As many educators in the United States and Canada have held back or retreated on adapting courses to generative artificial intelligence, those in the rest of the world have pushed forward.

The approaches are in some cases so divergent that a new report from the Digital Education Council sometimes reads like two reports about two different worldviews of higher education.           

By Doug Ward

How do we adapt online courses to generative artificial intelligence?

That’s the question we asked about a dozen instructors, instructional designers, and educational technology specialists to grapple with this semester.

Through a series of discussions we called a CTE Innovation Lab, they worked at identifying the major challenges in online education and considered how we might approach online teaching in more effective ways and how generative AI might help us overcome some of the problems it has created.

Mahdis Mousavi, Unsplash

By Doug Ward

A new survey from the Association of American Colleges and Universities emphasizes the challenges instructors face in handling generative artificial intelligence in their classes.

By Doug Ward

I talk frequently about the need for faculty members to experiment with and adapt their teaching to generative artificial intelligence.

During a CTE session last week, an instructor mentioned how difficult that was, saying that “the landscape of AI is changing so rapidly that it seems impossible to keep up with.”

By Doug Ward

The phrase “humans in the loop" has become a cliché for the importance of overseeing the processes and output of generative artificial intelligence.

By Doug Ward

Teaching tools in Copilot

Microsoft has recently added Copilot tools specifically for teachers.

By Doug Ward

Research about learning and artificial intelligence mostly reinforces what instructors had suspected: Generative AI can extend students’ abilities, but it can’t replace the hard work of learning. Students who use generative AI to avoid early course material eventually struggle with deeper learning and more complex tasks. 

On the other hand, AI can improve learning among motivated students, it can assist creativity, and it can help students accomplish tasks they might never have tried on their own.

By Doug Ward

A few eye-popping statistics help demonstrate the growing reach of generative AI:

By Doug Ward

The KU version of Copilot now allows the creation of agents, which means you can customize Copilot and give it instructions on what you want it to do, how you want it to respond, and what format its output should follow. 

By Doug Ward

Adapting colleges and universities to generative artificial intelligence was never going to be easy. Surveys released over the past two weeks provide evidence of just how difficult that adaptation will be, though.

Here’s a summary of what I'm seeing in the results:

Faculty: We lack the time, understanding, and resources to revamp classes to an AI age. A few of us have been experimenting, but many of us don’t see a need to change.