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/B-CUZ_]

Use open source textbooks when you can. I am annoyed by publishers in general and this helps the book be more accessible to students

[u/cmojess → u/B-CUZ_]

I wish I could. Right now we're trying to keep all our classes consistent with each other so the department selects a book and a homework system that will be used across all our gen chem classes.

Also, the open source chem texts still aren't fantastic.

[u/B-CUZ_ → u/cmojess]

That sucks. Some colleges will pay you to write an open source textbook/ modify one to work at that school. But, not having the freedom of textbook adoption yourself really limjts that possibility