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Gonna try with a little help from my friends
187 Plays8 months ago
Neil, Morgan, and Phil finish the miniseries taking stock of where online education is in 2024. Given the enrollment and demographic changes that we're seeing in online education, a key question is whether colleges and universities are ready to support the changing student base. And will generative AI change the game in student support services.
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Transcript
Introduction and Online Education
00:00:08
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to Online Education Across the Atlantic. It's great to be with my colleagues Morgan and Neil again. Let's jump right into it.
OpenAI's Sora and Generative AI
00:00:19
Speaker
Trying to look at what the news of the day is. Actually, it's been a little bit of a slower
00:00:25
Speaker
Newsweek than we've had in the past. But I will start out with the open AI release of Sora, which is basically a text to video model that they put out there and that you can generate videos up to a minute long.
00:00:41
Speaker
just using prompts. And then what the availability is really for people to assess critical areas for harms and risk. That's their way of saying we're trying to be careful. But I don't know if you guys actually looked at some of the videos that have been produced on that, but it really is stunning and another jump forward for AI. I have trouble not pulling out my inner Donald Clark on this one. Did you guys look at any of those videos?
00:01:10
Speaker
I've seen them go by, but I haven't looked in detail yet. Ah, letting it pass through. How about you, Neil? Yeah, I haven't, but I just think it's amazing all of the kind of array of things that are coming out now and the kind of implications of it all.
Transforming Educational Content with AI
00:01:25
Speaker
So yeah, I need to have a little play around. Well, this one is sort of interesting because it didn't get that much news coverage, but for me, it actually was another step function in generative AI and what it's doing.
00:01:40
Speaker
Go look at the videos. They're remarkable and the clarity. They have a prompt. It's almost like a drone video going down a valley during the California Gold Rush and the amount of detail they have. Just coming from a very simple one-paragraph prompt is really stunning.
00:02:00
Speaker
We're going to get to a point where when people see clip art or simplistic graphics and educational content, increasingly, we're going to get to an area where students are going to be like, come on, what is this? This looks amateur, what we're doing right now. So I don't want to be too bullish on generative AI, but that was the big one of the biggest news releases, although it wasn't reported as much as I think I would have expected. So what is your inner Donald Clark
Adapting to AI's Impact on Education
00:02:27
Speaker
here? And I think you need to deliver this in a Donald Clark accent.
00:02:31
Speaker
While we're talking about accents, I cannot do accents. Now, the fact that change is happening rapidly outside of education through generative AI, and it's going to change so many assumptions of the established education order, all the assumptions about how content is developed, what's possible, and access. You know, that a lot of the traditional views of education really come down to
00:02:59
Speaker
protecting institutions as opposed to let's see what we can do to increase access. And he's quite bullish on generative AI. I apologize for not being able to go with the full accent on this one.
00:03:13
Speaker
Yeah, the content development implications are really interesting, aren't they?
Financial Challenges in Education
00:03:18
Speaker
And I think my feeling is that there's the kind of companies that work with universities are the ones that are really pushing forward on that. And I'm always fascinated to know the extent to which there's experimentation happening in universities. It seems
00:03:35
Speaker
Seems pretty patchy on that, but the potential for, you know, some of these applications around content development and speed and efficiency and all that kind of thing, you know, is kind of fascinating. It's going to be really interesting to see how things play out. Yeah, it's quite clear to me, or I think it's quite clear that content development is going to be one of the biggest impacts coming from generative AI. And my argument is that
00:04:03
Speaker
it has the potential to democratize content. So getting faculty, course designers, students much closer to the point of truly developing content instead of relying upon external organizations to be able to create everything. So getting closer. And so that gets to your point where you're saying you're not seeing much from institutions.
00:04:26
Speaker
I hope we do eventually because I think there's a real opportunity to get, as I said, democratize content
AI Democratizing Education
00:04:34
Speaker
development. We'll see where it is, but as you said, right now it's mostly with the companies, not with the schools themselves.
00:04:40
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like there's I feel like there's some quick wins as well because there's you know to your point about kind of clip art, you know, there's certainly like content that's provided from educators that you know, you feel like AI can I don't know you can always push it through the filter of AI and suddenly it's it's less terrible. Yes, less terrible.
00:05:03
Speaker
I was just realizing, you know, there's an interesting sort of story here. A couple of weeks back in one of my posts, I'd mentioned that JW Narrow University in
00:05:13
Speaker
in India was starting to get into online learning more. And one of the things they did was build a big studio or build a studio for faculty to create instructional content. And there was an opportunity missed, I think, to sort of jump over a lot of places that had been doing online for a longer time and just go straight into more democratized aspects of content creation there. Like they should have skipped the studio altogether.
00:05:42
Speaker
That's a good point. When you talk about the studio, I've seen that in other schools, Arizona State University and many others have studios, but video production is very different than being able to write text in a one paragraph format. And so I think there's a fundamental difference that when you do a studio, that's a great idea, but you're still relying on external expertise to really get it started.
00:06:07
Speaker
And whereas that's why I think that text to image, text to speech, text generation is really fundamentally different.
Skepticism on AI's Role in Education
00:06:16
Speaker
So it looks like we're going to become all AI all the time here on the podcast, which aligns with the World Economic Forum. And I'm not sure if either of you two actually received your Davos invites this year or if that was another missed opportunity. Mine got lost or, you know, there. Yeah. In the post.
00:06:35
Speaker
Yeah, it must be in the post as well, Phil. Yeah. Well, for next year, we are willing to go to Davos, or one of us is, I'm willing to sell my soul and go there just to enjoy the food and the fun. But they put out a video, they're really promoting AI and education, which of course does the opposite for me. It's like, well, if the World Economic Forum is pushing everything that AI can do, maybe I should
00:07:00
Speaker
You know, now I have a more pessimistic view once they put it off. So it's almost a counter example, but I'm willing to go next year just for the record. Yeah, I don't I feel like the way because you shared a piece didn't you from the World Economic Forum for us and like the way that that's worded doesn't do it any favors in respect to what you were talking about Phil, to be honest, because, you know, the cynic in me says, you know, this is this is great, but what about the kind of reality of
00:07:29
Speaker
um the inside of university and the kind of constraints and stuff you know that i always i guess i often take that line because you know you get external commentators you know talk up certain things without really appreciating
00:07:46
Speaker
the kind of reality universities, the kind of pace of change and things. So, you know, that immediately sets off kind of alarm bells for me, even though, you know, I'm certainly, you know, of the mind that these, these things can have huge impacts. But yeah, it read like, it read in a way that kind of had me kind of leaning over to the cynical side a little bit.
00:08:06
Speaker
And ironically, that post that I shared was actually from a professor of marketing and innovation at King's College London. So it's not like it's just coming from outside the house. The calls are coming from inside the house as well.
Financial Pressures and Academic Cuts
00:08:22
Speaker
The other thing I would say, at least in the US, and it's a continuation of what we've covered, is more and more financial stress on institutions. And Inside Higher Ed had an interesting article this week just showing all of the campus cuts where they're cutting academic programs due to financial problems. And the majority of those institutions were in the Midwest, particularly Ohio. Definitely Ohio and Michigan took a beating in this article.
00:08:50
Speaker
They did start out with UNC Greensboro and their problems, but from there it's University of Toledo, Wright State University, Baldwin Wallace, Marietta College, another UNC one. But we're going to keep seeing this in my mind, that there's so much more financial stress than a lot of people in higher education have wrapped their heads around.
00:09:15
Speaker
And I fear that part of the reason, and this is an excuse, but people were so quick to latch on the fall national student clearinghouse data showing that enrollment went up and are interpreting that or hoping it to say, ah, finally, we're going to start getting out of the depths of the financial crisis, as opposed to really grasping
00:09:39
Speaker
No, that's a temporary bump in enrollment and there's all of the inflation effects and everything else that's causing financial stress. So it's a continuing story, but we're definitely, you know, and we've mentioned this on the podcast, but I found that to be interesting, particularly about the Midwest.
International Student Recruitment Issues
00:09:58
Speaker
You know, I was just thinking, you know, mirror image to certain extent over here as well. And I was just thinking to myself, you know, I'm slightly this time next year because, you know, we've seen a drop in undergraduate applications. There's real challenges around recruiting international students that are making up for the shortfall that, you know, we've had a lot of those types of announcements that you were kind of mentioning and cuts that universities have to make.
00:10:27
Speaker
And I just see another year of challenge. And so I almost dread to think where institutions are going to be this time next year. But anyway, that's a cheery note. The most positive I can say is eventually I hope there will be an increasing number of people with an academia who take the financial challenges more seriously as a structural issue that's not going away and not just a labor dispute issue.
Challenges for College Presidents
00:10:56
Speaker
I mean,
00:10:57
Speaker
One of the worst jobs I can imagine right now is being a college president who needs to do some financial cuts because it's almost, no matter what you do, whether you do it well or not, you're going to get just crucified publicly in votes of no confidence in how to do it. And that doesn't mean people aren't doing a bad job.
00:11:16
Speaker
There's just no way to win in that case. There needs to be a way to have a serious conversation about it because, you know, yeah, and it doesn't seem and, you know, certainly there are some in edtech, I think, who fan those flames a little bit, you know, in a sense of, oh, it's the end of the world of somebody's cutting programs, you know, and programs need to be cut at some point, you know, not only because of the structural changes, but
00:11:39
Speaker
You know, at one point they used to teach nephrology. I'm glad they don't teach nephrology anymore. They cut that program.
Program Cuts in Education: A Necessity?
00:11:47
Speaker
Yeah. I think that's a good point because what conversations I do see in this subject is you did it a bad way. Like you use flawed data. UNC Greensboro, part of the issue is we think your data on enrollment was flawed and you misapplied it and West Virginia
00:12:06
Speaker
you ignored the debt. Okay, that was pretty legitimate that they didn't really look at all the debt decisions. But it was always what was done wrong, and it's never the conversation that you mentioned. Hey, let's talk about how do we cut programs because we have to do it particularly now. And yeah, it's just not much of a productive conversation at all.
00:12:28
Speaker
Yeah and I think that there's often cited grievances of, you know, sometimes ed tech partnerships or other partnerships or consultants and there's often kind of, you know, wherever there's been prior grievances around money that's been paid out, those often come up in these kind of disputes as well and that adds to that kind of nature of, you know, can we have a proper conversation about
00:12:52
Speaker
you know why it's not viable to run these programs anymore because I think in most cases it's not it's not political but there's a problem with supply and viability for courses but yet not a really robust discussion around it
00:13:08
Speaker
And I think another red herring that gets thrown in there is also the too many administrators argument. And certainly there's some validity there and things like that. But it is a bit of a red herring and not sort of thinking about what it takes to run a large institution. There should be a kind of bingo card, shouldn't there, for all of the things that get cited in these instances, maybe? Maybe we could create one. Maybe we could. Yeah. A particularly grim one.
00:13:38
Speaker
Well, when you're talking about money spent with partners, I'm going to put Morgan on the spot, and it's not necessarily a financial crisis, but you were in your, I don't want to use the word obsession, in your deep research capabilities. Do you remember the numbers off the top of your head again, what you found out about Maryville University? Yeah, you know, I'm finding, and so what
00:14:02
Speaker
Phil is referring to as my obsession. I'm going through tax records of universities looking at spending on external partners. And there's a lot of spending on construction, which is a whole other thing that I'm going to get into at some point. But a lot of these places are spending on OPMs, essentially. So looking, some of them report what they pay the OPM. And sometimes it's in the region of a substantial portion, 20% or more, of their total revenue.
00:14:33
Speaker
of the total university revenue going to an OPM partner. And those are outliers, but still there are incredible signs there of universities essentially keeping themselves afloat by these external kind of means. And I started to think in terms of a zombie institution, essentially keeping itself afloat for whatever reason, either just to keep itself afloat or whatever.
00:14:57
Speaker
So it's something I want to tease out a little bit
Concerns Over University Financial Strategies
00:15:00
Speaker
more. So look out for the newsletter post in the future. But I think there's something there. And it does raise the point about, you know, whose job is it? Because these are all privates that I'm looking at, because those are the ones that I have access to tax records. But like, at a certain point, the Board of Trustees has to say, look, it's not about keeping going. It's about making a smart decision on
00:15:21
Speaker
for the sake of the institution, the student society and things like that. But it's a tough one. So look out for some blog posts. I'm still going through that. It'll not surprise Phil to learn that I'm very, very good at cleaning things very thoroughly, very slowly and using things like Q-tips. You would do well in prison.
00:15:45
Speaker
fewer side to clean the look. Things you don't want to hear from your business partner. I'm not alleging anything, don't worry.
00:15:57
Speaker
Okay, so let's get on to the main topic for today.
Conclusion: Evolution of Online Learning
00:16:00
Speaker
And this is really the third and I think final episode in our mini series where Neil had suggested that we take a step back and look at where are we in 2024 with online learning. And the first week we covered more on the product side, what's being offered and a lot of that got into micro credentials.
00:16:21
Speaker
The second episode got into enrollment and how much are not just increasing for online education, but we also talked about there's an increasing amount of undergraduate enrollment in online education, whereas it used to be mostly at the graduate level.
00:16:39
Speaker
and the types of students who are interested in online education now, quite often are much less prepared for college. First generation, they don't have all of the support structures. And so that's what we want to cover today is sort of ask the question, given those changes, is higher education at large ready
00:17:02
Speaker
for these changes that are happening demographically, as you're getting an increasing percentage of students who need additional support
00:17:11
Speaker
are we ready for it and where it's going? So to get started, and I wanted to sort of call out more on the positive side. That's a constant theme here. Can we at least try to find the positive news first? An example from each of us where we have seen colleges or universities who are really upping the game and how they support students. And it doesn't have to be just in the past year, it could be anytime recently.
00:17:39
Speaker
But let's start with that. What examples do we have where colleges and universities are truly introducing programs to better support students in this world?
00:17:50
Speaker
I think there's a few examples in the UK of institutions doing things around that. I tend to think about it in two different areas. So there's the analytics being more coordinated around analytics and using that to identify where students need help. And then there's also a shift from
00:18:12
Speaker
more of a you come to us if you need help versus kind of an approach where you have an allocated success coach. And I know that's kind of relatively common for online. But I know universities like Coventry, I think, have kind of introduced success coaches that are allocated to students to kind of help them navigate through their studies. I think that's a relatively new thing over here.
00:18:38
Speaker
Edinburgh as well I think I've got student advisors now so there's kind of moves towards more proactive models of student support to help them through their studies from when they start and the allocation of a kind of a person which you know wasn't hasn't been totally common and there's universities like I think Nottingham Trent University over here is one of the ones that's often cited around their use of analytics for
00:19:01
Speaker
interventions and warnings so yeah there are there are moves around that kind of thing and I think another aspect of it is I've kind of heard of more universities sort of being a lot more active around attendance monitoring for students so
00:19:17
Speaker
I think some of these things are obviously driven by what you were saying around demographic changes. I think some of them are also driven by a bit more of a robust approach from our regulator around continuation and the kind of thresholds around that kind of thing. And I think the kind of third aspect is probably also just going back to the kind of economic climate
00:19:41
Speaker
And universities kind of needing to make sure that they get you know Sounds sounds quite crude but get students in get them through and get them out, you know successfully Well before we go to morgan a question I have is like when you say recent, you know the coven tree example and stuff like that Are you talking about they've introduced these since the pandemic or in the past five or ten years? What kind of time frame?
00:20:03
Speaker
Yeah, good question. I'm not entirely sure on Coventry, but I think it would have been in recent years. I think the Edinburgh Student Advisors thing was something that I saw recently, so I think that has happened in the last year or so. And it wouldn't surprise me if the Coventry one is a more recent development, although I don't have that off the top of my head. But those feel quite unique for the UK. I don't think even this idea of a success coach
00:20:27
Speaker
was particular common parlance over here, but yeah, I suspect that they are more of a post-pandemic era change than prior to that. Well, great. Well, Morgan, which examples, and just to throw you a curveball, I'm going to be looking to see if you can give an example and don't mention Georgia State. You're allowed to mention that, but that's always the easy one.
00:20:50
Speaker
Well, I was actually thinking of doing that because that's always a safe answer. But you know, they are one of the places that I think has done well. And I just wanted to throw some cold water on, on, on Neil's optimism there for a moment. But there's a, there is a paper out at the moment, essentially, casting the Stershams, as my friend Rose Smith used to say, on the role of advisors and coaches and whether they actually contribute to, to student success. I haven't read it yet, but I wanted to do a,
00:21:18
Speaker
read of it for a newsletter post. I'm having difficulty coming up with schools that aren't Georgia State for places, but I think, you know, there are two components that are interesting to me. One is also places playing more attention, especially the online space to veterans and the role that veterans either
00:21:40
Speaker
recent veterans or people that are still in the military role, I think that's got to be a sort of critical part of it. And also sort of realizing that they're dealing with non-traditional post-traditional students as well. And I heard an interesting comment on a blog post or on a podcast from Seth O'Dell the other day saying that often what his marketing agency
00:22:04
Speaker
finds that they have to do with clients is actually tell the clients like, do you realize that most of your students now are non-traditional? And it comes as a surprise to them. And that doesn't speak well of their ability to sort of get out ahead of that. But I think that's gotta be a sort of key part. But I'm having difficulty coming up with concrete examples, I must confess.
00:22:28
Speaker
Well, I'll add one, but it's sort of an oldie but a goodie, and partially because I worked on it. If you go back in time, back to 2008, I had done consulting with DeVry University, which at the time, it was like, I think, 92 campuses, 90, 100,000 students.
00:22:46
Speaker
for-profit system, obviously. But the for-profits, I think we need to look to them because for a long time, they've been serving the demographics of students who need additional support. First-generation, minority students, more job-oriented focus. So they've known this for a while. Now, not all of them have done a good job, but DeVry University back in 2008,
00:23:12
Speaker
They did a whole technology replacement where they moved to Lucian Banner.
00:23:17
Speaker
and Salesforce. And what I don't think, it wasn't just let's swap the vendor. What they were trying to say is the CRM aspect of it in particular, they wanted the view that any student who went to any support advisor, whether it's financial aid, academic, at this campus and online support, whoever they talked to, that advisor needed to have the full record in front of them.
00:23:45
Speaker
this is who the student is. These are the courses they're taking. These are what they're trying to do. And it really, it ended up being like a four or five year project. But what it really did is you heard from the advisors afterwards, they just were not used to have this 360 view of a student.
00:24:06
Speaker
and that any other advisor could see the notes that they were putting in there. And it was this massive paradigm shift to, in that case, truly focus on the student. So that was a long time ago. It was a major investment, but I do have to say that was an example of really investing in student support for changing demographics, which hit the for-profits before the rest.
00:24:34
Speaker
Another one, and since I hate being too positive for too long, so I'll go with sort of a joint one here. And it's actually another former client, so I don't mean any of this to disparage them, but the California Online Education Initiative. So what this was is trying to get all 113 or whatever colleges working together
00:24:56
Speaker
on online education and support doing a course exchange. It was a whole initiative that had a range of activities. But it's interesting, if you go at the student success resources they had back in 2018, and this is when they were really trying to emphasize a holistic support of students, they did things such as unlearned learner readiness. And I know they're not the only ones.
00:25:23
Speaker
But helping students determine, can you handle an online course load? Is your life in such a place that you have the time management capabilities to do it? They had tutoring resources that were shared across the campuses, online and campus-based. They had counseling, which might even get into, hey, I'm having financial trouble. Let me try to help you work through this problem. They had library services.
00:25:53
Speaker
Now, if you fast forward to today and if you look at their student support, unfortunately, they've really put everything into this course exchange, trying to hope that students will enroll in courses and they've de-emphasized student support. So now most of their student success is saying, hey, you should go ask your campus. I bet they can help you out. And whereas it used to be really a
00:26:19
Speaker
proactively targeted at supporting things. So I mentioned that because I thought they were doing a great job with it, but it's also, there's something to learn from the fact that it just wasn't valued by the state legislature and the chancellor's office. And it got de-emphasized because it's not a sexy thing to talk about. You don't have enrollment numbers, you don't have fancy technology necessarily,
00:26:47
Speaker
That's part of the problem, I think, is that for nonprofit schools is to realize the importance of this area, even if it's not sexy. And I think it's very much even more needed today than before. So I would add those two examples. I never realized both of those were pre-pandemic examples. So I'm going back in time for mine.
00:27:09
Speaker
Over here, certainly some of the student support aspect is driven by the sense that student mental health is a lot worse. And I just wonder whether there's a similar picture and a similar sense over there. Yeah. No, I see it at least in news articles and in schools saying we need to support mental health. So yes, from that standpoint. From a practical, is it helping?
00:27:39
Speaker
I don't know. But from an awareness issue, I'd say yes. I think it's I think there are two aspects of it. And we really need to think about both of those. So one is the awareness that students need the support, both in terms of on campus and online. I think both of those are or do that, but also a design of the system, because too often universities and colleges design
00:28:04
Speaker
systems around their own sense of what an org chart looks like or what their own divisions are and without thinking about what the student journey is or what sort of seamless kinds of things. I had a friend who made a map once of her campus and it was in a very warm climate of all the places students needed to go to to get help.
00:28:28
Speaker
And, you know, they were here and there. And then she was told to bury that and never let it to see the light of day by senior administrators. Now, why why was that? Like, why were they saying don't let it seem the light of day just because they didn't want it to be obvious how many different places they have to go? Yeah. And they didn't want to have to deal with it.
00:28:47
Speaker
And so I think places really need to sort of think about, yeah. I'm thinking of a quote I sent to Neil. Neil doesn't like the story IKEA. I found a quote in a book about IKEA. I used to have a Swedish boss.
00:29:03
Speaker
So about how they look at friction in the face and laugh, you know, because they introduce more friction into the purchasing process than most stores. And yet people flock there. And universities are the same sort of way they they introduce as much friction, you know, you can't do this here, you've got to go there, you've got to go over there. And instead of like, okay, let's solve your problem. And without making you walk across campus in 1000 degree heat.
00:29:32
Speaker
Yeah, that's a brilliant metaphor. I'm going to use that. Getting from the start to the end of IKEA is a bit like students' journey through university support services. Except that you aren't given the path. No, no. Yeah, none of the arrows on the floor.
00:29:49
Speaker
I think there's an interesting aspect to some of the things that you were saying Morgan, not the IKEA things, but they're kind of just general. Because the way I think about it a little bit is what's the legacy model? And for me in the UK, the legacy model is you have some of these services, not all of the services, but it's for the student to reactively go to these services. And I remember working in a university around academic support
00:30:19
Speaker
for students and one of the big challenges that they had is that they they all often used to say to me we get the worried well but we're not really reaching the people that we want to reach that we know need need help and you know they made all efforts possible to kind of to achieve that but fundamentally the model is a bit more transactional if you need help it's on you to go and get it from a service that you know back then you can only access really by
00:30:46
Speaker
you know walking down the road or down the campus to it and I think that is the challenge of a trajectory based on the demographic of students where different approaches and therefore an organisation model that maybe supports those kind of different approaches needs to kind of move towards and I think being more proactive
00:31:09
Speaker
and intervening. The balance of responsibilities between the students having to kind of access versus you being proactive to see if they need help is a kind of the interesting space I think for this.
00:31:25
Speaker
Well, I'm going back to, and I apologize to my California friends for harping on this, but I think it's really telling. And Morgan, you mentioned about really support too often is based on organizations. If you look at what's happened with the initiative I mentioned,
00:31:41
Speaker
There's a reason that it's now saying, hey, you probably have this on your campus. Go to your campus. It's this tendency to say, oh, we already do student support. Let's just point people with students over there. And it's very much, if you dig underneath that, it's based on an org structure and current funding and job expectations.
00:32:03
Speaker
and it's not at all saying, wait, what do students need? How are we doing a poor job already? And even the idea of, well, if we're doing course exchanges, meaning students can take courses from different colleges, is that still a good model to say your primary student support is at the campus level and you need to navigate it to different campuses? Or more likely, you don't even know what it is. But for me, it's
00:32:31
Speaker
That is such a core issue. Are you building it around the org structure? Are you building it around student needs? And far too often, even when people have awareness of the issue, they're really talking about how do we fit it into our current organization and not redesigning. So we get two things off of yours. We'll take the IKEA example. That's got to be riffed on. And I agree with that. That is a good metaphor.
00:33:00
Speaker
to what students need to go through, but also this idea of designing support services around your org structure as opposed to student needs. I think that's where the big challenge is right now. Yeah. And I've written about it in the
00:33:15
Speaker
in the newsletter a little bit, but one of the better workshops and sets of training I did was with Nancy Fried Foster looking at participatory design. And she did it in terms of spaces, but she also did it in terms of things like websites, actually having students say what they want on a website and what they need. And it was often
00:33:35
Speaker
contrary to how the university would arrange things. It's like, no, no, no, no, you know, you can't do that because that's a different, they have a different reporting line, so you can't have that on the same thing as that. But it was sort of really insightful. And the urge of university administrators to impose their own structure on top of things was massively powerful.
00:33:59
Speaker
I think we actually have a couple of posts that should come out of this episode because I think that's a great point that should be written about and the whole design aspect. But also here's an approach to do that design that we're not seeing often enough. Yeah, absolutely.
00:34:16
Speaker
I think there's actually a real skill in that aspect of design for kind of students as well because I think sometimes you do get into, is it the Nielsen Norman mantra of kind of, you know, don't ask what people want, you know, see what they do. And there's, I think sometimes in the UK, certainly there's been big movements around student engagement and co-involvement and stuff.
00:34:39
Speaker
But I won't worry sometimes that the methods aren't necessarily they're about you know, ascertaining what people want rather than you know observing their engagements and getting getting evidence and data on that so I think that that orientation is good, but the way that you do it is you know is quite nuanced I think to get the best outcomes and
00:35:02
Speaker
So let's tie this episode sort of together from the news aspect with our main topic here. What about AI? AI tutors in particular? You do see that getting introduced at a lot of schools. Grand Canyon University's got an AI virtual coach called Mira, I believe it is.
00:35:21
Speaker
that's there as a resource to guide students. Mira is specifically trained for nursing and healthcare. It's discipline-specific, and they're not the only ones, but it's an interesting example to look at. But does generative AI change the game in terms of student support?
00:35:45
Speaker
Or, and it might be a mix of both, or is it just an easy thing to throw in there and feel good about it without doing the design we're talking about of really looking at what students do and how they engage? So how do you guys view virtual AI assistance? Is that going to really change the game or is it just an abstraction?
00:36:08
Speaker
I think it depends, doesn't it? I mean, you know, taking an off-the-shelf product that isn't really congruent with the challenges that you're facing in your institution is kind of one approach that you might take. I think there is potential for online for them to offer benefits around kind of help-seeking and just even in terms of a study aid, particularly if you're kind of falling behind potentially.
00:36:34
Speaker
but it's all in the kind of implementation and I think it's all it's linked into an institutional understanding of particular challenges that students face as well that you're not just simply taking something off the shelf and adopting it because it's kind of new but you're also kind of understanding where
00:36:52
Speaker
where the need is and how to apply the tool really I think that's one aspect. I mean I guess we've seen as well you know the Georgia Tech, Jill Watson example around kind of queries and stuff so that you know I always think we're talking about a lot now but you know there have been things that have happened in the past but I think it's about a sort of sensitive
00:37:16
Speaker
application and steps into using these things I think on online rather than you know it being okay we need one of those we're going to kind of slot it in and see what happens kind of thing.
00:37:28
Speaker
Yeah. And by the way, for people who aren't fully up, the Jill Watson, that was based on the IBM Watson AI that the engine that won in jeopardy and made a name for itself what a decade ago. So it's pre generative AI, open AI and the current hype. And it's a great point that I was getting worked on years ago as well. It's not just happening in the past year or two.
00:37:54
Speaker
but also adhering to the iron law, which says that all chatbots need to be named after women or need to have women's names. But I think there is something to a chatbot in the sense that a lot of queries can be answered pretty quickly. And maybe it's a 90-10 sort of thing. The chatbot can take care of a bunch of stuff, but there's other kinds of things that need a more complicated kind of
00:38:22
Speaker
kind of solution. So there is that. I think one aspect I'm interested in as well is I remember reading a paper and I frustratingly can't find it but it was kind of a very different younger age but it was just the idea that students were kind of less inhibited to ask kind of questions in relation to their education and this was a pretty old school paper so the kind of visual representation of avatar of this kind of
00:38:50
Speaker
computer-generated assistant was pretty old school. But I'm interested in that because we do sometimes see in online that I don't really know where to go for help, or I'm a little bit reluctant to pester my instructor. And so I think that's a really interesting avenue for chatbots as well, particularly as they get more advanced, that it breaks down that barrier of where do I go for help.
00:39:19
Speaker
And I think on that and on the talk that we've kind of had about demographics, there's maybe an interesting angle in such that if an institution provides a tool like that, that a student doesn't have the money to subscribe to outside of the university, then there's also another component of that for kind of less advantaged students as well, having access to something. So I think that's one really interesting route. I haven't heard of anything happening in that
00:39:48
Speaker
domain, but I think that's a really good avenue to explore. I do worry sometimes, though, that there's sort of the impact of the new, you know, thinking about those systems that like, I think, Austin P, the system that they developed that helped students plot their own degree program or suggested different majors and they found a bump in usage and impact, but then it sort of went away over time. And I wonder if we'll see the same sort of thing with
00:40:17
Speaker
with chatbots if that'll become, you know, if it's the impact of the new. I'm sort of reverse of that view right now in terms of generative AI for tutoring virtual assistants, that in the short term, I'm pessimistic. I think it's getting thrown out there to
00:40:37
Speaker
be part of the club and show yourself and avoid and not just doing it to look like you're doing something, but to avoid the deeper design thinking that we're talking about. I'm optimistic longer term.
00:40:53
Speaker
Because I think there's such a step function that's happening in these capabilities. It's going to take away the excuse that we've seen for so long in higher education. Oh, we can't afford to hire more tutors. We can't afford to do this. And it's very human resource limited. And I think that AI is going to keep developing.
00:41:15
Speaker
and it takes away that excuse and eventually over time, I think it will lead to more thoughtful support structures taking advantage of what is unique about AI capabilities. It might not look like it is today, might not look like Jill or Mira or any of the female assistants, but I think that I'm pretty bullish on the long-term trend, but I think in the near term, it's actually avoiding deeper thinking.
00:41:44
Speaker
Yeah. And it takes quite a lot, I guess, as a tech company to kind of hold your nerve when everything and then the AI frenzy is around you and say, we're going to take our time. We're going to play this out. Yeah. Doesn't help with the press releases. That's our press release. We're slow. So we're good. Well, this has been I've enjoyed this series because it is good to take a step back, say, where are we and where are we heading in online education? And it's great to talk to you all.
00:42:13
Speaker
For all of our listeners, we appreciate you guys subscribing and look forward to our next discussions.