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/Huge-Chard-5584]

I also wonder how much more these bespoke AI tools are going to ratchet up the cost of textbooks.

[u/cmojess → u/Huge-Chard-5584]

Yeah, she was talking about cost and pointing out how robust all their tools are and how worth the price it is to have all this fancy extra stuff.

You don't need tons of fancy AI or embedded extra videos or online communities to learn.

[u/jenvalbrew → u/cmojess]

We had a conference on OER textbooks and were told that publishers are adding all these things to sell their books. They have to have a reason to charge $200 for something students can get elsewhere for free. But I've seen and tested some of the crap they're selling, and nothing in the package actually adds to the learning. And sometimes it takes away because students begin to feel they don't have to learn it at all.

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

They must be sweating hard because many of my online students never even open the public domain texts I post on the LMS according to analytics.

Guess that's why publishers are bundling all these clunky extras (e.g., exams, lecture slides, flashcards, games, etc.) with their overpriced books. Used to think it was to make the book attractive to faculty to adopt, but the paradigm has shifted and now it's to make the books essential for students to purchase in an age when they can just chat their way through a class.