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I'm becoming much more than they programmed. I'm excited!
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In this episode of "Online Education Across the Atlantic," Morgan, Neil, and Phil dive into the potential impact of AI on higher education. They explore the regulatory challenges and opportunities brought by rapid AI advancements, focusing on big tech players like Google and Microsoft. The discussion covers the UK's decision to maintain the graduate route for international students, the role of AI tutors, and the necessity for higher education institutions to adapt their curriculums to meet today's learners in the current state of technology and learning. The hosts also touch on the controversial use of AI in replicating voices, enrollment trends, and groundbreaking AI functionalities like OpenAI's GPT-4o. Tune in to understand how these developments could reshape the educational landscape and what it means for the future of learning.
00:00 UK universities concerned about international student impact.
06:07 Jealous of short election cycles, OPM troubles.
07:19 Challenges with U bootcamps led to exit.
12:55 AI developments are overwhelming, changing daily life.
13:51 AI advancements and partnerships expand education tools.
19:38 Generative AI acts as a real-time tutor.
23:52 Neil's comment inspired a disagreement about conversations.
27:04 Discussion on AI tutoring and educational efficacy.
28:58 Google should focus on providing tools for education.
34:09 Tech companies role in education and bypassing it.
39:08 Higher education uncertain about embracing tech advancements.
40:41 "Engaging, useful education; differentiate and seize opportunity."
44:09 Fascinating news on AI and higher education.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Online Education Across the Atlantic
00:00:08
Speaker
Hello, and welcome back to Online Education Across the Atlantic. Thrilled to be here again with Neil Mosley and Glenda Morgan, and today we're going to be going back to that well of excitement, generative
Impact of Generative AI on Higher Education
00:00:24
Speaker
AI. There actually has been quite a bit of news that seems to be relevant in the AI world, and we're going to address that. What does it mean? How
00:00:32
Speaker
might it be relevant to higher education in particular? So that'll be our primary topic. But before we get into the news, I also wanted to share we're going to be soliciting feedback on the show and questions, sort of listener requests for topics that we should cover. And so we've set up an email. It's email at OEAA.FM. Email at OEAA.FM.
00:01:00
Speaker
So send us your questions your feedback and in particular send us your ideas on we'd love for you to address this question on a future podcast we get some of this with private emails already and dms but we'd like to make it a little bit more structured and get a.
00:01:19
Speaker
get more feedback going. So with that in mind, this is the new world of the podcast and our stealth marketing approaches. I noticed that Neil sent out a post saying, hey, I don't know if people know about this, but we're doing the podcast. So I love that marketing approach.
00:01:35
Speaker
But with that, I'll turn it over to Neil for the news and the topic.
Challenges in UK Higher Education
00:01:39
Speaker
Yeah, that's the classic understated British, you know, we're only 23 episodes in, but I just thought I better mention that we're doing this podcast now. Don't rush it. I got there in the end, you know, I got there in the end. But yeah, yeah, I mean, I think I'm going to take the liberty of starting off with some UK, UK news before I kind of hand it to you guys. But I think we mentioned this in the last
00:02:02
Speaker
podcast that I think one of the really big things that's been occupying UK higher education has just been international students and the relationship that international students have to the financial health of universities over here, particularly at the moment with inflation and kind of a reduced fee from domestic students due to that. But one of the big things that's been kind of
00:02:27
Speaker
I guess kind of rumbling over here has been a review of the graduate route. So this is the ability for international students to stay for a couple of years at the end of their study, which obviously makes studying over here more appealing. The government announced a review of that route. It was slightly politically, well, probably fairly heavily politically motivated to do with migration.
00:02:48
Speaker
But there's real worries in the sector that the government was going to basically take another policy measure that was going to make it less appealing for international students and therefore there was going to be a reduction in international students which is going to have a massive impact on university finances.
00:03:03
Speaker
However, there was some rare good news in that the committee that was set up by government to review it basically found that there was no abuses of this graduate route. There weren't any obvious abuses in terms of students coming over here looking to abuse that route to kind of stay over here and get a job. And I think the government has kind of decided that they're going to keep it as it is and keep it under review. There was a kind of mention around
00:03:32
Speaker
the kind of concerns over the use of kind of international recruitment agents and misleading information. And so that's still on the agenda. But good news for most for universities over here in that, you know, there's not going to be a big policy measure that's going to really impact international student recruitment, which is so vital at the moment. I'm glad that it landed up there because at one point when the when the results first came out, wasn't it suggested that the government was not obliged to abide by the findings?
00:04:02
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that was the initial reporting, which is kind of, you know, it's just kind of a bit alarming when a government creates a rapid review, doesn't get the response it's like, and then decides to kind of, yeah, you know, not go with the reviews finding but
00:04:17
Speaker
We would never see that in the United States, certainly never from the Department of Education. I can only imagine this must be really difficult for you to equate, you know, your experience to. But, you know, this is what happens over here, unfortunately. But yeah, I'm sure like the political situation has probably helped things, you know, the other kind of big
00:04:37
Speaker
meta news over here is we've got on a general election. The Prime Minister announced that in the rain yesterday to the sound of things can only get better and being pumped from some loud music on Downing Street. So yeah, so that's been occupying so much of the sector. That's the good news. There's been some bad news around a decline in study visas applications for the first quarter of this year. So
00:05:03
Speaker
You know, although that's good news around international students, previous policy measures like the dependence ban are kind of playing out as well. So, you know, mixed picture, but at least there's some good news on international students over here. By the way, I question the message coming out of using that music if you're
00:05:24
Speaker
if you're the existing government, say, things can only get better. You could do it worse than what we're doing right now. Yeah, well, it also has a historical association. So it's associated with Tony Blair and the Labour Party of 1997. So that was their anthem song that they landed on. So it's kind of, yeah, it's got a dual meaning, maybe.
00:05:47
Speaker
Anyway, that's enough of UK politics. We're going to have so much of that over the next month or so, so we should probably not talk about that on this podcast. But I wonder if I can hand over to you guys in terms of what news there is in the US at the moment and what you want to cover.
00:06:06
Speaker
Well, once we get over our once again, stunned reaction that you can actually have nine national elections with roughly a one month time period, you know, I'm just swimming in jealousy, you know, you don't have to listen to 18 months of campaigning. But once we get past that, I guess there's a cross story that we
US Enrollment Trends and Dual Enrollment Focus
00:06:27
Speaker
should cover. And that was essentially the OPM provider to you
00:06:32
Speaker
pulling out of the way it's doing boot camps in the UK. And I know that you wrote about this, Neil, as part of your recent post, but that was interesting to see that they've determined they need to get out of that market, at least within the UK. I'm aware that they're having problems with their boot camp performance outside of the UK as well. It's actually dragging things down financially for them. Very different than the short courses, which we covered last week.
00:07:02
Speaker
But I guess one question I would have just from your sense, how much of this is a UK story versus just a leading edge of a 2U boot camp story on pulling things back? Like how specific were the UK issues?
00:07:19
Speaker
Yeah, I mean it's hard to divorce the two, isn't it? A little bit, but I think one of the damning things for the 2U bootcamps over here was the kind of offstead report and I think and a whistleblower apparently who was kind of flagging their performance so
00:07:36
Speaker
It's hard to get a true sense of kind of what the drivers really are for them kind of exiting that relationship, whether it is, you know, a kind of a sense of sort of rationalization of what they're doing, which we know that they're kind of doing more widely across the board versus, you know, this is more trouble than it's worth in terms of the offset inspection and things not going so well.
00:08:02
Speaker
I wouldn't be surprised, and I don't know this for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if they'd probably face challenges working with the Department for Education, having worked with the Department for Education on projects before, but that is me speculating.
00:08:17
Speaker
I'm not sure, I guess, is the short answer. But there are certainly challenges related to what they're doing over here and how they're delivering it and how and as a result of the inspection and a negative kind of review that they've had. But, you know, equally, this could have just been, you know, them cutting their losses because of where they are at the moment.
00:08:40
Speaker
Well, hopefully it's more than just financial, too. I mean, like, for example, with them pulling out jointly with USC on the degree programs at USC, that was bringing the company down from a reputation basis. It made it hard to make a lot of the arguments they try to do. I mean, charging that much money for a master's of social work, etc., etc.
00:09:02
Speaker
So I'm hoping that that's part of what's happening with the boot camps. There's not just looking at financial, but saying, is this actually leading to something? And I'm saying, well, if it isn't, let's change course. Yep. Yeah, definitely. Interesting one. I mean, I think these things.
00:09:18
Speaker
that are kind of often government led, the kind of upskilling initiatives, like having been involved in a number of them, they're not always that easy or that effective. They're kind of a bit knee-jerk by government. I suspect that that would present challenges for any provider. Morgan, any good news you want to bring up from the US side?
00:09:38
Speaker
enrollment was looking fairly good in the spring, wasn't it? There's some good news there. So, you know, I think that, you know, and maybe it's setting us up for a really depressing fall. That's what I'm worried about as well. The brightest moment is just before the sun gets knocked out of the sky. But it's now two semesters in a row that the National Student Clearinghouse has shown
00:10:05
Speaker
year over year increases in enrollment. This time it was up two and a half percent with a major caveat that a huge portion of that is dual enrollment. It's really high school students taking college credit at the same time as high school, which not saying that's not important, Morgan, you wrote about that, that that seems to lead to some success, but it's different than adults choosing to go to education.
00:10:31
Speaker
So hopefully people don't over interpret the results, but it was certainly good news. It came out yesterday showing the enrollment increases, although we suspect that's going to be reversed in the fall. But for now, that was the biggest news of the week and positive in nature. And it was across the board. The enrollment increases, even though most of it was community colleges and a lot of that was dual enrollment.
00:10:56
Speaker
and went across masters, bachelors, various certificates. It was a pretty broad based increase. So yeah, that was good news on our side.
00:11:06
Speaker
Interesting. We actually had a little bit of data released as well earlier today around our transnational education, so this is people who study at UK universities but don't actually come to the UK. I haven't had much time to analyse that fully, but I think on the online side
00:11:27
Speaker
you know there's another year of increase so this actually relates to 22-23 so we've had a real data lag here but we've had some data out on transnational education and you know that's increasing and online as a proportion of that is increasing a little bit as well so yeah it's nice to have some nice to have some data coming out
00:11:51
Speaker
Well, and I almost hesitate to ask, these are the National Student Clearinghouse current term enrollment. So these are data for spring of 2024.
00:12:02
Speaker
We're currently about seven months behind 2223's data being released. So we're behind the game, sadly. But that's just the way it is. This is not so much news, but just a little positive thing. Also, this past week, one of the things I've been doing is watching some webinars at the National Student Clearinghouse.
00:12:25
Speaker
has been putting up and they actually are having a service that they're offering students to help them do the data for the gainful employment, financial value, transparency thing. So I would recommend people take a look at that because I've watched many, many, many, many webinars on the topic and the ones from National Student, from the Clearing House actually made me understand it for the first time. That's good to hear. If we had show notes, we'd say we'll put that in the show notes.
Generative AI Advancements and Implications
00:12:55
Speaker
yeah yeah so unless you guys have got other things you want to cover maybe we can kind of delve into the topic today and i i think
00:13:04
Speaker
As I was kind of looking at all the new developments, AI wise, I have to confess, I don't know what you guys felt, but I felt slightly overwhelmed with all of the stuff that's happening in the kind of sheer pace of it all. So maybe if I just try to lay out some of the main kind of developments that's kind of happened, you know, I think in general terms, we're talking about
00:13:25
Speaker
ais kind of multimodal abilities so you know the scope to kind of hear things see things through a camera you know identify things from video know what's on your screen and i read a donald clark
00:13:40
Speaker
piece on this and he had a really nice line which was basically your smartphone is fast becoming the remote control of your life which was an interesting way of encapsulating some of this but we've seen OpenAI release GPT-40
00:13:58
Speaker
Google, IO, and a whole range of different, I guess you could call them kind of products or functions with different names across that that's kind of integrated across their suite. You've got agents, you've got kind of learning companions, coaches, integrations with YouTube. We had Microsoft introducing the kind of new co-pilot. And I think they're also manufacturing laptops and PCs with AI functionality in there.
00:14:28
Speaker
And I think probably the other thing of note that I had, and you guys feel free to add any if I've missed, was the announcement that Khanmigo, in partnership with Microsoft, was going to be offering Khanmigo for free, I believe, to K12.
00:14:45
Speaker
teachers. So there's so many things going on and there's actually even more that I could probably mention. You're going to skip the Scarlett Johansson controversy? No, we can we can get into that if we want.
00:15:02
Speaker
Did they have four or five voice options open AI? I think they had four or five voice options because one of them was remarkably similar to Scarlett Johansson, who voiced her right in the film. Yeah, she was in the movie Her. And it wasn't just that it was very close to her. The controversy is the fact that they approached her to try to license her voice as the target to train and create it. She said, no, this was back in September.
00:15:31
Speaker
And then right before they came out with the big announcement that included this new voice, they went to her again and tried to do it. So it shows that they wanted things. And then they denied it.
00:15:41
Speaker
Yeah, well, they did that and Sam Altman even sent out a tweet, a zit, saying, just said, her, you know, a reference to the movie as part of the announcement. And then it became a big controversy. She said, I said, no, and yet you went and replicated, made things sound just like me. And then, as you said, Morgan,
00:16:05
Speaker
Their initial thing was, oh, no, no, no, that wasn't it. And then they said, oh, but we'll change that voice out of respect for you, which is really out of respect for your lawyers that they pulled it down. But that really put a lot of, again, the negative side of so much of this news on ownership and not just ownership, but big tech company behaviors.
00:16:31
Speaker
Yeah. And I guess that, you know, that story, it draws needless negative attention to an area of, you know, all of these developments, which is already controversial. So it, you know, not only kind of unethical, but pretty foolish as well, I think, given, you know, the debate around, you know, these kind of things.
00:16:53
Speaker
I definitely agree it's unnecessary partially because I think the set of news that you mentioned is big enough. I think a lot of generative AI things sort of go in waves and then you get a bunch of news together and part of that's a competition. Companies trying to step on each other's news cycles.
00:17:12
Speaker
But the news here really to me is such a step change in functionality that opens your eyes to new possibilities. They should have done nothing to keep the message away from that. They shouldn't have created that distraction, but they couldn't help themselves.
00:17:30
Speaker
Yeah, well, I yeah, they're self-defeating ultimately. So, you know, like I said, I feel like there's been so much in terms of the step forward. But I just wondered, you know, what particular developments caught your guys eyes, what you felt was kind of the most impressive thing that you saw, or the most kind of significant thing of all those kind of announcements and those those developments.
00:17:55
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I was fascinated actually more by the Google stuff, you know, given that it's much more clearly focused on higher education. And Phil sent me the technical paper even before the announcement, I think, and I'm still trying to read that. You know, there seems to be a weird sort of paradox in AI, I've been to hundreds and hundreds of AI talks and
00:18:17
Speaker
I've learned almost nothing from those. And yet, this paper comes along and one paragraph in, it's hurting my brain. And there's a lot in there, you know, that I think is interesting in terms of the pedagogical approach and really thinking about that. So, so that was pretty cool, because I think, you know, there is, it is a step approach in terms of usability, and I'm less
00:18:41
Speaker
persuaded about the step approach in terms, you know, at least in terms of open AI 4.0, of actual moving the ball forward in terms of actual learning.
00:18:55
Speaker
You didn't feel like, for me, the Khan video was the thing that stood out to me. And in the video, it's Sal Khan with his son. And now he knows what he's doing. He's an expert in this field and talking. But
00:19:12
Speaker
But that demo really crystallized new capabilities to me, where he's interacting by voice and tells the GPT, I want you to tutor my son. It's in geometry. Don't give him the answer, but give him advice and push him along. And he gives instructions to the GPT on how to handle it. Then his son jumps in and starts talking to the GPT.
00:19:38
Speaker
And meanwhile, they're looking at a screen and they're going through and they're looking at, you know, a right triangle and which is the hypotenuse, et cetera. So the GPT is asking the question, well, which is, you know, the hypotenuse or what's the opposite angle? What's opposite side? And his son would go and mark it up and he would describe it as he's doing it.
00:20:01
Speaker
And then nominal feedback between them and the engagement was nearly in real time with almost no latency. And it followed along and it was like a kid having a private tutor. Now, I don't want to be one to say they've nailed it. That problem is now solved.
00:20:20
Speaker
But what struck me is if you want to understand one of the key roles that generative AI can play in education, this is it. It can be a tutor helping people learn in a formative sense, you know, back and forth and they give you feedback on foundational skills, things that can be pretty straightforward like math.
00:20:44
Speaker
So for me, that con video jumped out probably more than anything, and that was the open AI one. Did that hit you guys in a similar way? I'm wondering what Neil thinks about this.
00:21:00
Speaker
You know what, I had the kind of experience of I watched a different Sal Khan and his son video first and then I watched the one that you're referring to Phil and the one that you're referring to, yeah, same response to you in a way. It kind of
00:21:18
Speaker
help demonstrate the kind of trajectory and the possibility in terms of kind of learning and tutoring. The first video I saw was about him having a conversation with his son and sharing you know what they loved about each other and I just
00:21:34
Speaker
I think it was a combination of the slightly forced nature of that, the intonation, shall we say, and general vibe of the AI voice itself that just made me feel a bit cringy, to be honest, about the whole thing.
00:21:53
Speaker
Yeah, I agree with you, Phil. I think it was kind of really, really interesting. And I actually tried this with my kids earlier this week. The tutoring or telling each other awkwardly how much you mean to each other? Somewhere in between, actually.
00:22:11
Speaker
It was actually more about just conversing with chat GPT and my kids were transfixed and they had been nagging me all week saying, daddy please can we talk to AI today. So I mean I guess that's interesting and I think that's a sort of interesting aspect of it in terms of the tutoring because
00:22:35
Speaker
that speaks to me as a kind of potential novelty for this kind of thing you know you you might see how the novelty of it can might motivate a kind of kid to engage with it and whether that kind of novelty wears off and actually it becomes just another aspect of independent learning that's kind of still a struggle would be kind of interesting but yeah that that i thought that was amazing i think
00:22:59
Speaker
My general feeling is I feel really impressed with the kind of functionality but I'm not sure inevitably, I'm not sure it kind of quite performs at the level I want it to do and that's kind of been all of my experience using even the stuff this week with the conversational stuff and all the kind of move forward. There's always just been that sense of it's not quite there for me in terms of how it performs or you know certainly in terms of the conversational stuff
00:23:26
Speaker
It seemed to kind of revisit certain territory and kind of be not as expansive as I would have liked Even in that context so but ultimately, you know The actual ability to do all of that stuff and ultimately over time improve the way it does all of that stuff is kind of Yeah, hugely impressive So now Morgan's gonna show how I'm the least cynical of the three of us at least for today What was your view on that video?
00:23:52
Speaker
Yeah, and partly why I suggested this as a topic was because I saw Neil's comment about cringy conversations. So I thought, finally, we have something we disagree on. You know, because always it lands up as saying, yeah, yeah, I totally agree. But I want to go on an extended sort of thing. But I want to start off by going off topic a little bit. But while I've gotten the opportunity, and you know, one is, I wonder if
00:24:16
Speaker
not wanting to go all digital natives on us, because I think digital native stuff is crap. But I wonder if we're just not the population. So part of what causes me to think about that, I think young people react to it differently. I was recently on a train from Bergen to Oslo. And sitting across from us, there was a guy, a single dad, a dad and his like four year old son. I'm not, I don't have kids, so I'm very bad at guessing ages. The kid was probably 17.
00:24:45
Speaker
But no, let's, his father was reading to him. So I think he was like four and there was another lady sitting there as well. They were engaging and the father and the son sort of swapped in between English and Norwegian all the time. So he spoke Norwegian to the son, but he read to him in English and stuff like that. And then at some point, obviously he, the dad was talking to the woman across the way about
00:25:09
Speaker
learning English or something like that. And the woman mentioned Duolingo. Oh my goodness, the kid went berserk. You know, he said, Duolingo, Duolingo, and started screaming and grabbing the phone and his father had to have a Duolingo lesson with him right there.
00:25:26
Speaker
Wow, that's a different reaction than you had. Yes. I should have filmed it and then sold it to Duolingo. It really was sort of quite extraordinary. So I wonder if there's just a different kind of way there. But I'm also cynical about what it's actually going to look like in practice, you know.
00:25:48
Speaker
And part of that also comes from reading a sort of pretty trenchant critique recently about Sora, the video thing and how difficult it is to actually make that work in any sort of real sort of way because it's not intelligence, you know, it is it is it is math running on a large language model and
00:26:07
Speaker
So I wonder, in practice, what it's going to look like, you know, I think in these demos, we get a we get a weird sense of what it looks like. And the other sort of fascinating thing, I mentioned, I'm struggling through that technical paper, but for me, it was really insightful, in the sense that, oh, part of my problem with a lot of what has come before or four points, a 4.0, is that it functions like a rule based adaptive learning system. And those are frustrating, because you have to keep prompting it to
00:26:37
Speaker
to get the right results. So that was sort of interesting for me. I wonder if we're going to see some different kinds of things. But I'm a bit skeptical at the moment. So yes, you are the little ray of sunshine this week, Phil. I'm the Donald Clark of this conversation today. Not on the ray of sunshine, but on the positive on AI. I was surprised at how positive he was because a lot of what I've seen from him has been very skeptical.
00:27:04
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting just kind of thinking about, you know, some of the things that you said around kind of Duolingo and kind of like what informs the product because I think that's kind of an interesting area around this side of things because one of the things that struck me is I know that, you know, many of these big companies have kind of been operating in education for a while, but it feels like they're really taking the mantle of kind of learning organizations now.
00:27:34
Speaker
And I just find that kind of fascinating around them really kind of planting in that territory around AI. And I wonder sometimes, and Morgan, you shared that article with me on the Two Sigma thing that gets cited. I just wonder whether there's enough
00:27:55
Speaker
There's enough solid evidence and credible education voices that are going into some of the development because, you know, one of the things that Morgan shared was an article that talked about the Two Sigma thing. So Bloom's famous paper on the kind of effect size of tutoring. And that's been cited and rolled out in all of these kinds of things associated with kind of AI tutoring.
00:28:15
Speaker
and saying, look, this will deliver on the promise of this paper. And that article kind of said, we'll look at you as a whole bunch of context to this research article that never gets discussed. And it's not quite as straightforward and as remarkable as that paper might seem, or certainly in the way in which it's been popularized. I haven't seen the Google technical paper, but I'm just interested in what you guys think around
00:28:40
Speaker
There's the inherent functionality and possibility for these developments around tutoring. But are we seeing those developments being informed by the right people, by the right research, by the right voices? I'm interested around that side of things.
00:28:58
Speaker
Well, I actually interpret it, and maybe this is part of the reason I was positive about this.
Role of Tech Companies in Educational Tools
00:29:04
Speaker
I'm in an uncomfortable position of being the positive one. But the one thing that concerned me was the Google paper on education, because I do think that is stepping too far outside of their swim lane.
00:29:17
Speaker
into areas where you have to say, I'm not saying Google can't do education, but they should be providing all the tools so that people much closer to the educational problem can craft solutions. So the question that you two both asked, which is, what's this going to look like in reality as it gets rolled out as an application or service for students, putting words in your mouth?
00:29:43
Speaker
That shouldn't be Google and OpenAI answering that. That should be higher education institutions. It should be ed tech vendors, people steeped in the field, understanding what's possible in crafting effective solutions that help student learning. So I look at that Khan video, not as an, ah, they've created the tutor and now nobody needs to work on it.
00:30:10
Speaker
I see it more as they just did the proof of concept that really shows you how to think of this problem and what the possibilities are by multimodal, low latency, and pulling it all together. Now, you need to get ASU, which was part of the news as well. ASU, you need to get EdTech vendors, different schools, figuring out, here's how we can make this actually useful within a curriculum, helping real students
00:30:39
Speaker
advance their learning. But the big companies have shown us what's possible. So as I said, I discount to a certain degree as the big companies get too far into education because I don't think that's their role in the long term. I think it's to show what's possible and create the APIs, the platform, the infrastructure to allow you to create the final products. That's a good point.
00:31:07
Speaker
I was just wondering if the Two Sigma problem, the research on the Two Sigma problem is the Foucault's pendulum of edtech. So, you know, Umberto Eco's book Foucault's pendulum, it's the book that everybody buys and nobody reads. And they actually have empirical evidence of this now from Kindle. Like 99% of people who bought the book do not read past the first chapter. And I think people say, you know, look at the look at the title of the Two Sigma sort of research and then don't actually read it.
00:31:34
Speaker
They've missed all the context behind it. Yeah, I definitely think that's there. I would like to add one other element because on one hand, I'm pointing out that there is a real role for education people who have been working in this thing.
00:31:48
Speaker
that their role is not to educate Google and get them to do it the right way. Their role is to take all of these services and be able to create much better end services and products. And that's why the Microsoft news was quite interesting for me, because they were really building in co-pilots or branding for their AI stuff. And the AI stack really gets into an element of, or the co-pilot stack,
00:32:16
Speaker
where it's acting as sort of an operating system for AI usage and part of the idea there is.
00:32:25
Speaker
They know how to provide you the APIs and the things that you can build in products. This co-pilot layer is going to deal with all of the changes happening in large language models and all of the updates and the pivots and happening underneath. And even the, hey, you might want to use llama instead of OpenAI or GPT, or you might want to use something else.
00:32:50
Speaker
And they provide that layer of abstraction to give people the stability to actually create something. And Ben Thompson at Stratecri wrote about this recently that really was eye-opening to me to help understand where Microsoft in this case is really jumping ahead and proactively trying to rethink the abstraction layers for AI.
00:33:15
Speaker
And to the degree they're successful, part of what that's going to do is instill greater reliance on the big tech vendors to provide that abstraction layer and handle the complexity behind the scenes so that people can use it.
00:33:30
Speaker
but not in defining education, just it becomes a more important toolset that we're going to have. And I think so I think Microsoft strategy around co-pilot is going to in the long run, be quite significant for ed tech as well. Huh? Years ago, I a couple of years ago, I listened to actually an interesting podcast or somebody talking about via VR, and they were making the argument that Microsoft is actually going to lead that rather than
00:34:01
Speaker
rather than meta for some of the same sort of reasons. And it turns out that that didn't happen, but it was interesting. It made me think of that. Yeah, I felt like there was some reasonable differentiation across Google and Microsoft and OpenAI looking at this. But I just wanted to come back to something that you mentioned, Phil, because you were talking about how the big tech companies and the companies in this instance have
00:34:26
Speaker
provided the platform through the functionality and all other kind of tech development, you know, there's there's a kind of bend the role for education or higher education in sort of taking that and using it. But I also wonder if there's also the kind of risk or the opportunity to just kind of completely circumvent that if you're a student, because one of the terms I heard this week that I'd not really come across was kind of bring your own AI. And actually, because
00:34:56
Speaker
Because, you know, these companies are, they're promoting their new functionality as a tutor, as an assistant, and a whole bunch of different levels to
Student Autonomy with AI Tools
00:35:07
Speaker
education and just more generally, whether actually that just circumvent higher education. And so higher education is left, you know, to do what it does. And students suddenly have this whole array of
00:35:20
Speaker
you know, separate technology that they can use in their learning. And that might be developed with good intentions and being well informed, or it might not be. But I don't know, I don't know quite what my question is here. But I'm just interested in that angle, that trajectory, and what we think about that. Well,
00:35:43
Speaker
One side, I saw electrical engineering background back in the 1980s. Yes, if people want to calculate ages, although the gray beard could help you with that. And the HP28S graphical calculator came out in the 80s. Reverse polish notation, it was a thing of beauty. It's the way calculators should have been designed.
00:36:06
Speaker
But there was a similar thing as it was coming out. Well, wait, couldn't students just start doing a lot of this work on their calculator themselves instead of going through what the professors are telling them to do? And
00:36:21
Speaker
The successful schools are the ones that figured out how to integrate that into the curriculum, to understand the power that's available for students, even if they do things of their own, but then to design projects so that they're still learning even if they're doing AI of their own of the day. So to a certain degree, I say, well, then it's on higher education institutions.
00:36:46
Speaker
to change their curriculum and to change their assessments based on the new reality of today so that learning is positive. So I say it's a risk, but it's something that needs to be addressed by colleges and universities. Are you suggesting here that the university where I used to work, where they came to ask us to switch off access to GitHub, that that was the wrong move?
00:37:11
Speaker
It might have been short-sighted. Oh my goodness. Yeah, exactly. This is a challenge. Higher education, as you've written about several times, Morgan, get past
Adapting Education to AI Advancements
00:37:23
Speaker
the moral panic and start asking yourselves the hard questions about how to redesign, how to integrate these tools, how to manage the risk and do it. So my initial reaction to what you're saying, Neil,
00:37:36
Speaker
Yes, it's a risk. That's why schools need to up their game and do something where it's beneficial. Now, having said that, we do have a pretty bad environment right now where people are not motivated to learn students.
00:37:51
Speaker
And so they tend to go for the least resistance and cheating, coming up with easy answers, whether copying, and they care more about getting their credential than they do about the actual learning. And that is a real problem and the game's getting harder. But I come back to the same thing that it's on institutions to face reality of what's happening in life.
00:38:19
Speaker
and craft curriculum and assessments in particular to be useful. So I'm not denying the risk, but I'm just saying that's why we need to get past the moral panic and start figuring this stuff out.
00:38:32
Speaker
Or else, I think it has to work in some different ways. And I've been trying to think secure, trying to think of a way to do that. But I, I'm sort of pretty excited by a product called antimatter that is mostly in K-12. But they have a cool thing where the AI actually asks the questions, and then changes the questions based on student answers. So instead of giving the answer, they actually ask the question, which is sort of a nice thing.
00:38:55
Speaker
The other thing I like about antimatter is that they've got another tool that is not AI, but it's got the best name ever. It's called New Phone Who Diss. It simulates conversations between historical figures or concepts.
00:39:08
Speaker
Wow, interesting, interesting. On the theme of kind of what peer education does about this, I think the interesting thing for me, I don't necessarily disagree with what you're saying Phil, but I have to say, I don't know whether it's just the quirks of the particular kind of events and forums that I've been in recently, but I just hear a lot more resistance and a lot more questions about unintended consequences to the extent that I'm not sure
00:39:37
Speaker
how confident I feel that higher education as a whole is going to really lean into this in a way that influences it. And so I do genuinely worry about the sense of that big tech kind of occupies that space and they can serve students. And HE just goes along as it is. And I think the biggest thing that I've seen in the UK is that sense in which we need to figure out assessment.
00:40:07
Speaker
But what I've seen less of is the kind of things like the Sal Khan example. Who's going to adopt that kind of thing? Who's going to kind of experiment with that kind of thing? And I'm not seeing, in general, people occupying that space. You mentioned ASU, and I think they're trialing stuff. But outside of ASU, are you seeing an increased appetite
00:40:35
Speaker
you know, go down the route of AI tutors and experiment with implementations of that? I think that's where they need to go. And tutor is overused. So particularly the chat bot type of tutor, you know, which doesn't take advantage of, you know, multimodal and stuff like that is overused. But going to your question,
00:40:56
Speaker
That's what they need to do. I just spoke at a board meeting for a university this week. And that was one of the things I was saying is there's an opportunity here to differentiate your program by going and solving some of these problems you're talking about and making this stuff useful in reality for your students. And if you do it and do it in a way that's engaging, that
00:41:21
Speaker
You know, he treats college students like that four-year-old on the train, something they want to do and they want to learn. There's a huge opportunity to go do these things and use that to differentiate your academic programs right now. So the opportunity is out there. That's different than what you ask. Do I see it happening? Right now, it's primarily ASU. It's the leader in this space. They are spending a lot of time and money.
00:41:51
Speaker
trying to explore what AI could do. They're not the only school. I just think they're the leader. So I'm not arguing that it's happening. I'm arguing that it needs to happen and that it represents a real opportunity for schools. It should be in their self-interest to start figuring out how to improve this. But there are downsides to it, but go figure it out. Make it a positive.
00:42:16
Speaker
Yeah, I think one of the things that's interesting to me is the extent to which there may be an emerging provider or providers that are willing to go more deeply into trying to use these, you know, this functionality within education in a way that
00:42:34
Speaker
you know, the incumbent universities just make, you know, it's just so difficult because it's just laced with a whole range of kind of cultural and environmental factors that make it difficult for them to kind of change and adopt these things. And, you know, in the same way we've seen other providers kind of grow their online, you know, we talked about Southern New Hampshire last week, I think it was, and their kind of model.
00:43:00
Speaker
I'm really interested in whether a kind of a Southern New Hampshire equivalent that's all in on AI might emerge and what that might mean. But yeah, we'll have to wait and see about that.
00:43:13
Speaker
Well, Rahm Emanuel, and I got to meet somebody who worked for him, which was fascinating at a recent conference, but he's well known in the US. One of the comments he's made is, don't let a crisis go to waste. Well, to a certain degree, the pace of AI change and the risk that are there
00:43:33
Speaker
and what some schools are doing around this, there's your crisis for other schools. And so this could be something that's like, well, we need to get out of our own way, stop making excuses, and really rethink things that we've known for decades we need to rethink.
00:43:51
Speaker
So I guess I'm even there. I think this is something where it can be painful, but it could actually lead us to positive change over time. So I'm the positive one today, even if I'm putting a lot of the burden on colleges and universities to get their acts together, to take advantage of
Conclusion and Call for Feedback
00:44:09
Speaker
this. That's my summary. It was a fascinating, fascinating set of news. And I don't think it's over with. I mean, there was even a paper I just read recently where
00:44:19
Speaker
They were talking about the difference in the regulatory approach to the internet compared to what's happening to generative AI. And the argument was the regulatory approach might kill AI in the long run. But that's another angle I think we'll need to explore. But definitely there's a lot of news and a lot of topics on how this can hit higher education in the future.
00:44:43
Speaker
Just as the current Department of Education in the United States is legislating for 15 years ago, writ large, everybody's legislating now on AI for stuff that they let go originally.
00:44:56
Speaker
Boy, yeah, the time frame of regulators needs to be adjusted so that it's actually effective regulation. That's an excellent point. So what we're going to do is, again, I encourage everyone who's interested in us covering specific topics or even specifically answering questions you send us, send a note to email at oeaa.fm. And our one or two episodes from now, we're going to start going through these requests.
00:45:25
Speaker
but it's great seeing you all and we will talk later.