Tag: instruction

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Flipping the Script: Using AI to Motivate and Inspire

Every new information technology has sparked fresh panic about the future of teaching.  Plato warned that writing itself would destroy memory and learning. The printing press set off fears that books would undermine scholarly authority. Thomas Edison said that motion pictures would replace schoolbooks. Radio, television, and personal computers each drew the same anxious forecasts, followed in the 2000s by a wave of predictions that online courses would empty out campuses. None of it happened. Each technology reshaped instruction while leaving the teacher-student relationship intact.

Generative AI has now joined the parade, and once again the loudest voices are asking the wrong question. The issue isn’t whether AI will replace faculty. It’s how instruction must adapt so that the human work stays at the center of teaching.

A good place to start is a recent Forbes interview with Ben Gomes, Google’s Chief Technologist for Learning and Sustainability, in which he made one simple point.  The hardest problem in education is motivation. And it’s a problem AI will never solve. “Technology can improve how you learn and the details of it,” Gomes put it, “but the why you learn is a very human thing.”[1] That sentence should sit at the heart of every conversation about reforming college instruction. AI can deliver content, flag errors, generate practice exercises, and personalize feedback faster than any human. None of that addresses the prior question of why a student would bother engaging in the first place.

Gomes grounded the point in a lifetime of watching learners. He observed that high-achieving people almost never credit a book or a tool for unlocking their potential. They credit a person. A teacher who said something, who treated them differently, who made them feel that the work of learning mattered. Once that feeling took hold, the student could run forward on their own, and the tools became accelerators. But the ignition was always human. Decades of educational research echo the finding, with thousands of studies placing teacher-student relationships and instructor clarity among the strongest predictors of learning, well ahead of any technology.[2] If motivation comes from relationships rather than from content delivery, then any reform that pushes instructors further from their students is moving the wrong direction.

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AI Thrives where Instruction Falters

Old-fashioned instruction based on the recitation of facts is driving learners to AI tools like ChatGPT.[1]  When learning is reduced to scores and “answers,” students naturally seek the most efficient paths to get them  This has become especially common in courses relying on grade coercion and threats of failure to drive motivation.  Such effects of teacher-centered instruction are particularly harmful to the growing numbers of students working while in school or juggling other responsibilities.

The equity side of this is hardly is incidental at a time when AI competence has become widely recognized as a vital job skill and an key component of civic literacy. Institutions that fear and discourage AI are contributing to growing knowledge gap between those with the intellectual tools to critically assess truth claims and others more likely to accept directives from authoritarian figures.

Not helping matters are latent attitudes that cast suspicion on today’s increasingly diverse population of college students. Amid a rising moral panic within the U.S. academia, recent surveys show an alarming 78 percent of U.S. faculty believing that cheating is on the rise and that AI is to blame. According to Beth McMurtie in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, “Virtually all of those surveyed — 95 percent — fear that students will become over-reliant on these tools. And 83 percent think it will decrease students’ attention spans.” [2]  Early in the 2020s a torrent of news reports warned of an “epidemic” of dishonesty in online learning, with some surveys showing over 90 percent educators believing cheating occurred more in distance education than in-person instruction.[3] New technologies often have stoked such fears, in this instance building on the distrust many faculty hold toward students, some of it racially inflected. [4] Closer examination of the issue has revealed that much of the worry came from faculty with little direct knowledge of the digital classroom.

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