EP 391: Is ChatGPT Making College Better or Worse?

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Is ChatGPT making college better or worse? Here we are. It's been multiple years, multiple school years that we've had ChatGPT and large language models available to students everywhere. And yes, this can be a polarizing topic about generative AIs role in colleges. Should students be using it or should students be using it at all times? I don't know. I have hot takes on the subject, but that's not what today's show is about. Today's show is about bringing a guest we've had on before onto this show to help us maybe answer some of those questions and really take a broad look at AI's impact on education as a whole. So today's conversation, I can already tell you, is a good one. So welcome to Everyday AI. What's going on, y'? All? My name's Jordan and I'm the host of Everyday AI, and this thing is for you. It is your daily live stream, podcast and free daily newsletter helping us all not just understand generative AI, but how it impacts our lives and how we can use it to grow our companies and to grow our careers. And that all starts with education, right? So that's what we're tackling today. So if you haven't already, make sure you go to your everyday AI dot com. Sign up for the free daily newsletter if you're joining us on the podcast. Thank you for that as well. The link will be in there. And also we are debuting this show live, but technically recording it ahead of hand. So I can't give you today's daily news, but it will be in the newsletter. All right, enough chit chat. I am excited for our guest today. Had him on before, one of my favorite conversations. And, you know, no pressure to Jason, but I don't think he's going to disappoint. So please help me, help me. Welcome to the show, Jason Gulia. There we go. We got him live. And Jason, first, thank you for coming on the show. And can you just explain for everyone a little bit about what you do, because you do a whole lot.

Yeah. And Jordan, it's such a pleasure to get to talk to you again. I love interacting with you and hearing about what you're doing. So, yeah, for anyone who doesn't kind of know who I am. So I'm Jason Gulia. I'm a professor of English, which feels still sort of strange to say in the AI space. And increasingly I work with AI, so as an AI consultant. So at Berkeley College, so I'm on the east coast, so not the California, Berkeley, the one in New Jersey, New York, we're very career centered. So and that has actually helped me a lot. So a lot of what I do now is I help our college and now increasing other colleges really figure out how AI can or whether it should be worked into different parts of the college experience. And colleges are so different with their approach to. And that's actually been sort of frustrating but also kind of invigorating. But that's what I increasingly do and I think a lot about where AI should fit into the classroom and in terms, especially in terms of college operations, which now is kind of, kind of started to get front and center in the conversation. But yeah, that's what I do.

Yeah. And, and Jason, can you just briefly take us through maybe first let's just focus on your own personal experience there at Berkeley. How has, you know, walk us through in a nutshell. You know, Chat GPT came out November 2022. What was it like originally? Right. What was the reception both from, you know, faculty, the university and students? And how has that changed over the past roughly two years?

So the big change has been thinking about AI as a plagiarism machine. So when ChatGPT came out and suddenly over a few months, everyone was using millions and millions of students and even faculty were starting to play with it. And it took a really, really long time to get out from under that shadow. I actually think it really only started, started to happen only about six months ago for a lot of institutions. So that when ChatGPT came out and I kind of went there first too. Right. This is a tool for plagiarizing and cheating. Right. That students are going to offload all of the hard cognitive tasks onto the machine and they're just going to hand in everything. That's kind of where I started too. And then I gradually, with playing with it and taking a different approach, changed my mind about the potential for this technology. And I think that that idea dominated colleges for a really, really long time. And now even when you go into some colleges, you'll still find that being the dominant narrative. I think that is changing, but it's changing slowly and the development has been very sort of uneven. So when I go and I talk to colleges, I kind of expect maybe about 60% of the people to be with me. Right. Be open to this technology, open to kind of thinking about it. Maybe experimenting with it on their own or actually being. Creating some student, facing some stuff. And then you'll also have some percentage of faculty who just think, no, it's just not allowed. And this is why it's not allowed. Right. And they quote, unquote, ban it. Although one of the things I now tell a lot of faculty is you actually can't ban it. The only thing you can do is issue a gag rule. Right? All you can do is tell your students you're not allowed to talk about it, but they're still going to use it, especially as it gets worked into every, almost every tool that students are using on a regular basis. So I would say the big change has been that the originally the narrative was all about plagiarism, and now that hasn't gone away. But it's more complicated because I think that faculty members and administrators are more open to the fact that students will have to know how to use this technology because they're going to graduate, they're going to have to get jobs. And now, increasingly, it seems like they're going to have to be able to use AI in a certain way, and certainly generative AI in a certain way. And I think the other thing that has changed is that colleges have become convinced that it's not going to go away. Originally, probably for the first six months after ChatGPT came out, there were two ideas that dominated colleges when it came to AI. Idea number one, it's a plagiarism machine. Idea number two, it's going to be gone in a year. It's going to fade away. It is a fad. Everyone's going to play with it. They're going to realize, oh, it's not that good, and they're going to put it aside and move on to the next shiny thing. And now I think that it's been around that it's been around for a while, and it's still very much in the public consciousness and people are still talking about it, or even two years later or almost two years later. I think that that idea has faded away. And I think that has been helpful because then I. If we understand that, I think we can start planning. It's really hard to plan for something if you think it's going to fade away in a year.

Yeah, no, that's a good point. And, Jason, I think it's worth digging a little deeper on what you just said there. Right. The point of college. I mean, there's a lot of points, but one of the biggest points is making sure students succeed. In the real world, at their first job, getting them jobs, right? Getting them in the door, making sure they have the necessary skills to succeed. And you know, obviously employers are now more so than ever looking for AI readiness. They're looking for employees who can understand the generative AI large language models like CHAT GPT, right? So do you think yet is. Is that one of the things that has maybe caused this shift? Maybe did we see, you know, a year or two of graduates, you know, collectively throughout the country that maybe didn't have this, and they're going out there and going back to their universities like, yo, like, we can't get a job because you banned this technology. Like, do you think that that actually played into this whole job readiness thing and maybe banning it was really screwing students over?

I think it did. And one of the things that's weird about colleges is that they're so different from each other. There are so many different kinds of colleges for different purposes, with different mission statements. I think that it's so tempting, and I do this too. We tend to lump colleges and universities together. But, and I'll use my own personal experience for this one, I've been very fortunate because I teach at a small career focused institution. Like one of our explicit missions is to get students ready for dynamic careers, right? That is like built into our culture. Students come to us because, you know, number one goal, get a job, get a job, keep that job, or build that business, right? They want to gain social mobility. And that has actually helped me a ton because after ChatGPT came out, I was starting to slowly work it into my courses within a few months, right? I played with it on my own. I had come up with these use cases. I tested things out and started to figure out this is how it can work into a college course. And I rolled it out and I got no resistance, right? I was very honest with the president of my college, with everyone above me, and I said, this is what I'm going to do. This is how it's going to help students out. This is, you know, everything else. And I was able to give, give my logic to them, and I got no resistance because I was able to have that mission statement front and center and say, well, students will likely have to use it in some form regardless of what they want to go into. So I really, really want to work it in. And they said, yeah, go for it, do it. Most colleges and universities do not have that right? So they have so many other. And it depends on the institution. But so much of the time there are these different missions that they have. And I would. I agree with you, Jordan. I think that one of the biggest ones, arguably the biggest one, is a job. And so I do think that the recognition of that and the understanding that this technology is not going to simply fade away into nothingness, I think that's been the push, and I think in many ways that has been good. One of the things that I think is promising about this technology is it should really get colleges to think very seriously about what they've been doing for a long time. Right. Are colleges and universities really getting students ready for the workforce? Right. And, like, be very, very. I think it's pushed a lot of us to be very honest. And now that we have AI thrown into the mix, we have to think, well, they have to know how to use it. Right. They know how to pick up skills. And a lot of the things that I emphasize for faculty is that it doesn't have to be an entirely new thing. So one way of approaching it is to say, you know, use. Have them use AI tools, do X, Y and Z. And another is like, teach critical thinking, and then you can show them how you can apply to this. A lot of the skills, analysis, critical thinking, creativity, these are very much still going to be in flux, even with AI as it is right now and I think certainly going forward. And so trying to link the two, saying that there's a way that you can kind of take what you've been already doing and refine it, maybe there's a way to make it better with AI in the mix and figuring out how we can get our students prepared to actually have those jobs and start those businesses. Because now, increasingly, my students and AI is part of this too. They want to start their own business. They want to become entrepreneurs. Right. And they credit some of them, credit AI with being able to do that.

Oh, absolutely. And Jason, you. You. You brought up something interesting there. So you said that, you know, your integration of AI into the classroom was relatively seamless. Right. You. You prioritized ethics and transparency. And, you know, your, your college, you know, promoted that. Right. And. And we're on board. But that's probably not the, the average rollout for educators and, you know, throughout other universities across the US Maybe. I know you do a lot of consulting. You know, you're tapped into the, you know, the network of professors. What's it like for everyone else? And maybe can you share, you know, an instance or two, you know, where it's going.

Right.

You know, are you in the 1%? Is it 50. 50. And then how are others struggling? And can you maybe paint that picture? Is it still kind of a horror story in other instances? Are you still running in circles trying to figure out how to actually grow your business with AI? Maybe your company has been tinkering with large language models for a year or more, but can't really get traction to find ROI on Genai. Hey, this is Jordan Wilson, host of this very podcast. Companies like Adobe, Microsoft and Nvidia have partnered with us because they trust our expertise in educating the masses around generative AI to get ahead. And some of the most innovative companies in the country hire us to help with their AI strategy and to train hundreds of their employees on how to use Genai. So whether you're looking for ChatGPT training for thousands or just need help building your front end AI strategy, you can partner with us too, just like some of the biggest companies in the world do. Go to your everydayai.com partner to get in contact with our team or you can just click on the partner section of our website. We'll help you stop running in those AI circles and help get your team ahead and build a straight path to ROI on Genai.

Yeah, so in my experience, I kind of see three major categories and they're not totally separate from each other. There are ways in which they very much kind of meld as we go along. But really category number one are faculty members who are really using AI as faculty facing tools. Right? So using it to generate a quick draft of a class plan or using it to create a quiz, if you create quizzes, right. Doing that sort of thing. Right. Creating PowerPoints. So a lot of faculty are just sort of there. And that's been, even for faculty who've been very receptive to it, that's been kind of the dominant group, right. This faculty members know, you know, they know what they're teaching, they know what they're kind of doing, they know what they're looking for. And so they use these tools, whatever they are, to kind of quicken the process, ease the workload. And so that's been sort of the dominant group, I'd say probably like, so I'd say maybe about 40% of faculty members that I talked were kind of there. Right. And then you also have the group that I'm very much a part of which is really thinking about, so using faculty facing tools. That's great. But then started to think about student facing uses of this technology. Right. Thinking about using. And I do this all the time, using a chatbot for role Playing. One of the big obstacles when it comes to learning is that we tend to learn in a very, especially at college, a very theoretical space. We read something, we learn the theory and then we never apply it. And actually chatbots are really, really good for immediately saying, here's a chatbot, it's going to set up a scenario for you. We know scenario based learning really, really works very well. And run it. And if it sucks, if you mess up along the way, run it again. Right. It's something you can't really do with humans. Right. Just reset it, do it again, think about what went right, what went wrong, and you can just do that over and over and over again. So thinking about student facing using the technology, and I think that that's kind of a small group, I'd say like 20 to 30% there. And then the other group is people who are resistant to the technology. That is very much a huge part of student faculty as well. And they're an important voice. I actually really like listening to them. Right. Because it really kind of helps me out and it helps ground me. And there are different reasons why faculty are resistant to this technology. I'd say one of the biggest is the environmental concern. I think that there are a lot of faculty say, I'm not comfortable having my students use this because if I have say 20 or 100 students using it, I'm worried about the environmental impact. That hasn't been worked out yet. Right. Maybe it will in the future, but right now they make it makes them uncomfortable. Right. Whether or not we agree with it or not. Right. That's a big concern. One of the reasons they push against it. Another is this worry that, and you know, I try to come back. I don't, I don't think of the technology this way, but I understand why they do. But thinking about what happens to human, to human interaction in the classroom, right. Students are using AI all the time. And so that for many faculty is a reason to just not use, especially the student facing part of this technology. And I think it's important to have all the voices, I think it's important to have all of those groups in the conversation and to have students in the conversation. One of the things that I'm really passionate about is if you have a task force, get a student on it. If you have a committee, get a student on it. If you give them, and don't just give them a voice, let them build stuff with you. Actually let them, you know, give them agency and say, oh cool, let's build stuff together. It's. It kind of changes the dynamic. And by having, you know, these different groups and having everyone be really, hopefully listening to each other, bouncing off each other, I think that's the best case scenario. And I do think that the percentages, based off of my experience, percentages of faculty in those groups, it has sort of shifted because I would say that that resistance group has gotten significantly smaller as the technology has just been around a little longer. We've been exposed to a little bit more. And now I would say the vast majority of faculty I talked to, the biggest group anyway, are in that, playing with it from a faculty side and then are maybe starting to think about from the student side, although I think a lot of faculty aren't there yet, but that those have been, I think the big shifts with colleges and a lot of it depends again, on what kind of college it is, whether it's a big college, small college, and also how much agency the faculty member has. So for online classes, for some colleges, myself included, if I get an online class and I want to work AI in or I want to make a change in it, I do it. No one questions it. I don't have to run it up the ladder. I don't do anything like that. There are colleges when you are literally not allowed to change anything. You're given an online course, you cannot change anything in that course has been accredited, it's gotten the seal of approval wherever it's from, and you can't actually do anything. And that's. We got rid of that model at my college because it's so frustrating as a faculty member. And the students, too. Right. Because you can sense that they're not creating their own stuff. But I think that. Yeah. So keeping that in mind, that, I mean, I personally think that AI has a huge potential for improving online courses, but a lot of it depends on how much agency the faculty actually has.

Yeah. And that was just like a lot of great insights and going over these kind of three different groups and, you know, Jason, maybe you won't call them out. I will politely, just with facts. Right. Because it's good. Right? I think it's good. You have to keep in mind the environmental factor. Right. But hey, educators, you know, presidents of universities, if that's your reason, if that's the actual reason, you know, it's. It's a, It's a great cause, but you, you also have to think about it logistically. Right. Because, yes, chat GBT is 10 times more energy intensive than a simple Google search. However, you know, it's not 10 times more Google searches that will be used. It'll be twenty, fifty, a hundred times. So you know, half a dozen of one, 50 of the other.

Right.

So uh, it's not actually, you know, by banning CHAT gbt, I'll just, I'll just say that you're not doing anything for the environment. You're actually doing more harm because it saves way more, you know, 50 Google searches versus one perplexity. So, you know, I guess pick your poison. But I, I, I want to talk though, Jason, a little bit about the student experience.

Right?

So when we're talking about is CHAT GPT making college better or worse? Right. You just gave us a some great insights through the faculty through the eyes of a professor. What about a student? Right. And maybe not your students because I think the way that you're leveraging ChatGPT is, is, is a no brainer. It enriches the student experience. But I'd say that's probably not the, the norm. Do you think ChatGPT is good for students or is it bad across the board?

I think right now students are in a tough spot. I talk to my students a lot about how they interact with AI. The vast majority of them use it, right? They're relatively familiar with it. They may not have gotten to the point like they're, they're master prompters or anything, but they use it very frequently for information. And one of the things that they tell me is that college is confusing in terms of AI policy. Right? So I try to put myself in the perspective of a student thinking about going to college and this thing that's relatively new to a lot of us now, you have to go into your classes and you might be taking five, maybe even six classes during a semester. You have to track all of the AI policies, right? You have to know what they are. You have to figure everything out. And sometimes you're not even allowed to talk to your professor about it, right? You can't go to them and say, oh, I was using the ChatGPT or perplexity the other day, like you're not allowed to do that for some classes. And then you add to that high stakes everything that if it gets to the point where whether a student uses something like ChatGPT or not, if they're accused of using a faculty member, it might be passed off immediately to a disciplinary committee, like immediately, right? Within 24 hours. And so then you're talking about failing assignments, failing classes, right? Getting kicked out of classes. Right. And just I, when you have an environment like that don't think you can have constructive conversations. I think that thinking from the student perspective, we have to be very, very aware of that confusion. Some of them are just very confused about how to use this technology. And part of it is how faculty are approaching it. I think that, you know, faculty are at fault, right, in terms of really not having some cohesive plan for this or really way of talking about it. One of the examples that I now give to faculty is Grammarly. That I have many faculty members who I talk to say, oh, they're not allowed to use AI, but they're allowed to use Grammarly. And what I say to them is, when was the last time you went into Grammarly? And inevitably, five years ago or so. Go back in, Go back into Grammarly, hit that generative AI button, let me know what you think. Right. And that's like a light bulb, because they'll tell their students, oh, use Grammarly. And then they'll use Grammarly, which has, you know, generative AI and a version of ChatGPT baked into it. And then they get flagged. And so that's very tough to deal with. And so that's one of the things I'm pushing for at my college, trying to really think about this new experience and have students talk about it and share about it, because I can't imagine what it would be like if I were a college student and this technology was everywhere around me, and every day it was getting worked into more things that I used. Right. It's coming into Microsoft products which were a Microsoft institution. And now suddenly the powers that be are telling me I can't use it and I can't talk about it. I can't even mention that I know what it is, and that's just catastrophic to me. My hope is that once we get past that, it's going to improve the student experience, because I do think there's a lot of potential for it. And, you know, it can create better learning experiences if we're doing it in certain ways, in certain purposeful ways. But I think we need to get there, because right now I think we're at that point where there's so much confusion and there's so much angst because the stakes are always so high. I personally think step number one, if we're going to actually help students figure out what to do, bring those stakes down, bring them way down, right? Like, if I think that you're in one of my classes and say you're someone who just literally took the assignment, put it into ChatGPT and copied it. Right. Didn't do any reflection, didn't do anything like that. Odds are it's probably not a good product for various reasons. But say you did that, like I'm not going to hand it off to someone else. I'm going to deal with it. I'm going to talk to you. I'm going to say, oh, did you have some trouble with this? And you know, things like that, like there's a way to have a constructive conversation conversation, but it is not putting a zero into, you know, the learning management system and basically saying some version of how dare you use chat gbt.

Right?

That is not the constructive way forward. I think that it has to be like an open conversation and also emphasizing that we're all learning as we go along. I'm not an expert in this stuff. I've been playing with this and teaching it for two years. I'm still not an expert. I'm still like constantly chasing and trying to figure out best way forward. And I think it's okay to tell our students that. I think they appreciate it, right? That we are actually all trying to figure this out. And that also lessens that state those stakes. Because if the stakes are like expulsion and failing and all that really, really scary stuff that you can never ever take back, then I don't think students and faculty can have a meaningful relationship because the relationship has to be based off of trust and openness and that that is not trustful or open.

And Jason, I don't think we can have a conversation about chat GPT in the classroom without at least quickly addressing. I promise you, I'm not going to go on a 10 minute rant like, like I sometimes do. But you know, you talked about, there is a huge problem here, right, with, with students being accused of, of using AI, you know, in times when they don't. Can you just tell everyone just quickly about the whole AI content detection fallacy?

Yeah. So please do not use AD detectors. Please, please, please do not. There are a couple of reasons why. One, accuracy, right? That's, that's reason number one there, at least for me. There's so much mounting evidence that we should be very, very wary about who's getting flagged by these detection programs. Right. We know that they tend to flag students who are non native English speakers. That is a huge, huge problem. If you are a student in a college class and you're not a native speaker and you get flagged by these programs, that can be completely debilitating, right? That, that can completely shut you down. And so that's a problem. The other big problem is how much do we want to lean into fear? I don't think that we should lean into very much at all. And so there are so many different manifestations of this. So really, over the last couple of years, when people were told, you know, I'm going to ban ChatGPT in my courses, right, Whether that's possible or not, say I did that. And then students would go and they would have to document everything. They would go through Google Docs, they would take snapshots of their screens, they would timestamp everything, and they would hand in like this really, really, like detailed because they're so worried about being caught. You can't learn that way. You're spending so much time thinking about documenting things just in case you are caught flagged by the system. You can't, you just can't work that way. Right. You get so hard to like, do any, any sort of meaningful cognitive thing if you're in panic all the time. And so I personally take the other side. I try to think about how, you know, the best thing is being open with students, talking them about it. And if I think something, you know, maybe for a certain task, maybe AI is not the best thing. Right. Tell them why.

Right.

Always tell them why. Right. Every single time, all across the board. And don't take it for granted. And sometimes that gets you say, oh, maybe there isn't a real reason for it. Maybe they can use AI for it and that's okay too. You can change your mind. But yeah, I would say I don't recommend that anyone use AI detectors, certainly, even if you are tempted to touch them, do not take them at their word. Right. It's not going to work well for you and it's not going to work well for the student. Because if you use it, you flag a student and whatever happens, right, if they deny it or anything else, that relationship between you and that student is severed. And I really worry about that. Right. Regardless of the outcome, I don't know if you'll ever get that relationship back. And so, yeah, in general, don't use it. It comes from a place of fear and they're just, I don't think they're accurate enough to use.

Yeah, yeah, that's. We'll keep it pretty short. I'll just say, yeah, they don't work. They're fake. So we'll, we'll leave a link to Jason and I's conversation from last year in the, in the show description so you can go listen to the entire hot take from that one. What about, though, for the students maybe that don't have an innovative professor like you, someone that is again, prioritizing ethics, transparency in innovation into integrating large language models into the classroom. What about for those students that, you know, maybe they're operating in a gray area or maybe the kind of rules are very lax and for the most part, and I know some students like this, right? School's easy now, right? Because hey, chat GPT change a couple of words and you know, they're good. And so much of school, at least, you know, I was in school, you know, very long time ago, but so much of school for me it was like 80%, 90% writing papers. So what about for those students that maybe, and I'd make the guess, it's an overwhelming number, right? Probably a majority of students are doing this. That's why you've seen literally dozens of apps for college students that are like, hey, you know, get away with using ChatGPT. And there's some of the top education apps on the App Store, right? And on the Mac store, right? These, these companies have exploded in popularity. So are students screwing themselves over because on one hand they need to use it and learn it to get a job, but on the other hand, are they just blindly floating through their, their college experience?

This is such a hard question for me because I think, and I include myself in this group, that's the big question. That's what we're trying to figure out. And a lot of I think it comes down to being very, very honest with what students learn from the process. One of the big changes, I think that has happened for the way that I teach and a lot of people move in this direction is with just the emergence of generative AI and so many students are using it, really focusing on process over product. And that has been very, very helpful that so many of our students over the last couple of decades have been really, really conditioned for various reasons to just look at that product, just focus on that, you know, five page essay, that research paper, and you just hand it in. And for a lot of fact, that's what they did. They almost never, ever saw the product. And so one of the things that I do now is I try to structure everything in a way that really focuses on that process. So one of the things I did last year in one of my classes, I got rid of the final paper. I just axed it, I got rid of it and instead I said, you know, I gave them something to work with, I gave them a Lot of agency with choosing what it was. And I said, you know, first you're gonna free write, right? And I really, I said, I recommend, you know, try to put AI aside for a little bit. Just free write for five minutes. Just let your thoughts kind of, it's gonna be messy. That's okay, don't worry about, just get it on the page. And then from there I talked about, you know, look at that free write, boiling it down to a couple things. And then I gave them, you know, the assignment of boil it down to an argument, right? Just one argument, something you think based off of your writing and everything. And then I gave them a contrarian chatbot, right? I, I create custom GPT for them and I said, this bot is basically going to push against your argument. And they had a conversation with it. So I that there and they actually gave me the link to the entire chat and I could read through it and kind of see how they engage with it, how they were thinking, all that sort of stuff. And so that's a way for me to front load the process. Now I do think that a lot of faculty do not do that. And that is one of the things that worries me because whenever I do that now I have to qualify everything at the end of every class, I have to, whenever we do something related, I have to put this giant qualification, right? Say this is just me. Don't assume it's going to be the case with every professor. And that's really hard. That is really, really hard for students. When you're saying that, oh, I'm doing all these things, all these innovative things for certain reasons actually help the student out. And then you have to say, well, but you cannot assume that your other faculty, your other professors will have that same approach. And I'm hoping that changes. And I think it will start to change over the next six months to a year. Because my college and a lot of colleges are like this, we're starting to develop kind of an overarching institutional set of guidelines now that when ChatGPT came out, a lot of it was just handing agency over to the professor and just say, figure it out, right? Do, do, create whatever policy you think makes sense and enforce it in whatever way you want. And we, a lot of us have realized that that doesn't work right there. You need like institutional buy in, especially when you get to accusations and appeals and all that sort of rigmarole and all that kind of clunky stuff, messy stuff, I guess they'll say. And so I'm hoping that as we create more institutional guidelines that will start to change because then I'm able to say, you know, this is what I'm going to do with AI. And then I can kind of take for granted that other people are doing something else, right? They're not just like banning it in classrooms or whatever, whatever the institutional policy is. Because it's hard. It's. It's hard if you have to tell a student at the end of every innovative thing like, oh, you might not be able to do this in other classes because now you've also given them a taste of it and now they're going to go in the other class and they're going to say, oh, okay, cool, another five page essay. And what I'm hoping happens is if I teach it enough then, and I have enough students and those students go out, the culture starts to change. Because that's what I think needs to happen. I think there needs to be a culture change. But that is slow moving, especially with colleges. College culture doesn't like to change very much. And the only way to do it is just like be open with it. I do it from a professor because I don't have the same stakes, right? I don't have the same stakes that a student does, right? What are they going to do? They're going to yell at me. Like they could, I guess. But it's very different dynamic. So I'm hoping that changes because right now that part is tough. And then I think once we do that, once we have that culture change, then we can start to think about teaching process and being honest with students, right? Being honest with students, that this is what I think we get out of the process and telling them, you know, giving them guidelines like how, how to use AI, how it can work into it, or maybe it can't work into it and just telling them, right? One of the things that I do in my classes, I'll have an AI scale. So 1 is no AI, 5 is full on AI. And all along the way I'll tell them, you know, it's a two, it's a three. And the point isn't to like ban it. The point isn't to say like one. Oh. It's more to have students see how that works. In my workflow, I have some stuff that I just like doing by myself. Some things I'm more than happy to hand over and then most things I'm happy to work with it. I'm like a two or three. And I want students to see that because they're not seeing models of that. They're not seeing that you kind of do that. They think it's all their. No AI or all AI. And most of us, I think, settle in the middle.

Yeah. Jason, I want your. Before we start to wrap here, I want your quick take on this. You know, when we look at the bigger picture, is chat, GPT making college better or worse? If you had to choose one collectively, which one would you choose? Why? And then how would you either fix it or make sure that it is improved throughout?

I think it's such a hard question for me to do collectively. I think overall, it's your.

It's your second time on. We gotta. We gotta ramp it up here.

I know. Yeah. I would say better in general, and I'll qualify that quickly. I think we're having conversations we should have had for a long time ago. I think that this technology has forced a lot of us into positions where we need to think very seriously about our online courses, about our pedagogy, about whether we are doing all we can to prepare students for the workforce. And really the potential here is that we get to revisit what we've been doing. Right. We've been doing for a long time. And this has helped me out tremendously. Right now, this thing is here. Should I be doing this? What was the point of giving essays? What was the point of. Right. And whether or not I stick with assignments or I change them, being very, very honest with myself. And so I think that because of that, because we're at this messy spot where colleges are actually talking about this, I think that's a good thing. I think that's an improvement because so many of us have been in a rut, teach the same things again and again and again, the same assignments again and again. I mean, look. Look how dominated colleges are by essay assignments. Should we have been doing that? Is that really, like the best way for all disciplines across the board? Probably not, right? It makes sense in some contexts, but not all the time. So I think that's an improvement. And I think for me personally, to move forward to get kind of that part of your question, I think we lean into that mess. I think we have those hard conversations, right? We have them politely, really, really talk to each other. We really try to listen to the other sides. And then. And then we can start planning, then we can start building from there. I think it's the only way going forward because I think that we could very easily regress, we could very easily go back. And my goal, one of my goals in life is to not have to make that not happen, to make us continue to push forward, have those hard conversations, get students in, and then build from there.

I think, I think, Jason, that was just a great way to end today's conversation. Talking about to lean into this mess, lean into maybe this uncertainty and ambiguity that we have going on right now, to maybe rethink the process of education.

Right.

Like, I love what you said there. Like, why are we, you know, so reliant on writing extremely long papers as, as like the main backbone of higher education? Yeah. Maybe it's time to rethink it with AI front and center. So, Jason, thank you so much for joining the Everyday AI show to talk about if chat GPT is making college better or worse. We appreciate your time and your insights.

Thank you so much, Jordan. It was a pleasure. It was fun.

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All.

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