. And then I will trot out the sort of official definition that my co authors and I developed for the "Norton Guide to Equity Minded Teaching." But really, I think you're right in line with the main goal, which is to ensure that any student who enrolls in a class, whatever the modality, you. Any student can be successful and there are things that we can do to help students be more successful. Design choices, teaching practices on a day to day basis, humanizing ourselves is key to advancing equity, to helping all students who enroll in a class be successful. For me, that's what this is all about, regardless of their background, regardless of their level of preparation, regardless of the communities that they grew up in or the color of their skin or their sexual orientation or their faith.
Any student who shows up in my class, I'm going to do everything that I can to support that student. That's how I think about equity. Now, regarding the book, what we said is, because we wanted to distinguish equity minded teaching from inclusive teaching, and everything that I just talked about is, you could also say, yeah, that's inclusive teaching, and we agree that there is a lot of parallel, a lot of overlap.
Maybe the Venn diagram is pretty Thoroughly overlapping there, but with the book, we distinguished equity minded teaching as also paying attention to grades and learning outcomes and Promoting parity in those learning outcomes. Really, unfortunately, there are persistent gaps in higher education attainment, grade inflation, all these kinds of things based on students social identities and backgrounds. And we said, okay, but if we're really going to be equity minded, we're going to pay attention to closing those gaps. We have to engage with the data see who's benefiting, who we can do more to support. And so focusing on promoting parity in outcomes is how we make that distinction.
We also brought a strong focus on the importance of critical self reflection on the instructor's part. None of the work is really going to be meaningful and sustainable if we're not also noticing, how we're doing as an individual.
Are we experiencing well being? Are we struggling? Factoring ourselves in and noticing when we might make a misstep, but that's pretty inevitable if you ask me. But then be willing to learn from that and do better. There's a big reflective piece in our definition as well, paying attention, thinking about committing to those small iterative changes that we were talking about, we took a strong page right out of the small teaching book and that approach is embedded in the Norton guide as well. So, yeah.
[00:24:38] John Nash: We were talking about earlier, Jason, you were mentioning that the arc of our podcast has been sort of at the higher level stuff and not at the sort of the tip level or what's happening in the classroom. And I wanted to look at a couple of things, Flower, if it's okay, that come out of the guide and there's a tip in there to translate arcane sounding, jargon laden. learning objectives into goals that make sense to students.
And I thought this was particularly, you know, powerful as a reminder of the agency that instructors have, may forget that they possess. I mean, I've fallen into it. I'm handed some learning objectives and I have to just sort of print these. Maybe there's even a state mandate that I have to state them in a certain way and then, then I move on. And so, yeah, could you say a little bit about that? And where the power is inside that?
[00:25:28] Flower Darby: Yeah, I love it. So in the book we do have three sections and the whole first section is about the planning of our classes. And we do very intentionally talk about in person classes, online classes, everything in between, the hybrids, the blends, the synchronous, the asynchronous. But what that is about, what you were just talking about, is really about enhancing student motivation based on goal theory. So if I have a sense of why I'm doing what I'm doing, what the purpose is, how it's going to help me, I'm going to naturally experience more intrinsic motivation and motivation precedes learning. Learning does not happen unless motivation is in the mix as well. So, yeah that really academies that jargony kind of language that nobody would understand.
I agree oftentimes it's mandated. There's accreditation factoring in there. But we can also add our own explanation of what it really means for students. It can be in writing in the syllabus. It could be in a welcome video that we make. Helping students understand what the goal is in our classes. And I love what you said about instructor agency.
Because, yeah, we spend a lot of time thinking about what I've have really also gotten into is the Stephen Covey circles of control. And it's essentially a three part diagram where there's the center of the circle. That's where I have control. That's my area that I can I'm responsible for. And then the second circle going outward is influence. Here's where I might be able to shape other people's thoughts, perceptions, maybe advocate for change.
And then the third circle is concern. And for me, that's really helpful to remind myself of, hey, there are things that I do have control over. How am I communicating with my students? How am I helping them understand what we're doing in this class? And then there are things that I don't have any control over, and it's helpful for me to relegate those to those outer circles and not waste my headspace, my limited headspace on navigating those things.
But we have a lot of agency, even, I'm sometimes asked what if I'm just given a class that somebody else already created or what if I'm teaching a publisher, created online course, you still have agency over how you communicate with your students and convey compassion and care and support and be their coach, be their cheerleader. That's where I see that kind of agency coming in. I love that you brought that up. Thank you, John.
[00:27:52] John Nash: Yeah, of course. There was another thing that, and I'm sort of looking at Jason again, but there seems to be a theme popping up here. I know when we talked to Catherine Denial in our last episode this idea of the importance of the syllabus is the first signal of inclusiveness. mentioned earlier flower talking about you do an annotated syllabus.
I know there's ideas around liquid syllabus, other things, but can all also talk about this here, but this idea of the syllabus just seems like it's such a low-hanging fruit. It's particularly useful in humanizing online learning. Could, could you say a little bit about that?
[00:28:31] Flower Darby: Well, yeah, I think what we want to do is to invite faculty members to think about it, and I say that really deliberately because for many years of my teaching, I didn't give a whole lot of thought to the syllabus, and I know it's still extremely common to be given a syllabus or to, have access to some colleagues syllabus and then use those to create an example from. I think that many of us Thanks a lot. Myself included have thought about it like just the furniture in the room like, okay We got to have that but that's not the important stuff. What and so I think there's this new focus on really Carefully analyzing that document realizing how much it Communicates to students.
Are you going to be a friendly and approachable instructor or are you aloof and distant? Because a lot syllabi read is very uninvolved and impersonal, and when it comes to online classes and the distance that is baked into the format, anything that we can do to reduce students sense that we are impersonal, distant, or aloof is really important and valuable to do, and the syllabus offers us a prime way and a tool and a place to do that.
[00:29:37] John Nash: hmm. Mm hmm.
[00:29:38] Jason: Well, we'll put a link to you know the small teaching online book as well as the Norton guide to equity minded teaching. Really, really helpful book. There's even a way to request a free copy. and we'll put a link in for that?
So yeah, that's great. What do you what are you working on next Flower?
[00:29:57] Flower Darby: Yes. Well, I'm very excited. I've talked a little bit today about the direction that I've been going with my research and scholarship and really where I'm going is how we can enjoy teaching online more. Now, I know for a fact, there are some online instructors and probably some of your listeners who really do love teaching online I know that, but I think there's not enough of us yet. So, we know, and this is, terrible, but it bears out in the literature that students tell us that they feel like they're online struck instructors aren't there. We're just not there in our classes. And I still hear this. I saw this on LinkedIn just a few weeks ago. A faculty member was saying, "Teaching online is easy money because my course just runs itself. I don't even have to interact with students." And I'm like, what, like, how is that still a thing?
And what I've concluded is that it's because we don't really enjoy being in our online classes the way we enjoy teaching in person. For those of us who enjoy teaching in person, it doesn't feel the same, right?
Even earlier in this conversation, we were talking about being in a physical classroom and the buzz and the interaction with embodied students. And we love it. So that's where my work is going next is how do we help instructors enjoy being in our online classes? How do we help students enjoy being online, right? It can feel extremely transactional, a means to an end, I need to get that degree, but what have we cultivated flourishing in our online spaces for both ourselves and our students? That's what I've been working on. I'm very excited. Again, lots of practical things that we can do in that regard.
[00:31:30] John Nash: I'm excited to see where that goes. That's neat. That's really neat.
[00:31:34] Flower Darby: Thank you.
[00:31:36] Jason: I think those ideas will continue to hit home for people, both students and teachers, partly because, and I didn't make a promise not to bring up AI, but we almost got through this podcast without talking about AI, John. So far, we're like, we're like, 33 now for 33 talking about AI.
So we don't need to get a big con. This could be a whole another conversation, of course. But I think about particularly in, and I was just at a conference yesterday and talking to a lot of people about AI myself, as well as hearing from people about AI, particularly in this world that we're moving into.
Where this presence of AI could become so attractive, seductive to bring into our classes to just that, that would relieve a maybe some of that feeling that we have to be so present for some people that don't want to be present in the classes, but maybe for some people that actually do want to be present, this idea of this AI that can be kind of present and take care of a lot of these things for us.
Especially as we move into this kind of AI agency world where it can do multiple things maybe at one time. I don't know. I feel like we're moving Into a second half of online life that could have this as a bit of a, almost a counterforce to this idea that you're talking about, which is really bringing ourselves more into the online class and having enjoyment in that presence and thing for the students. Mm-Hmm.
[00:33:22] Flower Darby: Yeah, it's really complex. It's funny. I had not even noticed that we hadn't brought up AI, and it is a I think there's a lot of nuance there. On the one hand, when I talk to folks about, we need to be interacting with our students more. That can sound like that. I think we ourselves are 24 7 chatbots. We just need to always be online, always responding, always replying to an email, right?
Yeah. And honestly, our students and ourselves, we have become accustomed to that instant response from the many chatbots that we interact with all the time on customer service sites as one example.
But I'm not saying that we need to be there. And actually, I may be able to fill that. That gap a little bit. We know That in asynchronous classes, students are doing their work whenever they can in their busy schedules. We know they are juggling a lot of things and they are very likely doing their work at a time when we are not necessarily online be evenings, weekends, whatever.
When thoughtfully implemented, maybe AI can be a helpful resource in that moment where the student needs that help. I know I've been using AI in that way let me turn to ChatGPT and see if I can develop a little better understanding of this concept. But let me be very clear and say by no means am I saying that AI is going to replace us. We need to be in our classes. Our students need us. They need our humanity. They need our experience. They need our wisdom. These are things that AI cannot do.
And somebody might say, well, they're going to be able to do that pretty soon. We're designing for empathy and emotional intelligence. I'm saying no, AI does not have the experience of dealing with, in my case, my own daughters who are working through anxiety and mental health challenges. And I see how that impacts their ability to be successful. I have that empathy born out of my own human experience. Students will always need us for that. Not to mention our expertise but AI cannot replace us, but maybe it could be a helpful tool to increase some communication and responsiveness.
[00:35:24] John Nash: Yeah, it's interesting.
[00:35:32] Jason: how all this is going to work, right? Like we're, we're just, we're peering into a future that is unknown at this point, as much as I like to speculate. And, and I'm a big fan of sci fi, dystopian robot movies, particularly, but, but I, I'm going to throw this out in front of both of you and see what you think about this.
I was talking yesterday to people about how, particularly as AI starts to become more human like, it starts to create more psychological space for us, as if we are, responding to a human. So space without the psychological depth to know that there is a human there.
Now I'm talking to both of you. You're hearing me. I see eye contact, even though we're online. I feel your presence with me. I know that I'm saying something and it's actually being heard by other humans
I feel like that this difference between psychological space versus actual psychological depth and . Maybe some of that difference that gonna we're gonna know as we as we go along a little Little further into this.
What do you guys think?
[00:37:00] John Nash: You first , Flower.  (ha ha)
[00:37:01] Flower Darby: Was waiting for some pearls of wisdom there, John. Here's, I hadn't thought about it that way. So thank you, Jason. That gives me some new things to think about. The psychological depth in particular. I guess I just. Think that A. I. Is never going to care about our students as people the way that We can. And I heard this very passionately and eloquently shared from one of our top leadership at the University of Missouri. One of our vice provosts said. To a room full of faculty, AI is not going to care about your student whose dad just received a terminal four cancer diagnosis and is not going to work with that student to make sure that they have what they need to be successful.
AI is not going to care, I think, right? As you said, who knows? I don't have a crystal ball. But those authentic human based connections again, cultivating that, empathy, that care. I'm going to have to think more about psychological depth, but I'd love to learn more about that.
That's where I think that we need to go with this conversation.
[00:38:03] Jason: That's a great example. That's kind of what I think, like, I think that AI will be programmed to maybe respond even appropriately by the book and so on to somebody that's having this even respond in a way that is empathetic. That is, "Oh, if you need some extra time" or whatever like that, all the things, however, the student. will not have that, that psychological support that there was actually a human being that was there for me.
[00:38:33] Flower Darby: That's so important because we know.that we are wired for connection. We know that, biologically speaking, our very survival depends on connecting with other people and feeling connected with other people. And I think that's the key here, is that even, as you said, the student may get response that is empathetic sounding, but We'll still know it's not a real person. Yeah, that that's really interesting.
[00:39:00] John Nash: If, if we reveal it. So there's an interesting article, and I can share it in our show notes later. It was in the New York Times, and it was entitled, "I'm a doctor, GPT's bedside manner is better than mine." And Dr. Jonathan Reisman talks about
study in which ChatGPT's answers to patient questions were rated as more empathetic, and also of higher quality than those written by actual doctors. But it's his closing statement that bothered me the most about this, which he said "in the end, it doesn't actually matter if doctors feel compassion or empathy towards patients. It only matters if they act like it."
[00:39:36] Flower Darby: Wow.
[00:39:37] John Nash: "In as much as the same way, it doesn't matter that AI has no idea what we or it are even talking about. There are linguistic formulas for human empathy and compassion, and we should not hesitate to use good ones no matter who or what is the author." So even human, I mean, yeah, I just don't know what to make of this. We have a lot of work to do amongst our human compatriots let alone our artificial ones.
[00:40:00] Flower Darby: I mean, I'm glad you brought that up because again these tools, right? They're tools, they are tools and tools can be used for better or worse, and they are improving communication, empathy that they are. So that's good. Like for me this whole topic of AI is so nuanced, so complex. There are no clear answers. I think it for me again, it comes down to how we're using the tools. If this tool is going to make my email to my students come across as a little warmer and more supportive and friendly and approachable. Great. Let me use the tool. But I'm choosing to firmly stay in my stance that it's not going to replace us.
Human connection counts.
[00:40:39] Jason: And I think that example too, John, kind of points to where the work is, right? Our work, though it is embedded with technology, is actually with people. And I was thinking about this, this quote that I had in my presentation yesterday, which is, "the answer does not lie in rejection of the machine, but rather in the humanization of man."
And this is by Paulo Freire. And about how much our leadership work is not leadership of technology. It's leadership of people.
[00:41:10] John Nash: Yes.
[00:41:11] Jason: and our, our work is to understand what is happening in the technology, but then to lead people who are more empathetic and are are bringing more humanity into their spaces.
[00:41:27] Flower Darby: Love it.
[00:41:29] Jason: Well, this has been great flower. Thank you so much.
[00:41:33] John Nash: Yeah.
[00:41:33] Flower Darby: Absolutely. thank you again for having me on the show. It's always fun to talk to interesting, intelligent people who care deeply about our work. So I've, enjoyed our conversation, right?
[00:41:47] Jason: us. So that's our, that's a lot of our main goal here, really, John, is to get to that point of people saying nice things about us. So and to know what's coming from a real person. I mean, ChatGPT will, ChatGPT loves everything I say, NotebookLM. Absolutely adores every article I've ever written and every line, but to know this is coming from a real person makes a difference for me. So thank you.
[00:42:10] John Nash: Yes. I actually do believe Flower that you were showing real compassion and not just acting like it. Yes.
[00:42:19] Flower Darby: Yes. you got that right, John. Thank you.
[00:42:23] Jason: Yeah, thank you so much for being with us. For those listening, we'll put some links into our show notes. You can always find our podcast at www.OnlineLearningPodcast.com , that's www.OnlineLearningPodcast.com . You can look us up on LinkedIn, but our links are there as well. We'd love to chat with you. But thank you so much.

In this episode, John and Jason talk with Cate Denial, author of “Pedagogy of Kindness” about kindness to self and students in the online classroom. See complete notes and transcripts at www.onlinelearningpodcast.com
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Guest Bio:
Cate Denial is the Bright Distinguished Professor of American History and Director of the Bright Institute at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. Her new book, A Pedagogy of Kindness, is now available from the University of Oklahoma Press. Her historical research has examined the early nineteenth-century experience of pregnancy, childbirth and child-rearing in Upper Midwestern Ojibwe and missionary cultures, research that grew from Cate’s previous book, Making Marriage: Husbands, Wives, and the American State in Dakota and Ojibwe Country (2013). From July 2022 to December 2023, Cate was the PI on a $150,000 Mellon-funded grant bringing together thirty-six participants from across higher education in the United States to explore “Pedagogies, Communities, and Practices of Care in the Academy After COVID-19.” Cate consults on teaching in higher education with individuals, departments, and institutions in the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, and Australia.
Connecting with Cate:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/catherine-denial-8869a115b/
https://bsky.app/profile/cjdenial.bsky.social
https://catherinedenial.org/
Links and Resources:
Critical Digital Pedagogy: A Collection (free access)
A Pedagogy of Kindness (book)
Michelle Miller’s post on Same Side Pedagogy
Rethinking Rigor (Kevin Gannon)
Annotate Your Syllabus (Remi Kalir)
Digital Pedagogy Lab 2025
Theme Music: Pumped by RoccoW is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial License.
Transcript
We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions or can help with any corrections!
False Start
[00:00:00] Jason: good Well, thank you. Yeah, that was a great conversation
[00:00:02] Cate Denial: Yeah. Let me know, you know, if you need anything from me and otherwise I'll look forward to listening in when you get it all done.
[00:00:10] Jason: Okay, our our timeline is usually somewhere between two weeks and six months
[00:00:18] Cate Denial: Okay.
Start
[00:00:19] John Nash: I'm John nash here with Jason Johnston.
[00:00:22] Jason: Hey, John. Hey, everyone. And this is Online Learning, the second half, the Online Learning Podcast.
[00:00:28] John Nash: Yeah, we're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation we've been having for the last two years about online education. Look, online learning has had its chance to be great and some of it is, but. A lot of it still isn't. So how are we going to get to the next stage?
[00:00:43] Jason: That's a great question. How about we do a podcast, John, and talk about it?
[00:00:48] John Nash: I think that's a perfect idea. What do you want to talk about today?
[00:00:51] Jason: Well, today we have a special guest with us. With us is Catherine Denial. Cate is the Bright Distinguished Professor of American History and Director of the Bright Institute at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. Welcome, Cate.
[00:01:07] Cate Denial: Thanks for having me.
[00:01:09] Jason: Can we call you Cate?
[00:01:10] Cate Denial: Of course.
[00:01:12] Jason: Sometimes I take that liberty when people have that on their little thing in the video screen.
I say, well, if it's there, then I guess we can call them that.
[00:01:20] Cate Denial: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:01:22] Jason: Yeah. Well, good. Well, it's so great to have you here. One of the reasons why we reached out to you is because of your book, which we'll get to. But even before that , in the spring of this last year, so I've got a digital critical pedagogy book club that we started in the spring.
So. There's a great anthology that you're part of that talks about the pedagogy of kindness as part of that anthology the Critical digital pedagogy anthology. We'll put the link in our notes. I got to know you're writing there and then of course connected through LinkedIn and Always great to see your posts.
I feel like they are kind of North Star-ish posts and I and I like following people who who helped to kind of bring me You bring me back and keep me pointed in the right direction with all of this because you can get really, really in the weeds and also caught up with all the new technologies and everything like that and what we're doing.
So anyways, that was kind of my background of connecting with you. And so thank you so much for coming on to the, into the show. I just really look forward to having this conversation and have been looking forward to it ever since we set it up.
We're going to get into your first chapter here in a second, but I would like to talk to you a little bit. We would like to talk to you a little bit about just kind of how you got to the place that you are today as as a professor and maybe a little bit about what, It kind of drew you to, to write this book and to kind of take this kind of trajectory, I think, in terms of, of your focus in this direction.
[00:03:06] Cate Denial: So it has been 30 years. I am from England originally. And so I showed up in America to go to graduate school and was put in front of a classroom. And I had graduated exactly 1 month before that because the British system goes longer into the year than the American system. was terrified. I didn't know what I was doing. So I projected Dana Scully every time I walked into the classroom from the X Files to try and make sure that I was someone who could actually command some kind of presence in that room. I was taught as a graduate instructor to think of students as antagonists, to suspect them of cheating, to watch out for their plagiarism, to think about the way that they would try and change their grades, to anticipate they wouldn't do the reading. People are very familiar with these sorts of things. And it quickly became clear to me that this wasn't working for me. And it wasn't working for my students either. Setting up that kind of antagonism in the classroom just put us all on edge. So little bit by little bit, I tried things to change. try and change that relationship. I was really flying blind for a great deal of time. I did not know there was such a thing as pedagogy scholarship. I had no idea about the scholarship of teaching and learning. I was just experimenting in my classroom. And then when I became a professor. I was a much better than I had been in 1994.
Thank goodness. And that trajectory continued and
To conduct myself in a classroom. I was trained in intergroup dialogue as of 2013 from the University of Michigan and intergroup dialogue is a really structured way of talking across big differences around issues like race, gender, sexuality, religion, disability. I have colleagues at Knott's College who were part of my journey alongside me, my colleague, Gabriel Raley Carlin, my colleagues, Hilary Lehrman and Deidre Doherty in particular. And then I went to the Digital Pedagogy Lab in 2017, and that was really where I had this aha moment where the people in charge of my stream asked us to look at our syllabus and to identify who we were writing it to, to literally describe them with a bunch of adjectives. And I realized, despite all the changes that I had made in my teaching, that syllabus communicated that I was a distant authoritarian figure just waiting for people to mess up. that was a shock to me. So I set about completely changing that, right? Going into the granular detail of my syllabus, changing the way that I expressed myself and the things that I asked students to do with the goal of making the self that I presented to them the same self that I am. Right. And so that was really how I got to distilling a pedagogy of kindness. It came very, very directly out of that digital pedagogy lab experience.
[00:06:13] John Nash: I'd like to build on that. Cate, I was I, I don't know where this is written somewhere, but it's about the, about the hook. And when you start a book or anything, it's like, you need to capture the reader in the first place. sentence or paragraph and yours did just that. I even texted Jason when I started reading your book saying, I'm on the Kindle version,
"I'm 4 percent in and I'm enthralled." And so
um,
Um, You
to get towards kindness. And it's what struck me was also, we talk a lot about, in this podcast with others, about building capacity amongst the ranks of our faculty colleagues to be better teachers the centers for teaching and learning that try to do this. it struck me that this, description you make, which I think is true is a challenge to those that are trying to do the capacity building towards kindness, good pedagogy, is that your take?
[00:07:30] Cate Denial: Yeah, I think that's accurate. I think that the culture of higher ed is sort of more than the sum of its parts, right? It's not just the distillation of everybody's individual values and goals. It sort of has a life of its own uh, a culture of its own. And I think that culture is very highly individualistic. I think that it is very, very competitive. I mean, for some of us, it's competitive from the moment we decide we want to go to college, right? and I think that it is antithetical to so many things that are so important for teachers, like community. Right? Like, knowing who you can count on and who's going to be able to assist you in moments where, I don't know, you've run out of chalk, or something terrible just happened in class, or you have too much homework to grade, like, all kinds of things, right?
But you need community, and I think that higher ed is actually really bad at building that community in general.
[00:08:34] John Nash: Your, your take also reminds me of someone we've spoken to here before Dr. Michelle Miller, cognitive psychologist at Northern Arizona University, who wrote a piece that resonated with us on this idea of same side pedagogy and getting away from this antagonistic approach
[00:08:51] Cate Denial: Mm hmm.
[00:08:52] John Nash: we not on the same side, students and teachers together to try to have a learning journey together. caught that in your, in your approach as well. Yeah.
[00:09:01] Jason: Yeah, and it lines up well with so many other things that I'm kind of reading and hearing at this. stage of, of trying to really understand the students as well. And this idea of transparency in the syllabus as well that we've got this perception of how we feel in our hearts towards the students. And then we have what's projected out there in front of them.
And they're coming at it from, from this power differential, right? Where they see things in a very different way than we see things as we are. In a sense looking at them. And so I, I love that kind of turn for you in terms of that kind of awareness, that aha moment with the, with the syllabus that came through your first chapter of your book if we can get into this is, is talking about kindness towards the self. And, as I mentioned here at University of Tennessee, Knoxville, we're doing this as part of our book club actually this semester and in our last meeting, one of the faculty members said that this was some of the best P. D., professional development, that she's ever done in a long time. And some of that, I think, I think was because people really resonated with this first chapter of this, this first chapter that kind of starts.
[00:10:32] Cate Denial: hmm.
[00:10:39] Jason: we are always taught to put the student first and to be student focused in all that we do.
And so to have a, a book that actually starts with an inward look this and having kindness towards yourself was almost cold water on the face for me in terms of this kind of like, "oh" moment. So could you talk a little bit about starting with that as a, as a chapter and, and how you came to that?
[00:11:08] Cate Denial: Yeah, in the original manuscript, I had written this as the last chapter of the
and it was in conversation with Jim Lang, who's the editor of the series, that it got moved up It was really that there were some things that needed to be said that were prerequisites to everything else that I was saying in the book, and he had a clearer view of that from sort of looking outside in than I had while I was, you know, typing away at making the manuscript. there There were things about, you know, what kind of pedagogical training have we had or not had in our lives.
[00:11:43] Jason: Mm hmm.
[00:11:44] Cate Denial: What is being asked of us when we are put in front of a classroom of students? How do we make sure if we're going to be pouring out of our cup all the time, how do we fill it up? How do we make sure that we are resourced and that we are taken care of? And so it made a lot of sense to me that this needed to be the very first chapter so that before it, got to here's some stuff you can do with syllabi and assignments and your classroom practices, which can just sometimes feel like a piling on of more responsibility that there was a real pause to say, okay, how are you going to take care of yourself before we even think about making all of that other stuff manageable?
[00:12:27] Jason: Yeah, that's so good and very insightful. And what a what a wonderful thing to have an editor, you know, somebody working with you on this to, to have that kind of insight as well from the outside because I think so much even in our professional development that we do It kind of gets tagged on at the end.
Oh, yeah, and by the way
[00:12:45] Cate Denial: Yes.
[00:12:46] Jason: I know that we have just given you a list of a thousand things that you some of you would like to do some of you feel like you should do or have to do or And, and now I've seen all these examples of these amazing teachers and transformed lives.
And I'm feeling this. Oh, and by the way, take care of yourself.
[00:13:05] John Nash: And you, you distinguish quite clearly that there is a difference between being kind or, well, and kindness and being nice. And I I've been through many academic units and other institutions where, well, Iowa nice is a classic notion that I lived through when I was in Iowa and, but it's, you distinguish from that. Talk to us a bit, if you could, about that difference.
[00:13:34] Cate Denial: I know Iowa nice too, because that's where I went to graduate school. So yes I think we could probably make it Midwest nice, right? That there's a certain Midwest niceness.
Niceness as I conceive of it in the way that it works in higher ed is that it lies to us. It's very conflict averse. Doesn't want to have the serious and needed conversations to clear the air to make progress. is focused on plastering over cracks. And so if we could just, you know, not actually deal with the elephant in the room, but instead just all agree to get along, that's what's prioritized instead of actually meaningful conversation. so I think niceness lies about a lot of different things. It lies about precarity.
It lies about how much time we're putting in, lies about exhaustion and burnout. It lies about what, sometimes get shoved under the concept of rigor or tradition. And I think that we deserve and need honest conversations about those things.
[00:14:38] John Nash: How does, how does this play out then as we move towards pedagogy and working with students? And you note here in early on in the book too, that a pedagogy of kindness begins with justice. And this is a thread throughout as well, that we should be just does that play out?
What do you think as we get in front of students?
[00:14:58] Cate Denial: So I think the impulse to be nice is that impulse to just get along, right? So it's the impulse to bend over backwards to make sure that every articulated student need is met. And sometimes we actually need to hold fast to some boundaries. We need to set some boundaries on our time. We need to set some boundaries on our effort. We need to be the person who provides some structure and some accountability. Those things are not alien concepts, right? And they're not antithetical to being kind to ourselves and our students. So a great example of this from my teaching is that in, I think it was 2012 I had two sections of the same class.
I had 50 students who were all going to be writing papers at around the same time. And I balked at the idea of trying to give meaningful feedback on eight to 10 page papers three times, right? With all these students. So I was like, you know what? You can turn in your paper anytime you want to this term, and I will give you feedback, and my intent was, oh, this will be great.
They'll just sort of dribble in across the term. It'll be sustainable. Of course, what happened was that every single student wrote, two papers the night before the last day of class, and I should have seen that coming. I should have seen that coming. I'm terrible when I don't have deadlines and accountability, so I don't know why I anticipated that everybody else would be different. And so what I didn't offer there was the structure, the boundaries, right, to keep everybody on task. They had a terrible time writing those papers. Those papers were not the greatest papers that they could have written, right? And that was very much something that I failed to give them because I was being nice and I was not actually thinking compassionately.
[00:16:50] John Nash: Nor, not a criticism on you, but I think about also critical thinking comes into this, doesn't it? Thinking about way in which, I mean, I've that situation has befallen me as well. And being thinking about second order consequences, third order consequences, it took me years to realize there was a direct correlation about between the amount of work I assigned and the amount of grading I would do.
[00:17:12] Cate Denial: Right,
[00:17:13] John Nash: I
was so excited
to have them engage in what I thought was such interesting activities and they could go through these and then, yeah, there's this pile to give feedback on.
[00:17:21] Cate Denial: Yes, exactly.
[00:17:23] Jason: In your chapter about kindness to yourself, the, you talk a little bit, and this kind of relates here is, is how more work does not necessarily make better work. And you, you have a few statements like this throughout the book that I think are very releasing in some ways. It's like little breaths of fresh air but as you're thinking about the whole load of taking on a class and these, rigorous assignments that John likes to do because he, he loves getting into it and he wants students to engage and he wants to challenge them.
And all these things are good things. How do we balance this, this kind of internal almost like a knee jerk, like, well, for good teachers, we need it to be rigorous, right?
[00:18:08] Cate Denial: Yeah,
[00:18:19] Jason: than it is even, I find then some Dean, you know, breathing down our, our, our necks or whatever like that.
Hmm.
[00:18:31] Cate Denial: I don't like the term rigor. Kevin Gannon makes a great distinction about types of rigor, right? That there are standards, and I love that terminology, right? There are standards, and we want our students to meet them. And that's absolutely what we should be doing, but that too often, rigor is stuff like, I won't accept your paper if it's 2 minutes late.
If you didn't stay put. I'm not going to accept your paper. If it's not in 12 point times Roman font, I'm not going to accept your paper. If you have any life event that prevents you from handing it in on the day that it's due, I'm not going to accept it. Those kinds of things, right? That are hoops that we make students jump through for. Not terribly good reasons. There are other ways to manage workload and to think critically about how to help students do their best work without these sort of draconian and often punitive reactions to. very common problems, like where do people have staplers these days,
right?
or you know, you broke up at midnight with your partner and suddenly all that finishing work you were going to do is just blown out of the water, right?
We need to be able to respond to those things. So I think that kindness is not at all antithetical to standards, I think it is antithetical to the sort of concept of rigor that is very brittle and unbending, right? That has no flexibility in it and can shatter at a moment's notice.
[00:20:01] John Nash: It's not reflective. That's what I think about. I think about instances that are happening presently in our contemporary classes of this semester with generative AI and its appearance on the scene in round student work and professors need your reaction to move to your definition of rigor when encountering that and not having a reflective conversation about how or why it has, that kind of work has been turned in, so...
[00:20:30] Cate Denial: Yeah, yeah.
[00:20:31] Jason:  Yeah, it's this shift away from this kind of enforcer mindset of we've got, we've got a bunch of rules and if we don't stick to the rules, then it's a slippery slope and all these kids are going to slide right down that slope into the pit of going nowhere in their education .
Um, Yeah.
[00:21:03] Cate Denial: I think that it is tempting to think that rules are about fairness. But actually our humanity makes us so multivarious that there are very few rules that can equally apply to every situation actually recognizing that multiplicity of experiences is part of what makes for a good teacher, I think.
[00:21:27] Jason: That's good. I like some of that language in terms of standards. What do you think about high expectations? Because sometimes I hear that and sometimes it may be veiled as rigor when you say high expectations. I think I probably do that with my own, my own children.
Right. Well that's not a, it's, you know, I just have high expectations for you where it may be that I'm just too locked into some of the rules especially as they're becoming young adults that I'm just kind of a little too locked in. Mm-Hmm
[00:21:58] Cate Denial: I think that language of I have high expectations for you can be delivered in a way that is actually supportive and kind, but it can easily, easily shift to become the language of disappointment and shame. Right? just, I have high expectations for you." Right? And your voice conveys that this person didn't meet them and what a disappointment they are, right? And nobody has ever, been shamed to doing better, right? That is not a long term strategy for improving anything. So I think that our delivery and our, the intent behind the words matters a lot.
[00:22:40] John Nash: And the, perhaps the, the actual operational definition of the high expectation written
so that one can know what they're supposed to meet. I mean, with the children, Jason's a fine father, I'll use myself, but I might say, "I have high expectations for you" and a tone of disappointment, but I've never explained to my kids what those were.
[00:23:01] Cate Denial: Yeah. That's
[00:23:03] Jason: Right. So it becomes this kind of nebulous, high expectation that you never actually reach for your teacher who always seems to be generally disappointed with you.
[00:23:14] Cate Denial: Yeah, yeah.
[00:23:17] Jason: As you know, our podcast, we focus on online learning And we talk a lot about online learning in the second half, get this idea that online learning has been around now for, you know, 25, almost probably going on 30 or 40 years now. And this kind of going into the second half of life. We know how to deliver content to people.
Now we've got all these tech tools. People are connecting in high speed. We've got all these affordances of of our online learning but as we move into the second half of life here of online learning. you know, what, where do we want to go? You know, what are our hopes and dreams for kind of moving it into a new level?
One of those places, and coming back to this first chapter again, in terms of a kindness towards the self, is that we have, we have a lot of teachers who are teaching online who are pretty isolated. And they they don't have people that are caring for them. They are probably working too hard because they have too many
[00:24:28] Cate Denial: Yeah.
[00:24:29] Jason: on the go, and they're working across multiple So, schools and so on in order to, you know, fulfill a full time kind of schedule in a sense.
Where do we go from here? , how do we move into this next season, which probably will expand, I think overall, we're, moving very quickly past the 50 percent point , of students online versus face to face in, the U. S. And we're going to keep on moving in that direction.
And I'm part of the problem in that way. You know, because of what we do, but I also believe in it, right? I believe that we're, we're creating more access for people and we're reaching people that we haven't before in education and people in different paths. So that's all that. Anyways, long kind of lead up to say, you know, what words would you have for teachers that are listening to this, that are teaching these online classes?
[00:25:25] Cate Denial: So I, I think there's two responses. One is the. structural response and one is the, okay, given that, what can you personally do? Right? I was the PI on a grant last year from the Mellon Foundation that had 36 of us from different kinds of higher ed institutions with different kinds of roles, faculty and staff, investigate what it would look like if we actually took care of faculty and staff. And we took as our precip the idea that we did a pretty good job of taking care of students during the acute phase of the pandemic, but we did not take care of our faculty and staff in that same moment. So what would that look like? I think that there has to be a commitment to care. from administrations.
I think it has to come from, you know, your provost's office and the people who are there who are ostensibly supposed to be supporting you, right? There has got to be a much more honest conversation about contingency in this country. 70 percent of instruction right now is done by contingent faculty, and those faculty are often very isolated and unsupported and unsupported, not just in the fact that they have a colleague down the corridor who they can, you know, run a situation by, but in the fact that they are providing their own office supplies, for example, right?
Everything is just sort of thrust back upon them. I think that we have to have some really serious conversations about the way in which we structure the business of higher ed, and it is increasingly being structured like a business. Right. That was not the way in which I made, I meant that, but it is being structured like a business. And you get nowhere by exhausting and burning out the people who are doing the great work upon which your entire industry is. Is based, right? So that has to happen. And I'm hopefully I'm helping with this grant and with other work that I'm involved in. There's a group of us that are really, you know, trying to push those conversations and make those conversations happen. what do you do in the meantime? Because those conversations are not going to solve the problem today. Right? So I think there is the question of boundaries again, right? Setting very hard and fast boundaries on, say, when you will and will not respond to email. especially tough if you're contingent and you are. bringing together multiple classes, because you are sometimes at the point where every hour of your reasonable working day is taken up by classes, and then you have to respond to students too, right? But I think that we have to take as a foundational that we have a diminishing returns when we don't take care of ourselves. And so there's got to be a time blocked off where you're like, this is absolutely not time where I will be dealing with my students. This is time when I will be doing any number of other things that are not to do with my job. So, it's about I have email hours, which are on my syllabus. My, they're very consistent.
My students know what to expect. I have I try to take. day off from email altogether. I don't have email notifications on my phone and that's a big one, right? Because you know, you're out doing the grocery shopping or whatever and ping, ping, ping, ping, right? They're just coming in all the time and your, your sense of stress and overwhelm just grows. So, not having that on my phone. So, I can choose to go look and see if stuff has come in, but I'm not being told that all the time. I think that, especially for people who are isolated and away from colleagues, that using social media is a wonderful way to find different kinds of community, and there's so many different types of social media now. There's some to avoid, And there's some that are really generative. I, did not find my teaching community in my locality, really, I found most of my teaching community online and had most of my profound, you know, the conversations that profoundly altered me online, Finding community, finding ways to be able to
honor your sense of and work, for example. So right now I am sitting in my living room and I have a corner of that living room that is my office space, right? I also spend my time here reading books and watching television and entertaining friends and all kinds of stuff. So I have a candle. that I light when I'm sitting down to work that is sort of like, okay, now it's the workspace. And when I blow that candle out, that's the end of it being the workspace, right? It's a tiny little ritual that works for me in terms of saying, this is not going to bleed over. And that computer gets shut down for the day, right? I think all kinds of, of tiny pieces of, of getting back some autonomy and some space are really, really crucial interventions.
[00:30:41] Jason: One of my rituals here, because my my office is also the laundry room is turning off the dryer when I'm working.
So I don't know if it's, that's really the same thing, but that's what I do.
If
[00:30:54] Cate Denial: it demarcates that space, then it's working
[00:30:58] Jason: Yeah, those are great. Guiding points there. And goes back to that transparency and kindness to the students can also be kindness to yourself as you are explaining what your boundaries are. I think that you are Helping students do the same things for themselves. I would like to believe that anyway.
So is that true? I just let myself off the hook or just is actually help students in the end.
[00:31:22] Cate Denial: I have had students articulate to me that, like, what I can not answer email, like I shouldn't, you know, shut that down and it doesn't have to be on my phone. I mean I'm modeling taking time away. I actually last trimester brought in blank sheets of paper with a monthly blank calendar on it, and blank weekly calendars, and did an exercise with my students where I was like, what's the time of day where you're at your sharpest, you do your best work, identify those, and when is it never going to happen? Morning, night, whatever. When is it never going to happen? You're not at your sharpest. when are you going to take that time for yourself? Block off an entire morning or an entire afternoon. And they had colored pencils and they, they blocked off that time for themselves. We spent most of a class period doing this and then transferring it to these monthly calendars and having a sense of what their time was like. And that came up so many times over the course of the term, in terms of the reflective work that they were doing, that it made a difference to be given permission, tacit permission to do that, and then to have the time to consider it so that it wasn't another piece of homework, but it was something we did together. That also mattered to them.
[00:32:39] John Nash: It seems to me part of it also is a lack of Perhaps it's kindness on the part of those in more positions of power. This, these are great tips and it's sort of putting this boundary work in this kindness, self kindness work at the feet of us, and we should, but we work with others who, send emails at any hour or
a a footnote in their email saying, just because I sent this when you're asleep, doesn't mean you have to answer it. I'm, I'm paraphrasing, but that's the gist of it without saying, ah, maybe I could schedule this email to show up during their work hours or maybe it could
[00:33:17] Cate Denial: I think there are very few people in higher ed who are genuinely seeking to be unkind. Like whose reason to get up in the morning is to be unkind, right? I think that again, it's that culture that we're swimming in, right? And I think that for a lot of leadership, the same sort of aha moment that I had to have with my syllabus is the same aha moment they could stand to have with their communications coming out of their office. Right? The way that they're worded when they get sent. Please do not unload all of your stuff at 4 p. m. on a Friday, right? Like there is some self reflective work there and some work to sort of think about tone and language use and everything that spins out from there, right? That would be useful. I also think that there are, and some of these are in the book, I think that there are little things that could happen, like a space where the contingent faculty can either go to a place and borrow stuff that they need for their classes so that they're not constantly paying for things themselves, or have a certain amount that can be sent to people, right?
Or make things available to them online, right? There has to be that sense of community and community support, and it does not cost a lot of money to have a supply closet, right? Whether that's an online supply closet or an offline supply closet.
[00:34:58] Jason: Yeah, and it's a just a tangible way in which you feel that support then, and that people recognize that you're not in the, in the physical office. If you're working from home, that's good.
[00:35:11] Cate Denial: Yeah.
[00:35:13] Jason: I would like to, Before our time runs out here, talk a little bit more about some of the insights from the rest of the book. I think what I'd like to do maybe is ask kind of an overarching question, understanding where we're at and our listeners thinking about online learning, both administrating and teaching tend to be the instructional designers.
Those tend to be the people that listen to us. The rest of your chapters, you talk about kindness in the syllabus, assessment, and in the classroom. So what are some things that jump out to you as you think about the online space that we could do better in any of those areas?
[00:35:56] Cate Denial: I think one of the things that I think has made such a profound difference to me is rewriting the syllabus and then having the students annotate the syllabus. So that idea comes from Remy Killear and, people have varying degrees of autonomy when it comes to designing their syllabi, right, depending on the system that you're working within. Some people, like me, can have their students work with them to build the syllabus from scratch. And some people have a lot of boilerplate language or even a template where they're just filling in, you know, their name and their contact information and that kind of stuff. But no matter what, having the students then annotate that syllabus, speak back to it, right? And they're learning the skill of annotation, whether they are learning that online or not, right? It's easy to do in a very simple document where there's commenting enabled, but you can use things like Perusal or Hypothesis to do this too. it gives students some authority back, right? To talk
back and say, I love this policy, or why does it have to be this way? Why is this language on every syllabus I ever see, right? It gives them the opportunity to ask questions and get them answered. It gives them the opportunity to express points of view. And it just transforms this into, instead of a document that is top down, it becomes the co creation of what the course is going to be like. And I think co creation is perhaps the thing leaves out to me as, as joining those other three chapters of the book together, right? Believing in students as people who can co create their educational experience alongside you. So, making space for editing documents and making space for students to be able to tell. I have another concrete example, I have them fill in a self assessment sheet when they turn in a paper, for example. And one of the questions on that self assessment sheet is, how can I help you prepare for the next assignment? And, it's an opportunity for them to reflect on what sort of help they sought out in doing the first assignment they are perhaps realizing they need to do a little bit more work or polish a certain skill, to ask for it, right? To say, I'm going to need some more practice on this particular, whatever it is, equation, or piece of theory, whatever, right? So I think just opening up space where students get to say, I would love it if we could address this. I have thoughts about this. would like to edit this. I would, you know, anything that just helps them be the co creators of their experience.
[00:38:39] Jason: I like that as a thread a lot. And, you know, it threads through those kind of more concrete things, the syllabus assessment and classroom. But as, as you were talking, I thought, well, this really ties right back into being co creators in our lives together.
So here we are interacting in this class. We're going to have some level of effect on each other. How do we, how do we make the best lives for each other that we want to, while achieving this goal together this semester, you know, and I think that's where this kindness to self can come in as well.
[00:39:09] Cate Denial: And I think is crucial to remember that it is sometimes tempting to want to burn everything down, that is actually not a good strategy for our health and well being, right? That, this is about changing one thing at a time and seeing how it goes and then adapting it again and tweaking it.
And then, if I think about where I am in terms of the kind of feedback I give to my students, it's been a six or seven year journey to do what I'm doing now, right? Making one little adjustment at a time every time I taught a class. That is the way to make these changes. It can sometimes be overwhelming when you read a book like mine to go like, ah, that's so much work.
There's so much to do, right? But I'm very clear, like, pick one thing, pick one thing that you can change, and then you can check in with it later and see if it's working. And if it is working, great, accentuate it. And if it's not working, choose something else, right?
[00:40:07] Jason: Michelle Percansky-Brock talks about the liquid syllabus and how is annotating the syllabus the same or different than some of her ideas of coming at the beginning of the class really with a syllabus that instead of being in a, this kind of firm final position, it's, it's flexible.
[00:40:26] Cate Denial: I think they're really complimentary ideas, right? And I think depending on your particular situation, one might seem better than the other to you, right? Annotating the syllabus I found is really useful for people who have a lot of boilerplate language, who have a central office, or somebody who oversees the curriculum.
That is. providing most of the syllabus already written. it doesn't become an expression of who you are as a teacher. It's, it can tend to be very standoffish and distant and, and sort of phrased without any humanity in it, right? So, I think that is a great moment to be able to annotate the syllabus and have the students say, okay, well, we got it.
We can't change these policies, right? These policies are, are being handed to us, but we can certainly talk about how they make us feel, and we can talk about how we might mitigate something that seems too harsh, and how we can think generously about other places in this syllabus, right? So, I love the liquid syllabus idea.
I think it's just a question of picking the strategy that's going to work for your particular situation.
[00:41:35] Jason: Yeah. You have so many different kinds of colleges and expectations within those colleges and what might work for, for history, it would not necessarily work for social work that they're, you know, they're working towards some sort of external test on these nine different competencies and so on, and it might not work for somebody who's going to, who's going to be a surgeon, you know, and, and it might not work for somebody who is, you know is, is going to be an IT or whatever.
So I think it's nice to have some of that kind of flexibility and approach.
[00:42:06] Cate Denial: Agreed. Agreed. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:42:27] John Nash: we think about, it sounds the similar thing, the one question you're wondering about, make that change and see if it made a difference and then do the next thing.
[00:42:36] Cate Denial: Yeah.
[00:42:36] John Nash: So I'm wondering as you do your faculty development work and you explain this, this framing have you noticed over time that there's a good first starting place? So I presume, let's say I've read the book. I'm excited. I don't want to burn it all down, although I have thoughts of it. So I'm willing to play the long game. What's your recommended first start?
[00:43:02] Cate Denial: I think the syllabus is where we start because it is such, it's a relational document and too often it's written like a legal document, right? This is not a legal relationship that we're setting up. It's not a contract. It is a meeting of people that happens. And I think that the way in which our students meet us and interpret us, especially if they see that syllabus before they ever see our face or hear our voice or get any feedback or anything from us, even if it's textual, right? that syllabus has to do a lot of heavy lifting on our behalf. And So I think looking for the places. where you can look at the language and say, who is the student I'm imagining as I write this? Which is the question I was asked at Digital Pedagogy Lab. I think that's a transformative question and it helps you see where language can shift and change to be more welcoming. You can think that you are being welcoming, as I once did, right? And actually have your syllabus terribly standoffish. And so sitting down and saying to yourself, "okay, this student, I'm going to write a list of adjectives that describe the student this is addressed to," can be so transformative and so illuminating. And then fixing it, right? And fixing it and making it who you really think your students are.
[00:44:28] John Nash: That's lovely because I think where my brain might have gone in a, in a question, if you were working with me, I would say, I would start to think which assignments am I going to change or which, but it's, it's firstly getting to this communicative place and
about later, maybe what you're doing inside that,
[00:44:48] Cate Denial: I agree. I think it's, you know, we talk a lot about belonging. Are we actually generating that? Does that first document that they see actually say, Hi, I'm glad you're here. Welcome to this class. Here's who I am, in terms that make them feel welcome.
[00:45:07] John Nash: That is great.
[00:45:09] Jason: " I don't want to, you know, give away spoil any endings for people, but this is really where you start as well. In the conclusion of your book, you say "We need to shift every part of what we do to prioritize care and not only for our students, but for ourselves. We deserve nothing short of transformation, a system of higher education in which we are each valued for the totality of who we are instead of only the products we are urged to create."
And I, and I love that and I would love to see us get there. What other, what other ways as a, as a higher ed culture can we, can we promote this? We've been talking about kind of more the classroom level. What other ways as a higher ed culture do you think that we can get there?
[00:45:59] Cate Denial: I think tackling the issue of competitiveness is an enormous part of it. I think that higher ed in general needs to slow down. We're accelerating and not in good ways, right? More demands upon people in order for them to get a job, right? More demands for them to produce to keep that job.
More money, more grants, more, whatever the metric is, right? It is increasing constantly. And I think that those of us who are in stable positions who have some authority over the way in which other people's working environment is, that we need to really do the work of slowing things down and opting out of this increased acceleration pausing, asking ourselves, like, do we, I, I can tell you anecdotally that, you know, the standard for getting a job has increased exponentially at my at my college in the time that I have been there. But what's the real hard data? Can you go back and look at what the job ads asked for in your department or your division for the last however many, how many, you know, cycles. Can you see this happening in real time? I think there has to be a commitment to making academia humane. And too much of it is cutthroat and too much of it is just competitive in ways that I don't think generate learning or knowledge in good ways, right, sustainable ways, that actually uses up and then discard us.
[00:47:39] Jason: Yeah, that's that is, that's good. That's a good word.
[00:47:42] John Nash: I concur. I think it's, valuable from a faculty perspective, but also from a chair and dean and provost perspective, trying to understand the kinds of environments and supports that we need to really let this kind of work be fostered.
[00:47:59] Cate Denial: Well, thank you so much, both of you.
[00:48:02] Jason: Well, what's the best way for people to get your book, Cate? Because I, I'm just going to say right here, everybody should be reading this book.
[00:48:13] Cate Denial: The best way to get it is from the University of Oklahoma Press because it supports an entire sort of infrastructure of more books like this, right? But you should get the book from the retailer that is most available to you.
[00:48:30] Jason: Okay. That's great Let me just say what a great book it is for. a book club that is also kind for people. And I'll give you my, my pitch on this. The fact that it has four pretty manageable chapters. And I'll just say the way that we've set up our book club, which is via Zoom, we just are going to meet four times and we're just going to meet on those four chapters and we have asynchronous chats that go on as well if people can't make it.
And I just think it's a wonderful way to both talk about it with your peers, but also
start to change some of the culture where you're at and also put yourself in a place of caring with each other. So we have connections with people that are, that are teaching, some of them are face to face, some of them are online and so on. And it's just a, it's a wonderful way to actually, do some of the things that the book is talking about, which is to put yourself in a space where we're just not taking, it's not just self care, but it's care for one another within these spaces.
So, so I'm going to say thank you again for the, for writing the book and for putting it out there in such a way that's manageable for, for us and for giving us a kind of a compulsion to, to move forward in this, because I think it's a, I think it's a good thing to do.
[00:49:47] Cate Denial: Well, thank you so much and I love the idea of this being suited to book clubs, because like you say, a little community of care is, is perhaps the best outcome that there could be.
[00:50:01] John Nash: Yeah, terrific. Thank you.
[00:50:03] Jason: And if anybody wants to connect with you, Cate, what's the best way to do it is LinkedIn okay?
[00:50:08] Cate Denial: LinkedIn is great. You can also find me on BlueSky at CJDenial and I have a website at catherinedenial. org.
[00:50:17] Jason: wonderful. And we'll put all of those links in our notes and you can find all of our episodes and our notes at onlinelearningpodcast. com. That's onlinelearningpodcast. com. That was my podcasty voice.
There's a lot of competition out there.
AI is coming for our podcasting jobs now.
[00:50:37] Cate Denial: Yeah.
[00:50:38] Jason: got to,
step up our, our game here of of friendly, supportive enthusiastic banter and podcasty voices. So we're going to be working on that.
[00:50:48] Cate Denial: Great.
[00:50:49] John Nash: you know, Cate, where we're learning our podcast voices? We're learning
[00:50:52] Cate Denial: I do not.
[00:50:54] John Nash: Google Notebook LM is helping us, uh,
[00:50:57] Cate Denial: right.
[00:50:58] John Nash: AI created overly gushy, loving-any-topic-that's-thrown-at-them voices.
[00:51:05] Cate Denial: I wish that the people listening to this could see my face right now, because that was a grimace. That was a big grimace.
[00:51:12] John Nash: Yes.
[00:51:14] Jason: Yes. Yeah, there's a lot of cringey moments in those, but it's a wild world we're living in right now. Well, thank you for the opportunity to. See you face to face here. We all have this conversation. Thank you for taking the time. We really appreciate you. All
[00:51:28] Cate Denial: Well, thank you for having me. This was wonderful.
[00:51:31] John Nash: Yeah.
[00:51:31] Jason: Thanks so much We'll see.
[00:51:33] Cate Denial: Bye.