My colleagues say "We must fully embrace AI as a tool". I agree. But how do you teach it? It's a moving target, and you can't even give homework like: "Research <this topic> with an LLM of your choice, and submit the transcript" because they can do that, or they can just copy the task into an LLM and have the LLM do it. It becomes meta quite quickly.
And independent what and how we teach, we have to change how we assess a students learning result:
The first thing we have to change is that homework needs to be completely ungraded. Reviewed and corrected, yes, but not part of the grade. That's the only way to make sure that people who don't want to cheat have to cheat anyway to compete with those that do.
Second, all exams have to be in person. Online, cheating is so trivial it's not even funny (many students are so stupid about it that we have a pretty clear idea what's going on). In person, we have maybe 2-3 years until we have to make sure its proctored and people's glasses are checked. I think in less than 10 years, local mobile AI will be good enough so even a Faraday cage will not help.
Maybe we have to go to oral tests only.
Of course, none of this scales. Some of our intro courses have a thousand students.
Any ideas are much appreciated.
If that's anything like how they guided me to use programming languages professionally...
In my workplace I find systems and policies move too slowly to keep up with how rapidly the LLM world is changing. Colleges are even more glacial. They've barely adapted to video conferencing.
LLMs were, IMO, pushed out too early and without that clear "this is experimental tech" label. Full public access from day 1, no invite only betas, no research previews for a select few pilot customers/orgs, etc. I've been in IT for a little over 18 years now and I haven't seen anything move this fast before.
I mean, I never though I'd see Microsoft go on stage at BUILD and and announce freaking OpenClaw for Enterprise, and then make it available the same day. This is highly unstable tech and what I'd consider still experimental, being sold to F500s as production ready.
The only thing I can see them doing is removing technology altogether. People did just fine 100 years ago.
Want to learn to code? Use a Commodore 64. The company was purchased and rebooted the C64: https://commodore.net/
Perhaps this is rather a sign that you currently shouldn't jump on the LLM hype train, but rather attempt to get a good foundation on the basics. When the whole LLM area becomes much more "stabilized" (I see signs that this is currently happening, if only for the reason that training state of the art models has become more and more expensive), you can still get into LLMs if you want.
On the other hand I think there are real development gains in jumping on the train today. To my career's detriment.
Until that situation stabilizes I think the only institution capable of teaching about it is the family -- parents.
I don't believe them for one second, it's far from a solved problem yet these companies are selling this tech as if it's been around for decades and thoroughly battle tested instead of highly experimental and unstable.
Tristan Harris had some sort of comment like that on a podcast about the challenges posed by AI.
That seems like a smart approach. It reverses the traditional model of "lecture in class, homework outside of class".
My own experience with flipped classrooms (which seems to be shared by quite a few people who have tried it out): they only work well if all students actually read/watch the materials beforehand. In small, advanced courses, intrinsic motivation may be sufficient - but in most cases you need some extrinsic coercion - such as a mandatory quiz about the materials or hand-written lecture notes that need to be shown at each in-person session.
With AI, some people don't watch the lectures but let ChatGPT give them a summary which they submit. Then these people poison your in-person session with their lack of knowledge and motivation.
Just have a quiz every day. In fact, have _TWO_ quizzes, one at the start of class and one at the end, and take the higher of the two scores. In between the first quiz and the second, work through problems with the students designed to help people that bombed the first test figure out how to pass the second.
We had no lectures, the teacher just gave us a short, concise textbook to read a chapter of every week.
In class time was devoted to discussing and problem solving.
But yes, it only worked because we were a small class of 15 math students
If done more stringently (if you didn't watch the lecture, I'm not reteaching it), it maybe would've had a bigger impact, but I'm not sure.
Office hours remained king for serious Q and A for the class.
College is different, because theoretically you should be taking classes that are relevant to your field (although there are still "core" requirements that are somewhat high-school adjacent).
College is a different dynamic from a middle/high school classroom, but I don’t remember 95% of the material from my college engineering classes anyway, it’s the problem solving and information finding that I’ve retained and have helped me do the things I do. I remember the stuff from the classes that taught me the material in an engaging way though.
"Just do it right and it won't be a problem." This is not an actionable plan. What is engaging? Who gets to decide that? The teacher? The students? The parents? How do deal with certain kids finding different approaches more or less engaging? How do you expect a teacher to curtail their teaching approach to dozens of children at the same time?
Worksheets certainly are. But good homework, even if it's challenging, is what makes a reasonably fast-paced course even possible. In a well-paced university course you're typically spending proportionally several times as much time working on it out of class than you are in class. Then class time is both preparation and catch-up, similar to office hours.
This was true of my most demanding humanities courses (sometimes reading 100 pages a week directly from academic journals, not easy reading) as well as my most challenging math courses (group theory, ring theory). Once the pace gets fast, there just isn't enough time for you to learn everything you need to inside the classroom anyway.
And in those classes, where homework was really essential for learning at the required pace and depth of mastery, my instructors didn't even need to factor the homework into my grades at all. In some of them, we could get "feedback" on homework but it was never officially recorded in our grades... and yet, anyone who didn't do it would fail the next test. If homework doesn't have that characteristic, it probably doesn't need to be assigned at all.
If "flipped classroom" means that students are expected to do all of their homework in class, then indeed it'll feel like a waste of time to many of the smarter kids, and it will also just be unfeasible for advanced courses (which theoretically should be most courses in a university, though it currently isn't). But if it means "we don't even have time to lecture you on every single thing you need to learn, therefore you must arrive already having done the reading and the exercises, and we'll use this time to help clear up misunderstandings"... that's already how classes for grown-ups are in universities.
Kids get to learn lots of interesting things in school. The problem is that they're kids! They want immediate gratification from phones/games/recess, not to do the hard work of learning.
What about those students who don't have stable home environments? How are they supposed to find multiple hours a day to watch lectures?
How does this address the underlying issue of students off loading work? You've replaced homework with lectures, but haven't solved the problem of making sure the student is actually participating.
Logistically, this could only work if you shortened the school days, but then you would need to adjust the rest of society around that. Many parents structure their work days around their kids school schedules, and if kids need to go school later in the day, or get out earlier, that places a burden on the parents.
For secondary school, I do agree with you - homework load can be problematic for some students. But at the same time, my honors classes all came with hours of homework and I’m not sure I would have been as prepared for uni without it.
I very much doubt there is any agreement on what those skills are.
Creating the idea of “what to learn in the new world” is itself IMO an important academic creation, but there’s no reward for doing it and no way to know if you’re on the right track (you just have to wait and see).
Employers are also just adapting.
Wait until companies are paying unsubsidized “list price” for LLM usage. Then we can have a better idea of the worth of the automation and what skills should stay with humans.
We'll get an idea of the relative cost of the labor, all right. It's just that they are specifically trying to wreck the market, at all costs, to be able to cash in on the upside. It's sensible, if you're a monster.