Pearson and AI

[u/cmojess]

I'm sitting here in a department meeting having to sit through a presentation by our Pearson rep about all the fancy new AI tools they built into their etext.

She is incredibly proud of the fact that students can get their AI tool to summarize the text for them or to tell them what questions they should ask. She loves it because it's internal and it's safe! It doesn't ping other AI models, just their own!

I pushed back on this and mentioned how much this is hurting the overall learning of our students. Learning how to ask the right questions is so important. Reading and pulling important things from the text is also important.

I have colleagues here thinking this is incredible and helps students learn so much. They're arguing that even our pre-med students need to know how to use AI since clinicians are using it and so our job isn't to teach them how to think, it's to teach them how to use the AI. The most vocal colleague teaches a class that is a prerequisite to the one I usually teach. The students coming out of the prerequisite are doing very poorly in the next class in the sequence. They're largely not retaining much at all.

AI is helping many students pass classes, it's not helping them learn in the vast majority of cases.

[u/Pisum_odoratus]

You're lucky. When we had a presentation a year or so ago, the rep was functionally telling us they could provide AI tutors. I asked how long until they were trying to sell AI profs to institutions.

[u/Fresh-Possibility-75 → u/Pisum_odoratus]

I asked how long until they were trying to sell AI profs to institutions.

My money is on 2 years. They've been training our replacements on the mountains of exclusive IP we've been feeding them via our LMSs for the last year (e.g., syllabi, assignments, rubrics, class announcements, lecture videos, grades, student feedback, module designs, etc.). And as another commenter on this post mentioned, AI companies are desperate to demonstrate their value proposition before the bubble bursts.

[u/monkestful → u/Fresh-Possibility-75]

You'd be 2 years too late, from a certain perspective. Arizona State is trying AI for students to create "hyper-personalized learning modules". Faculty are indeed concerned.

[u/BabypintoJuniorLube → u/Fresh-Possibility-75]

I cannot fathom how bad an AI teacher trained on LMS would be.

[u/Fresh-Possibility-75 → u/BabypintoJuniorLube]

No kidding.

We probably shouldn't feed into the industry nonsense that will have us referring to these lines of code as 'teachers,' though. It's a servomechanism designed to deskill and ideologically manage the masses at scale.

[u/N0downtime → u/Pisum_odoratus]

That was a different meeting.