Exploring the Potential of Generative AI in Education

Thank you everybody for joining us. We got the big room somehow. This is our panel, an incredible group of people. This will be the first of many conversations around AI that you're gonna have today. So go ahead and take a seat. Let me, let me give a little bit of background on this conversation.

When Chat GPT fell out of the sky in December of last year, that's almost supposed to remember it. We a lot of interest from our institutions around, of course, the academic integrity aspect of JetGPT, and the Open AI large language model learning, that kind of thing. And so we held our first webinar in early January, and we had eleven hundred attendees. So, obviously, a very important topic. And that led to a series of webinars kind of focused on higher ed focused on k twelve.

So as we talked about this panel, we thought you know, let's bring a broad perspective to instructure Con. And so Tom, is representing the the k twelve side of things. Most of you representing the higher ed side of things. And then Leo is representing, international. And that's some of the different aspects of AI that we're looking at there.

So as we talk about this, you know, there's there's a lot of background, on language learning models, Zach Penleton, who's our chief architect, has a great timeline of, you know, it didn't really fall out of the sky in December. AI has been around for some time. But it really did hit education at that time. And so, the innovation was chat GPT four or chat GPT and the idea that it was a much easier interface to interact with for non technical folks. And so, I think, oh, on a side note too, there are seats up front.

They are no longer reserved. That was for the keynote. So if we all wanna come down. That's not shown as well. But let's talk a little bit about, the background on, when cove where when this hit at the end of of last year, what was your, in, in this case, districts approach to AI.

And and how did you how did you what was your initial response? Well, in the in the public sector, you're especially k twelve schools in California, we we systems move slow. And I think the best response we've had is no response yet because AI is something that we will immediately try and ban. We were trying to ban calculators up until about three years ago. So We're we're definitely, but the good thing is in our system, and I think for the K-twelve folks who are here, as we have some innovators who the first time this came to me wasn't probably till January. And then when I started to dig a little bit, I found out we have some teachers that are, attentive to this and starting to bring some information into our system.

And, you know, on the normal we work on the normal distribution where we have those front front runners and four runners, and we have to let them run because systemically, we will try and stop that innovation before it starts. If we listen to, the traditional voices in the system. So for us, it's we're really in our infancy. This is brand new for us. And it's something that we're gonna have to, I mean, in my perspective, not put rules around until, we know more about it.

Yeah. And and you've got some very specific challenges around, PII for students, young students, and how does that data? How do you fire all that data from large language models, right, that are ingest data? And so, yeah, the we've we've seen a fairly common approach of Let's take it easy and and maybe draw some initial lines. But it it does sound like you've kind of moved a little bit beyond the the initial response of this is just a an academic integrity or a cheating tool. Yeah. And and it actually came to us more of it.

Most it's mostly it's coming to us as a writing tool. And the way it impacts students' ability to to experience writing and then edit from there. And we haven't had, a grounds swell around the the the cheating aspect, but also, we have to allow our students to learn with the tools they're growing up with So our high school district, we're high school only nine three twelve, and sometimes I find us, you know, we're teaching a five year old curriculum to students for jobs, they're gonna that don't exist till five years from now. So we're always in this time work. Yeah.

Melissa, from the higher education standpoint. Tell me a little bit about the initial response there at the end of last year. Okay. So we, I actually was driving one day back from a haircut appointment and listening to a podcast. And I was listening to them talking about using chat, GPT, and therapy.

And in certain types of therapy, and it was fascinating to me. And I thought there's something there. That was probably October, November, And then shortly after that, the New York Times started, started spitting out articles about faculty. The what was gonna happen to academic integrity when chat GPT kind of took over the world. Very good testifies the headlines.

Right? And so immediately, just by nature of my personality and my role, I immediately respond. Okay. We're gonna embrace this. We're not gonna fight against it. We have academic integrity policies.

So we're not gonna start from a policy standpoint, but we need to be ready in January when our faculty come back with with actually a semester curriculum around how we wanna think about this. And so I'll be I'll be able to talk more about that, but we started off January with webinars, faculty learning communities, and and we've been there as the issue has evolved all the way through and and have faculty who are using it in their courses and we're learning. That's awesome. You you're on the more proactive end. We'll we'll come back to that in a little bit.

Yeah. Thank you. Thanks. Leo, from an international standpoint. I know, Amy, the EU in general has some regulations that, are starting to move forward and things like that.

But what was that initial response as as, AI hit the scene? Right? Yeah. Yeah. So what what happened was, any shock, you know, any times that we have, like, a big innovation that create kinds of shock people. You can easily find, like, these Uber resistors versus, like, people that are very open to and very willing to embrace the change. So this was creating we we knew that, of course, to this, to be clusters of people within my my school.

And that's internally. But that so basically what we had to do internally was to, just working with those super top innovators because they right away, they tried to say, okay. We can do this on the agenda. So they were throwing their number of things they would like to do. And, luckily enough, we do have a center.

We have a teacher learning center that maybe most of us, and so they were addressing all this recast to us. And so we were coordinating, basically, and it was great. So we could have, like, an overview about what was what's going to happen within the classes. But same time, as you say, few days later, what happened was like a regulator where, say, no, this may be, against going against the academic activity, and there was a lot of issues, names of ethics, a moral and many other things. So it and to us, it was like a stop.

So we could not, by the law. And So, this was as you may or some of us may know this was last in not that much because there were a big group of let's say stakeholders. And so there was lots of lobbying some days discussing what's going on. Haina, it doesn't make sense to stop it. We don't even know what is the and how to use it, so how can we, you know, we need to understand.

So the first thing as a as a scholar is to understand in the phenomenon, not just to say stop by definition. And so we were converting the stop into, let's see, let's understand the real, problem if the problem is, and the real opportunity. And then we can eventually regulate and setting any good policy. Luckily enough, that's the way where we are now. One of the things that we found is there's actually a lot of education, like you talk about.

There's there's people with different understandings of AI, different understandings, different comfort levels, fear levels, And we actually put out a guide, for kind of a baseline intro to AI guide that's available on our blog. But one of the things that's interesting is we got a lot of responses of kind of fearful hey, are you using AI in your product? And we had to say, yeah. We've been using AI for a decade. Right? Those those chat bots those natural language processing, those machine learning, those simple tools, are considered AI. They are different from large language model based generative AI.

And that's really what the the that kind of watershed moment at the end of last year was was these much more, powerful generative tools And like I mentioned before, that timeline is really remarkable about how rapidly, the the large language models have progressed. The the number of parameters they're trained on when from, you know, in the millions, a hundred and seventy five million to to a trillion in the most recent, release of of Open AI. And even even the use of OpenAI as the as the source product versus Chat GPT is the one of the many, many tools out there, is is really important on And so there's a lot of information. You'll hear a lot of information in the sessions this week. But it's it's something that we wanna make sure everybody understands, is educated about.

The week together can make informed decisions. But fast forward, you know, now we're we're in July, and it's kind of incredible how rapidly things have changed with AI. And I'll start with Melissa on this one. What have you what have you seen on campus? How is of perceptions change. What does that look like? It, actually, it's just been really exciting.

Right. As I mentioned, one of the early things we did was to set up a team site that we get anybody could throw in articles or things to kinda generate ideas and information. And we pulled together. We've had a number of faculty communities that we've worked with, that we started in the pandemic that have endured, but they've shifted in their focus. And so we had an automatic group of faculty that we could turn to about this and really take it from the standpoint of curiosity and whose game for thinking about how we look at this relative to our curriculum.

And we were fortunate to have some faculty, the head of our writing program, very engaged very excited already learning some things as she has started to embed it there. Our math professor who was really interested some really awesome conversations about does this inhibit creativity, or does it inspire creativity? And so we have an array of faculty on our campus right now who are using it that represent the sciences rhetoric, you know, whole array of faculty, and our group A faculty that we've pulled together has now expanded to include career services because we're an institution that focused on building digital literacy skills for our students. And in many ways, this is part of that. It's just a different iteration of it. So how do we think about workforce We have institutional research at the table because how do we start to think about measuring the impact of what we're doing in the classroom And now we are finally at the place where we're starting to think about putting, some general guidelines best practices and kind of a piece that will give faculty something to turn to, but that won't be prohibitive and will continue to inspire creativity.

It's funny because that cross functional team really does say you open incredibly well, as new uses for AA emerge. It's funny. We've only just seen the start of of what AI can do. It's I mean, it's moving so fast -- Yeah. -- that we need to build resilience and curiosity and and hold to our core values around academic integrity, but not we need to actually inspire innovation.

And so our area teaching learning and digital transformation. Many of our team are here or some of our core team, who are leading this. We put money behind it for faculty. So if you have an idea, we'll give you some resources to help you be able to build that course so we can see what it does. And Tom, you mentioned a little bit, by nature, k twelve can be a little more slow and measured in that, the the approach to roll stuff out.

Those are kind words. Yes. I I'm choosing my words carefully. Tell me a little bit about where you stand now, seven months later. Well, I I think we continue to underestimate the kids and the kids are the ones bringing this to us in high school.

So we have far more students who are using Chad GBT for different assignments and trying it and trying it in different ways, then we do teachers who are perceptive to how it could be used as an instructional tool. And that's why in in in high school, in particular, if we don't respect the knowledge the kids bring into the classroom, we end up taking an institutional stand that what they bring to us shouldn't work because we know what works when really sometimes the opposite is true. So for us, next steps are We have collaborative instructional leadership teams at all our high schools to start having that instructional conversation with those teachers who are on the forefront of this. But also to try and listen to and learn from what the students are experiencing as they go out and do this without prompting. So they're bringing this to us and we need to help land it in a way where we can ensure that it's a tool for those students who aren't experiencing it yet, but also that we don't have end up with, classroom rules so to speak that are prohibitive to a learning technology I always tell people just finished thirty years.

We were just going from chalk to dry erase and in my first year teaching. And a lot of our faculty are the same age as I am, like we've been doing this for a long time through the rise of technology. We, but we also have an amazing excuse me, group of teachers that are out there finding this and bringing it in. And so we have to strike that balance. Yeah.

It's so thing because I think we forget sometimes how digitally native, young learners are. I have a twelve year old who said with all sincerity, don't understand why it's okay to use Grammarly, but it's not okay to use chat GPT. And and it's those kind of basic I it shifted the way I was thinking about it. Right? I suddenly was like, I think we actually need to ed educate them on those boundaries and what's appropriate. And that's one of those moments that stood out for me.

But let's talk a little bit more about your experience, Leo. Yeah. So, well, let me start from what you just say. One of the question I do ask you to my colleagues, why don't we talk about this kind of stuff in how to innovate and being prepared? Do we know how we'll be teaching like, once, like, a ten or twelve year zero student with joining University. So, do you feel to be ready for that? That's the kind of question I do ask to my colleagues during the likelihood of having a meeting.

Because that's that's that's the that's the point. I mean, today you may be a superstar, but in ten years, are you? So, and this is like a little bit provocative, I know. But when keep an eye to keep an interaction to dialogue with the whole, you know, the the whole education system because we need to understand. We need to educate them as well, of course. But we do also need to understand who is going to come.

The new batches of people join universities, how much they're ready. So, going back to, Melissa saying, actually, likely, again, enough, we do have this team, very diverse and it's a genius that is working on exploration. We do work on two stream, like exploitation and exploration. So the teamwork and exploration, we have already started since many years, like, not just activity, of course, but open AI in general. And so what I try to do is using the leverage of this team, exploration team for creating the culture of.

Need to be culturally speaking more prepared to face the uncertainty and face the new things. So today's strategy in fact, mosque can be something totally different. So -- Oh, absolutely. -- we must be ready for that. Yeah.

It is just like this kind of came out of the blue. You do wonder what it what's the next, you know, At this point, if we're not comfortable with change, it's it's a it's a hard time to be alive if you're not comfortable with change. But, one of the things I think for that to lay the groundwork for the future. One of the things you'll hear, I think, a lot this week from us is, as we approach AI, there's kind of three pillars that instructure is looking at. Intentional.

Right? Let's be very focused on the human driven problems we're trying to solve. If we don't understand what the problem is, If it's not saving teachers time or helping with student success, what are we trying to solve? The second is safety across the board, you know, making sure that we are we are protecting student data. We're protecting, educator intellectual property, things like that. And then equitability. Right? I think that's one of the biggest challenge right now as we look at equitable access.

We've made such strides in in access during COVID And AI does have the potential to open up that rift again because AI costs money. It's one of the things we actually don't talk about very often is the processing power, that an AI chat bot that, you know, incurs. And so that could be if if all the tools become paid tools, students without the access to those tools. Now will will struggle. So how do we lay the groundwork for that in the future? And so you'll you'll kinda see recurring theme there, around those three pillars this week.

But you've talked about let's talk a little bit about educator training, because I think I think you mentioned it. Most of you mentioned it well, but, this idea that we kind of need to put educators, in the forefront. We need to put them in the seat where we're giving them all the tools to understand. Are you doing anything, Leo, around educator training and making sure, like, what resources that they have available? Well, so we, yes, in general, let me say this. So we do have a framework for, we call it faculty training programs, basically.

So we have this big framework of different kind of initiatives and programs. One is mandatory for all incoming faculty. And so we really want to make them understanding how the things work within our system. So do you need to understand the philosophy of the culture? Do you need to understand how many tools do we have? What is the methodology, the pedagogy? So we want to really bring them on board. And this is, again, for all the assistant professors, but, again, for any associated full.

So it's open to anyone. This is on different settings. So I need to teach in large class, you know, line setting, or I do want to, main interaction with life, in a face to face setting with maybe with the, at an elective level, whatever it is. We do have this kind of live sessions. Then we have, kind of a great subsidiary of, tons of materials that we have prepared.

So anytime wherever there's kind of knowledge base, so basically you can look on this, and you can find like a little tips or answers. And we do facilitate a lot of sharing within five weeks. So it's not just us tailing someone. We do collect old experiences, university wise. We try to formalize it.

To share this with anyone we may need it. And we celebrate those. So people need to know what they are extending into. So we do also recognize. We do also pay them.

If a great idea, we are running we are we must be run by ideas. That that crowdsourcing of knowledge. You know, I I find myself. I think I'm pretty knowledgeable on it. And then, you know, Zach Penleton will send me something I had not seen yet at all.

Right? And And I think that sharing of knowledge, making sure we're all kind of watching the landscape and what's emerging is really important because it's it's changing. I've seen stats that say as many as a thousand apps a day focused on AI are are becoming available. Not all in education, thank goodness. But they're they're it there's it's kind of a deluge. And I think we've we may have past the kind of peak of that, but I still think we're gonna continue to see a a large flow.

So, Melissa, how about you? What are you doing around, professional development for educators? We're, I mean, a lot of what you had said and what I talked about earlier, we took an approach that we need to educate. So we do on a regular basis every two to three weeks, We have external speakers or local speakers or faculty who will share what they're doing, take questions, kind of the whole thing, And it always happens on a certain day of the week at a certain time. So people know to tune in. And, and we had several hundred faculty participants through the semester, which was great. And we will be continuing that.

We fortuitously, in January, opened our new academic innovation center. So it also created a sense of place. And so we've had more faculty who've come in to kind of check things out. We do some of our meetings regularly there. I talked about the fact that we have a faculty committee that is focusing on, regenerative AI and chat and how to think about it in the classroom.

That group meets about every six weeks. And honestly, it's just a really super inspirational, creative, powerful learning community. And so that's where the ideas are coming up for how what are you doing? Well, we took Zelensky speech and we ran it through chat. And then I had the students in my class figure out what was Chad or what was his speech. Yep.

Or, you know, all these kinds of things that are very, very exciting. And and now, again, we're starting to think about guidelines and how we think about this moving forward. I did want to mention a surprising thing to us. So we meet regularly, or I do, and and and one of my team members, with our student body president early on, our student government. And They were actually unaware of this for probably the first couple months of the semester.

It really didn't hit their radar until probably around spring break. It's funny. I think my twelve year old doing about it before my eighteen year old, the news out there playing with it. Right? It's interesting. It's remarkable.

Yeah. Yeah. And now our students are a little nervous about when they should use it. You know, they want some clarity because they don't wanna look like they've been cheating. Yeah.

And and that's the that's the thing. The, you know, as much as we we struggle with the academic integrity tools, being able to identify this, and there's been a lot of headlines around you know, false false claims of cheating. It's hard because, you know, there's no source document to point to. You can't you can't point to where they copied and pasted it from. And so it makes it much more difficult to say, is this mediocre writing or, you know, is this And so that's why I think adopting more of, proactive tool helps students understand where the boundaries are.

Boundaries and also using it to promote critical thinking. Yeah. Like, don't believe everything you read. I and, you know, we've had some faculty who've used it, specifically to develop deep fakes that then students have to figure out what they are or what they aren't. And so really, really thinking about how we look at this promoting creativity, critical thinking, and and and one other thing that we found in the writing program is that at UT San Antonio, we have a lot of students for whom, English is not their first language or, you know, high socioeconomic, rates of, of pale eligible students, And and so, actually, there was a super powerful impact that chat had for those students who needed to just double check their grammar.

Just be able to make sure that they're writing the way that they need to. But but who don't necessarily wanna go see a tutor and don't have to go through a harder process. And so it's it has really helped us with our equity, pieces in that, in, in, particularly in the writing area. We hadn't planned for that, but it's definitely been a powerful, a powerful tool. Yeah.

Professional writers who say, you know what? Sometimes I just have a mental block. I need help trying to figure out where to start. And it's a blank page. If you don't know what to do, this is a great place to get started. Yeah.

Tom, for the younger learners, what what, you know, and for educators kind of preparing educators for using it, identifying use of it. What are you what are you doing right now? Well, my original plan was to type into Chad GPT. Please develop a professional development plan for Chad GPT for teachers honestly would not In Oxnard Union High School District. Yeah. I haven't walked totally away from that, but, what what I would say is the good news is that our professional development program is already aligned to hearing from teachers on what they need to improve what they're hearing, what they wanna see, what they wanna pilot, and then we have a group of teacher leaders that translated that information to professional learning.

So John's gonna be busy this fall, with his presentations on how AI and chat GPT are impacting our different curricula. But really, for us, we found over time, you know, high school kids roll a little bit like, high school teachers in that you have to present it to them. Yeah. If you mandate it, they walk away. But if you present it, and they can learn from their peers.

They tend to adapt and adopt and adapt, and that's gonna be our plan moving. Yeah. Although I haven't again given up on just putting it in JPT and seeing what happens. In January, I got a call from Steve Daily, who said Ryan write us a policy on, ChatPT and Education. The first thing I did was go to chat GPT and say, write and structure, you know, and acceptable use policy, and it was funny.

And then dropped into a document, and I said the above was written by Chant GPT. Here's why that's crazy. And then, you know, summarized the information around that. It's not a bad way to start sometimes. It is a is a directional thought.

And again, I think that's where we have to learn, how to help teachers and students use it in ways that they may not initially think of it. To to that end, one of the biggest challenges is assessment. Right? I we were on a webinar and there was, and I and I wish you may be in the room. One of our educators, he said my son has, is on the spectrum and struggles with with challenges, if you give him an assignment, he doesn't understand if he doesn't understand the why of the assignment, it's really hard for him to engage with the assignment. He can't do it.

And he said, that's one of the things I look at with Chat EBT is if a student doesn't understand the why of the assignment, they're more likely to turn to CH EBT or to cheat in general. And so it's more it kind of underscores that reason for us to explain the why. What what do you what do we hope you accomplish in this task that we're giving you? But what are you doing around maybe changing the approach to assessments or the approach to those types of assignments? What have you seen with your educators at this point, and whoever wants to go. Jump it. Jump it? Okay.

I I would say, it's a great question. One of the first things that several of us thought about when this came around is that when online learning, you talk about, you know, remembering when things were changing, One of the things that online learning did when our faculty were really nervous to teach online thought it would be the end of civilization. They did not wanna do it. I mean, this was back twenty plus years ago. It actually helped us improve the way that we assess learning.

Because we always knew all the research showed that, you know, shorter, quicker, more frequent assessments lead to better learning outcomes, But it wasn't until we had to move online. The faculty started to have to change their curriculum, instructional design, and pedagogy came together to really work as one, working with faculty, and we saw that actually it improved learning and teaching for students. And so we thought this could probably happen in with generative AI. We're not really sure all the details. And so to be honest with you, we haven't gone deeply into assessment because we don't see this as changing the base learning outcomes for a for a particular course.

But it can expand it or can change some of the workforce, you know, aspects to it or or other types of pieces. But what we have mentioned I what I mentioned earlier that I wanna I wanna highlight is that we have a full time staff person who works in our instruction in in, institutional research who simply works with our team to help us figure out the impact we're making. So whether it's a faculty development program, does it have an impact on student outcomes or whether it's chat GPT where faculty are taking courses that they've taught in the past but now tweaking to change and incorporate chat. And how does that change? Yeah. Does it expand the learning outcomes? Does it increase student engagement? Does it create any barriers? You know, and so I don't have an answer to that yet.

I really don't, but I'm super excited because that is on our big to do list as we go into this this semester. And we have a core group of faculty, probably at least twenty or twenty five who are really engaged and wanna paid and do that. Yeah. Leo, how about you? Well, I would say we are more or less on the same page. Actually, we do not have the formal policy for that, more than assessing the outcome.

We're not working on on the process through which, you know, we bring students there. So that means like we're in with a group of peoples, what group of people with faculty members, we're testing. We're using it into self assessment, some of our self assessment meet us, and on the engagement. So we are monitoring the last semester. And the next one, this is our piloting, let's say.

So we're in the, in the studying phase. So with a small group of volunteer would like to do it. And, and yeah. And so engagement and feedback are the first two let's say, dimensions we're working on now. And, gradually, then, yeah, the idea is to try to give a general policy for that.

But if if I can share little things about the feedback and the students, absolutely. Yeah. There was, a son of colleague, my working for university, a, b, whatever. And, he took at the exam, and he was no happy about the the the score he got from this exam. He's a student of undergrad level.

So he was writing an email to the professor. Hey, can have a chat, you know, kind of a talk just to understand and know what's going on with this, so just to explain me. And, as a professor apparently took a wide to give him feedback, say, okay, we can meet, we can have the paper shown next Wednesday. He took a while. So you know what Estuses did.

He said, he just was, okay, finding the feedback by himself. So he was going on JavaScript. He was understanding the story. So he was asking to the system why my paper was wrong. And he got an answer, and apparently he was happy with this.

And, and that's it. You was writing back to the professor. Okay. I don't need any more. Thank you so much anyway for your time for not giving me feedback to me.

And, now we just So this is why teaching learning centers. So we also need to listen maybe to understand better to what other students are doing because willing or not, they do things. Yeah. So we also need to understand, their behaviors. Now, I'm much more than the behaviors I am professor will be.

So, but this can tell us a lot on how also to be more prepared in an interaction with those students. I think that's one of the things that was a little bit lost in the initial knee jerk reaction. Into band, you had, you know, band checked GPT, band generative AI was this idea that we're all going to be using it. We'll be using the workplace. We'll use it in our classrooms.

It's it's here. It's not going away. And so it's it isn't incumbent on us to actually train students on how to use this valuable new tool. Right? And we you'll hear us talk a little bit, you know, when the calculator came out, students are gonna rely too much on a machine. They're gonna lose that, the other ability.

When the internet came out. I remember seeing my first paper from a student and and thinking, well, you you cheated. You copied and pasted this trick and left a website. Right? Instead of Instead of writing it down out of your national geographic, you went to national geographic dot com and cut and paste. Right? Which is kind of a silly mindset now that we'd look back at it.

But it but it was so interesting. I think if this is if you look at AI in that same kind of evolutionary, approach, I think it's it becomes less scary, less less, you know, willing to, you know, we're we're we're less willing to engage with it at that point. So by o by generating open mindset, and we're actually really be, you know, accepting that it has a lot of value, I think it that's the way we're obviously, that's the agenda I I'm pushing. And and we wanna go, you know, in a very productive way that way. So, Tom, tell us a little bit about what it would I mean, obviously, you guys are putting together a policy, your team up here.

It's got some work to do, and I'm probably making it harder for them. I apologize. But kind of what's next? What's what's down the road is, you know, the again, we we came out of COVID. We were trying to get back to the new normal. We got hit with open AI right at the, you know, just as we were starting to relax.

And so we don't really have the ability to sit on our laurels anymore. We've gotta be proactive. What What what's next do you think for your district? Well, I I believe this is, another push that we need just like we were literally five minutes ahead of closing down, going to one to one devices, we had about half the faculty trained, on one to one instruction when we closed. We had one meeting of about sixty teachers out of eight hundred, and then we were closed. We met online every Friday for almost a year.

And to talk about how to evolve instruction and assessment in this environment, I think coming out of that, the biggest struggle we have is that we are we are designed to memorize and respond and we need to approach not just assessment, but lesson planning with an inquiry basis. We have a an updated district rat grading policy where we're no longer supposed to. Be grading you for attendance for your dress, for your behavior. We're supposed to to give you an opportunity to show your knowledge. But a lot of times, you know, that's a struggle.

We need to understand that, kids curate their Instagram seven times a day using six thousand data points each time, and and we're afraid to give them an open ended assignment where they're gonna inquire with their peers or use a tool And so for us, the big piece is keep pushing into inquiry based instruction, inquiry based assessment, allowing kids to demonstrate their knowledge. But more importantly, what do the kids bring into the classroom? One thing we consistently do in high school is we don't spend time with the kids asking them, what do you know on all topics? Yep. And so for us, a big theme to share is What do kids know and how can we access that and then build inquiry based assignments around that? And then how can they value add to one another in the classroom? So when we're looking for reading, writing, listening, and speaking in lessons, if all we're doing is listening, and we're not reading and we're not speaking and we're not writing, then we're sunk. Now our state assessment doesn't align to that, but that's -- That's the next challenge. -- that's the next panel.

So, Well, and and I think, you know, I know a lot of educators, k twelve educators, specifically who, if you mentioned AI, they wanna pull their hair out. It's one more tool. The use. And I think, there are there are a myriad of ways that can save educators time. And I'm I'm gonna plug Zack Penelton's, innovation lab sessions that you'll see on your agenda.

Go look at those. There's some interesting things happening that you'll you'll want to take a look at. But I think initial investment in using the technology and understanding the technology really will pay benefits on the back end. Most how about you? Yeah. So I think one thing that I wanted to add that we haven't actually talked about.

In addition to sort of what we're doing to promote promote usage across disciplines, to assess what's happening, to engage our students more, Actually, a few faculty and more and more administrators are actually starting to use it to make their own lives easier. Yeah. And and I think the more that we're able to socialize that across I've had faculty say to me, you know, I had a grant due at midnight, and I know this, I knew this stuff I just couldn't get going. So I just went to chat and it spit out a bunch of stuff. It probably saved me six hours.

Yeah. I had what I needed. And I think that, again, you know, at core, we wanna focus on the teaching learning experience but also at core, we want everybody to start to feel comfortable with it. And as more and more faculty and others start to find the other ways that it actually can improve their life -- Yep. -- or make them more efficient.

I think it's gonna make everything else a little bit simpler So we're also incorporating that -- Yeah. -- into how we work with our faculty and what what everybody's teaching each other. That's the other thing you'll hear is you know, focused on three areas, teacher efficacy, teacher efficiency, and student success. Right? So helping teachers do the things that they don't wanna do more easily, helping them do the things that they actually wanna do more effectively and then actually helping the students stay on track. Right? That's that's key.

And and There are you'll actually we've got a number of resources we'll talk about. There's a there's, a AI resource site that, will give you some information on this week. There's, you know, our policies around, AI usage and things like that that, Daisy Bennett, are, from our team has spent a lot of time on that can actually help as you go back to your organizations and and are looking to model these policies. We've got you do not starting from scratch. We're trying to help kind of model what that looks like and and set the groundwork for you all, to kind of progress those conversations around the eye as well.

Leah, how about you? Yeah. So Well, what we like, what I strongly believe is that we need to bring, of course, faculty onboard and say how to facilitate this process. If we look at this from the change management perspective. So I'm using some theory to explain what I'm going to do in practice. I'll give you also an example.

So we want to make faculty perceiving things useful and easy. Of use, or easiness and usefulness are very important as we know in in that theory. So, one of the things I like to do next is to using chat JEP and try to training this to adopting different personas. So they, I want it becomes different kind of students. And then so I can ask professors to, practicing how to interact and how to deal with student A, student B, C and D, culture one, culture two, we do run a number of courses in the national.

So different settings, whatever different means, right? And so this is something that we're working now creating in a lab, those kind of things. So people can come over and they can start teaching. As we know, there's there was a recent report just published in February, paper this year saying that actually professors on the global scale, they used to spend less than half percent on the interaction with students. And this is like wow. So interactions the chapter.

This example, back and forth students, It's one way to try to apply this and to train. The moment they do perceive is okay. It works maybe. It will see that we jump on board right away. It's actually one of the things, AI is really good at is pretend to be this.

Let me interact with you as that. Right? And and writing the right prompts. Again, prompts engineering. The more you write prompts, the more, you're able to write more prompts the the more valuable AI is. But training it to do those interactions really is incredible.

Saves educators' time, lets them practice things I I could have practiced this panel in in, you know, in a virtual space with, you know, with the right AI applied. And so it really is incredible. And we're still thinking about the different ways. This, again, this is the beginning of the conversation. This is the first panel, of of the week.

We will continue well after Instructure Con. Having these conversations around AI, and we want your feedback. This is something that we, as a as a group around a journey together. And so, you'll have multiple opportunities this week to to deliver your feedback. We'll solicit it aggressively.

My my email is r lufkin at instructure dot com. And you can easily email me about what you're seeing. I I love the feedback as well. So, we've got three minutes left, before they they hook us up stage. What final thoughts from from this standpoint on on AI and and kind of what you wanna see this week, if anything.

I would just remind us as a as a group that the kids are all right. They I love that. That's great. And There's a no tool more powerful than their minds. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think that not just for students, right? Students understand how this amplifies them. I think educators need to really be assured that this is a power booster for them. This does not replace them. This doesn't replace a librarian.

We carry around, smartphones that have all the world's information in our pockets every day. That has not replaced a teacher. That has not replaced a a librarian their guides on our learning journey, and they need to feel so assured about that so that they embrace these tools as just things that make them more powerful. I totally agree. I think what what I'm thinking about is how we continue to prepare both our students and all of us for the future.

Oh, yeah. You know, as people talk about future literacy and building resilience and openness and curiosity, this is I think about our freshman experience with chat GPT versus our senior students. I think about the workforce that our seniors are going into now that an eighth grader will be facing. And so We have to really just imbue a sense of, potential and curiosity. Yeah.

And and that this will link to workforce, but that our success in the future depends on our ability to be resilient and open to change. And to find ways to make it work. And so, the more we can do that for our faculty, for our other staff, and for our students, the better prepared because this is fast, but it won't be the last the last fast thing we're gonna face. No. No.

And and I think it's so important to think about it in those different ages. We may very well see a wave of adult learners coming back to education to learn these skills. Right? I wanna be ready for them. Yeah. Yeah.

But how about you? Well, there's couple two quick things, if I may. So the first one is, there's a lot of room for doing things, right, to to explore. And this is super fascinating. We just need to be prepared for, and we need to conversate. We need to have, discussions.

We need to keep going researching and putting together ideas and to see what happened. The next thing very, more, let's say pragmatic is that I would have asked and, I would have loved to ask. To the audience here if there was, like, any chalcibility seen in there somewhere, like any AI system, listen to us. Yeah. And then my question would have been for that system.

What have you learned? From our conversation. This is something that practically speaking. Now if we can collect real time things, you can show up to professors if it works, if it does not. Yeah. I mean, it's a way to experiment, put in practice.

Right? This is my little way. That that's Leo team me up literally to, say, hey, rate your session. There is a feedback, site. Click on the on the website, on the agenda. You can actually go in and rate that session.

And if you have feedback, if there's questions, what you learn, things you wanna hear more about, put it in there and let us know because this is, like I said, this is the beginning of the conversation. We hope to keep having it, and it's it's your feedback. Every one of you has a slightly different perspective on AI than every one of us sitting here, and we wanna hear that. So Thank you so much. Enjoy the rest of the day, and, welcome back to instructure Con. Stop me on the corner. That's where you hit me like a vision.