AI and Education: How Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming Learning (International Day of Education Special Episode)

♪ It's the future, don't hit the snooze ♪ ♪ AI is here giving humans the boost ♪ ♪ Team humans rolling, brains in the game ♪ ♪ With Dan Turchin, y'all remember the name ♪ ♪ People rain in the mix, no stopping the flow ♪ ♪ Better work, better life, yeah we're ready to go ♪ ♪ Robots and humans are collab, you know ♪ ♪ Okay, let's start the show ♪ - This is Dan Turchin from AI in the future of work. Welcome to this month's special highlight episode honoring the International Day of Education as always we're using 11 labs to digitize my voice for this compilation, the real me reviewed and approved the content and of course approved the digital twin. Every January 24th the world recognizes the transformative role of education in building opportunity, mobility and human potential. In this episode you'll hear how education is evolving in the age of AI and why curiosity, access and lifelong learning matter more than ever. Let's begin with Chris Karen, CEO of Turniton. Chris reflects on how AI is reshaping academic integrity, assessment and the meaning of original work in education. His insights remind us that technology doesn't replace learning. It reshapes how students think, right and build knowledge. The relationship between higher education and AI is, I'd say, complicated is probably a good word to use. A lot of the innovation comes from academia and yet it vastly accelerates or tempts academics to plagiarize. It's certainly a catalyst for doing research. What would, you're in the front lines. What would you say, how would you describe the prevailing attitude in higher ed toward AI? It's super complicated. Meaning, when students graduate into the workforce, there's an expectation by employers that you know how to use LLMs to get work done or to make work better. Whether it's analyzing financials, writing a memo, creating images for a marketing job. But at the same time, educators place a lot of value on writing as a way to develop critical thinking skills and living skills, communication skills. So there's this dichotomy between using AI as an expert of the technology when you graduate, but through a lot of higher education, even high school, many faculty members and teachers want students doing their own writing. Because it's more about the learning and skills that get developed by writing versus simply the end product quality. We have a bunch of demands from educators to adopt that spectrum of beliefs across different assignment types, provide the different tools required to understand the role the student had in a piece of writing versus the role of either outside sources or to your point, the use of an LLM. But the biggest kind of summary, I would say, is current time. And my view is in the next-- in five years, it'll be larger than same. You're going to have assignments where it's used anything you want, including chat GPT, 3, 4, 5, 6, to use LLMs, but be very clear what part of the paper you wrote versus it wrote to, for this master's thesis or this essay in high school, you can use an LLM to brainstorm, to do research, but everything in the essay needs to be 100% new to students. I completely agree. It has never worked to be on the wrong side of innovation. And it's so clear what it means this time around to be on the right side of innovation. Now, this is not a rhetorical question. In the past, plagiarism has always existed. It's existed for centuries, or the threat of it. And we've had things like honor codes. We've had things like requirements to cite your source. In fact, in our alma mater, we could take our finals anywhere we wanted. And there was a social contract that you knew that to be part of that academic community, you weren't going to violate the honor code. Why is it different this time around? That kind of social contract? Is it just so much easier to violate? Or are people fundamentally changing? What's different this time around? I think it's both. The first one's a sad one. I think there's been a change in mindset by students of all grade levels. And I'm not sure the cause of it, but it's troubling for me. And it basically is one where the students want the degree and they want to minimize the work to get the degree and therefore minimize the learning. And that's not to the individual level, but at the big picture, I see that as a big change has happened. I think it'd accelerate to be in a pandemic when people had to go to a locality way to learn with unprepared faculty and teachers. But I do think that's a shift that's happened in society. It's for me very troubling because the value of education is not the degree. It's the learning and the skills that you develop. Yes, AI has made it easier to have your problem set done by a shortcut, you're actually written by a shortcut or you're test taken by a shortcut. But the bigger thing for me which I'm concerned about is this mentality shift away from the learning towards simply the credential. I think it requires teachers before higher ed, middle school teachers, primary school teachers, high school teachers to instill in students what matters most, which is getting the knowledge, getting the expertise. Because that's what matters in terms of career success and career impact, it's not about your credential environment to school, et cetera. Those things become a lot less important. AI enables more shortcuts for sure to your question. But I think the bigger problem is the mindset of students is drifting towards less value in learning, more value in just the degree. Our next guest is Marney Baker Stein, chief content officer at Coursera. Marney explains how digital learning is expanding global access to high quality education. She shares how online platforms create new pathways for skills, credentials, and career mobility, especially for learners who were previously excluded. I talked a little bit about the complicated future of education. From your perspective, in one of the places that really, as I mentioned, has been a pioneer for the last 14 years, 15 years, what do you see as the future of education? Well, I truly agree with what you said at start that AI is the engine of the future of learning. It's transforming and it's going to continue to transform learning from static, one size fits all learning experiences, which is really all that we could do in the past, whether we were online or whether you were in a brick and mortar campus, we just didn't have the ability to personalize and contextualize learning at scale. And I think AI is going to help us do that. It's going to allow us to meaningfully and powerfully personalize and contextualize and make much more dynamic every learning experience, as well as to more intentionally link learning experiences and credentials to what's going on in the world, what's going on in the job market in ways that just were-- we couldn't even fathom, even just two, three years ago. So let's say for the sake of conversation, there are three key types of constituents. When we talk about the future of learning, there's the learner, obviously, there's the educator. And then let's say there's the institution who's providing the content or the framework. I would go out on a limb and say every human is a stakeholder in one of those three categories. Maybe if you could, take each one, if that would be OK, and talk about what we should expect to see change starting with maybe the learner. Well, I guess I would just back up and say that I think what will see change beyond just AI-powering new learning environments is we are going to see micro-credential shorter, stackable, flexible learning experiences as the new currency of education. I believe that will happen for lots of different reasons. And I think that will be actually a really powerful change in the future. So how does that impact learners? I think for learners, what it means is they're going to be a lot more points of entry for them to learn and master skills and competencies and mindsets and be introduced to new applications for these skills and competencies and mindsets than ever before. I really believe that education, because of the scale, constraints, has always really targeted one learner profiles. I think there's going to be room for a lot more learner profiles into the future. I'm truly excited about that. I think for instructors, teachers, professors, it's going to mean that things that they started to experiment, whether it was pre-COVID or during COVID around online learning or digitally enhanced learning or hybrid learning, that they're just going to have like X more powerful tools to do creative stuff. As they're putting together learning experiences for this more diverse learner audience, and they're not only going to have more interesting tools, but those tools are going to make their work not only more creative, but I think more efficient as well. And for institutions, institutions are going to have to think about, well, what does this mean? For our modalities, right? So whether they're going to be considering, should we have more online programs because of this AI-powered, more personalized stackable learning experiences? Are we going to have more hybrid components? Are we going to use our physical infrastructure differently because of these tools? Could we kind of turn upside down what it campuses into the future? So I think they're going to have a lot of interesting questions to ask and answer themselves for the same reason. And I think you can take a kind of very positive optimistic lens and say, that's cool stuff all the way across. It's going to provide opportunities for evolution and transformation in education, for learners and teachers and institutions. And you could also be very pessimistic as certain people are and say, you know, like, well, change is bad. And we're going to lose a lot when this happens. And you know, I think we're seeing both right now. We're seeing people who are learners, all stakeholders, learners, teachers, universities who are super excited and getting really creative about how they can use these tools to do things that are going to change the world and change everything we know about teaching and learning. And then we have other people who are hanging on to the past. And I think that's probably a good balance, right? That's a good balance. That protects us from moving too fast and creates affordances and constraints for the creativity that I think will then be pressure-tested in important ways as we move forward. [MUSIC PLAYING] Education doesn't end at graduation. Dave Treet, Chief Technology Officer at Pearson, explores how AI supports continuous learning at work. He discusses reskilling, credentialing, and how organizations prepare people for the jobs of tomorrow. Students want to be able to focus on what truly is going to be most helpful in their learning journey to ultimately get the job that they're dreaming of. They don't want to waste their time. They want to be efficient. They want it in the flow of their own lives at the time when it makes sense. One of the really interesting things that we are seeing with our AI product that's out in market right now is we look at the telemetry of it. We're getting the highest hit counts on our AI study tools between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. That students-- it's just when they study-- and as a parent of a college student, gosh, I wish my kid would go to bed earlier. But it's the reality. And so to be able to use AI to meet a student in the moment of their life when they actually have the question, when they're engaging with the content, when they need to be guided by a pedagogical structured, scaffolded support framework for the specific to the domain they're on, tailored to how the professor wants to teach that particular segment or section. We are tools in market that are doing that right now. We're getting tremendous feedback of how helpful that is. And it's encouraging us to go bigger and faster. And I juxtapose that against this university presence, is basically saying I'm struggling with those that aren't leaning in, having the under-informed perspective of just not getting past what people are using chat GPT to cheat. And how do I stop them from cheating? How do I just-- I'm assigning a paper. And I either know that it was written by AI or the writing skills aren't sufficient, and both cases like frustration. And so how do we actually change the dynamic to take advantage of what AI can do to guide learning in the moment, contextually aware of the learner and what they need, scaffolded in a way and supported by pedagogy-based interventions to actually address what that core stress point of students are to be able to be focused and effective in their learning? I know that was-- I took that number of different directions, but it's a big deal. And I think we're just at the beginning of learning how truly impactful AI can be in the process of learning to learn and being guided through it. You are a student of learning. And like said, a parent with a kid in college, what do you say to the student who is discouraged by thinking about a degree to choose or what skills they should learn? And they say it's futile because I'm going to get outsmarted or outworked by AI when I'm in the workforce. What's the role of that higher ed degree or pursuing higher education? Yeah, it's such an important question. You immediately evoked memories of I've got one in college. I've got two on the way and going on the college tour. And as a high school junior, getting asked by the tour guide, what major will you be applying to? I'm still trying to figure out what I'm going to be when I grow up. So that notion of one, the system putting pressure on students to pick and to know, two, then the broken process that featured in the piece that we put out in this winter called Lost in Transition, where right now we've got a broken dynamic of the slingshot model of education that we've lived in, which is I'm going to pick a major, I'm going to learn everything I need to, and then I'm going to slingshot my way through a career based on all the knowledge I acquired in school. That doesn't work and more and more so every day. And so when you put the pieces together of a structure, a structure of education that's not painting the clear pathways to careers, the changing nature of how AI and innovations changing those careers and changing the skills needed to be successful in those jobs and careers, this is a big part of our focus right now is actually we again are in a privileged position. We bought a company a few years ago called Fathom, it has a skills ontology where we're constantly updating that mapping of what skills are required, not just for which job but tasks within jobs and having that as a framework against which then we can have the guided learning and the exploration for a student to understand, okay, these are the skills I've developed so far in these content areas and domains. What doors and career pathways have that has that unlocked, what would I need to learn to be able to pursue this part of my dream, and then having a much more deliberate pathway to get there, we want to give students that confidence with this set of tools and we're integrating these things more and more every day. So we have a huge early career focus to our business that is really looking at that lost in transition report talks about that skills gap that we have today where it's not well enough understood as to the frustration from employers that there's a shortage of people with adequate skills for how the jobs are changing and the imperative that that puts on the learning, that the higher education and even case through 12 learning experiences, we can do a much better job and this is our focus of painting that clear picture of skills to job and skills to your context and then learn from your current context into that job and learn to learn along the way knowing that you're going to be in a lifelong of learning to follow. Our next great former guest comes from higher education leadership, Dave Marchick, Dean of the Co-God School of Business at American University reflects on the social impact of education. He highlights how learning shapes civic responsibility, leadership, and opportunity across generations. Let me open her, I talked about the challenging relationship that academia has with AI. Now you're the Dean of the Business School of Co-God at American University. Let's Dave Marchick's perspective on AI and academia, friend or foe. I think it's a little of both, but it's akin to when the calculator was created and professors or teachers of math said, "Do not use the calculator because you're not going to learn math." When Excel became ubiquitous and professors would say, "Don't use Excel because you're going to lose your ability to enter data into a ledger." I think that many in academia, frankly, have their head in the sand about the changes that this technology is going to bring to everything that everyone does in every domain, very much like what you said in the opener. That we need to embrace it and understand both the strengths and the weaknesses of AI and the challenges it's going to bring. But in the workforce, students who will become graduates will be expected to know, to be fluent in AI applications in whatever they do. We are delivering, essentially, two products in academia. We're delivering knowledge to students and learners throughout their lifetime. Then we're producing knowledge to the masses through research and scholarship and the traditional scholarship that faculty produce. In terms of student learnings, our job is to prepare students to be better when they graduate, to have productive and fulfilling, interesting lives. In the same way that someone needs to read and write and be a good communicator, future leaders need to learn AI as a tool for everything they do. That's the way we've embraced it at my school. I would say I now hear from deans and college presidents and leaders across the country, and many schools are struggling with this. I heard from a leader of a major highly ranked public university last week who said they put out a call for faculty to embrace AI in the classroom. This is a large public university that got one faculty to say I'm charging ahead. In many parts of academia, the mandate is still do not use AI, it's cheating, and I would say that is putting your head in the sand. We agree in that respect, and I want to know, so take us inside, you know, the rooms where the decisions are getting made about curriculum and, you know, you said it yourself, academia moves slowly, presumably a lot of your faculty are kind of set in their ways. You have the power to intervene, you clearly have an opinion. How do you navigate that conversation with faculty members who may not be ready for it? So let me tell you the story of why we did this, and like this was totally accidental, and like you, Dan, in your career, you come up with an idea, but then you're running an organization, and then you pivot. And so we had two speakers in the academic year, two years ago, we had Kent Walker and Karan Bhattia from Google, who basically said, AI is going to be as profound as electricity or fire. And I said, okay, maybe that's hyperbole, but let's assume it's going to be big. And then we had a CEO of venture capital firm named Brett Wilson, who runs a venture capital firm in services. Because of the only invest in AI, you may know Brett. And a student asked his Brett a question after his presentation said, am I going to be replaced by AI? And Brett said, you won't be replaced by AI, but you could be replaced by someone who knows AI if you don't. And so a light bulb went off in my head right at that moment, and I said, we got to embrace this. We have to run, not walk. So I went to my faculty, and I said, we need to drive this throughout our curriculum. And they said, great, let's form a committee. And I did like an eye rule. I'm like, okay, this is going to be a typical academic committee. It's going to be two years to produce a hundred page report. And nothing's going to happen. So I said, great, you have six weeks and give me no more than five pages. And the faculty came back with a fantastic proposal, which said, let's infuse AI and everything we do. American University is not going to produce engineers or computer scientists like Stanford or MIT. That's not our niche. We're producing business leaders who go into marketing and finance and accounting. And so let's infuse AI into everything we do, starting with the first day that students come for the orientation. Ending with the highest level graduate courses and everything in between. Finally, we turn to Gary Bowles, author chair for the future of work at Singularity University and Global Speaker on topics related to the new labor economy. Gary challenges us to rethink education as a lifelong process. He explains why problem solving adaptability and curiosity are the real skills of the AI era and how learning ecosystems must evolve to support them. Well, there'd be a time when as employees, we are essentially amalgamating careers by sharing skills with a variety of employers. And the organizations instead of looking kind of monolithic like today, they're really loosening collections of employees sharing unique skills. So that is certainly what I think is going to be an increasingly common use case for work. So think of the traditional employee role as one use case, only one employer, one job, one location, one paycheck. But increasingly, what happens is a young person comes out of college and sure they might get it out of vocational school or high school and they might get a day job. But then they take a gap month with their friends and they're learning online and then they're driving for Uber at night and they're working on a startup with their friends. It's a constantly moving landscape of work and leisure and learning and and that I think is portfolio of work. So I believe that will be an increasingly common model. Parents ask me all the time, why won't my son or daughter, why won't they get a real job and the answer is it's a hedge strategy against an exponentially changing future of work. So for younger listeners who are thinking about what career to go into, we're facing this kind of metatrend about the very fundamental nature of work changing. And we're also facing potential competition from automation. So it's a confusing time to be a kid in college and trying to figure out what you want to be. What's your advice about the skills that kids in college should be learning now that will succeed the test of time? So first off, I ask again for parents for students and then for educators and administrators and colleges to all have a mindset shift. And the first step is to dial down the temperature on the importance of that near term decision, that window of the young adult launch pad of the 18 to 22 year old. If instead we think of it as simply your first real relationship with work, but your relationship with work is going to keep on changing in all likelihood. Now there might still be some jobs where you can get trained in school and then you're going to be in the same field that have a very similar job for decades, but that again is an increasingly less likely use case for work. It's much more likely that your relationship with work is going to keep on changing on a dynamic basis and that's going to happen for two reasons. The landscape of work itself is changing and it's going to happen because you as an individual as a human being have this wide range of skills and capacities and interests that you can continually explore. So step one, dial down the temperature, don't get so over indexed on the belief that you need to have this incredibly critical time of your life that you learn everything you need to be able to have a career in the future instead think of it as one phase. The second is to be thinking about less of the knowledges that we had to gather in the past and much more on what I call the flex skills so the no skills those bodies of knowledge that more and more information is going to be learned just in time and just in context that is you're going to look at your digital distraction device and watch you two videos and solve the problem that's right in front of you. And you're going to do that while you're solving the problem just in time and just in context but those flex skills those skills that are usable in a range of situations. There's hundreds of them that each of us have from collaborating to critical thinking to analyzing problems if I had to pick four I call them pace we need to all become problem solvers who are adaptive creative and with empathy problem solvers because as my father found with what colors your parachute if you present yourself to a potential higher as a problem solver you're far more likely to get hired. Adaptive because there's nothing in life that's certain but exponential change and we clearly saw that in the great reset created because that's what's going to keep you ahead of robots and software and with empathy because it is your capacity to be able to empathize with the needs of a customer with the needs of society that will allow you also to stay ahead of the robots and software and to be able to continually have your own North star in the kinds of problems that you most want to solve. Education has always been a bridge to possibility today. AI is accelerating how we learn where we learn and who gets the chance to participate from academic integrity to lifelong rescuing one theme is consistent when learning remains human centered technology becomes an enabler not a replacement. If any of these insights inspired you listen to the full episodes links are in today's show notes and if you know anyone curious about how AI is changing education share this episode with them or leave a comment with your perspective. Thanks for listening to this international day of education special edition of AI in the future of work until next time keep growing leading inspiring and learning. See you next time.