Campus Technology Insider Podcast February 2024
Rhea Kelly 16:14
Do you think generative AI could actually replace, you know, actual human instructional designers?
David Wiley 16:22
Well, you should never say never. But I do think there are important questions in the instructional design process around what should be taught, and what should not be taught. You know, if you're, if you're doing a first semester economics course, you know, what, what topics belong in an introductory economics course. I think there's some of those fundamental questions about what should we teach, what should we omit, what perspectives should we take on it — some of those questions seem like those are values questions that humans are in a better position to answer. But once you make some of those values decisions about, these are the things we should talk about, these are the broad strokes, the ways that we should talk about them, you can hand that off to a human being to write a draft, but you could just as easily hand it over to generative AI to write a draft at that point. It's just a, it's a draft creating machine. But there are a bunch of decisions that have to be made before, you know, before the draft stage of the process.
Rhea Kelly 17:33
So how do you think higher ed institutions should be approaching all of this? You know, I've seen lots of universities announcing that they have developed AI guidelines for teaching and learning. Then you have like Arizona State University recently announced their big partnership with OpenAI. Should more universities be, you know, pursuing partnerships like that? Or how do you think it should play out?
David Wiley 18:02
Well, first, I have to admit that I'm kind of worried that it's too early for us to be writing policies. These tools have been in popular use for about a year, right? We haven't even started to begin the process of imagining their transformative potential. All the ways we talk about using generative AI right now are kind of like talking about horseless carriages, right? We're thinking about the way that we have always done things in the past, and maybe how could generative AI, generative AI make it more efficient, or faster, or cost less. And all of those are great, but they're not transformative — there's just kind of more of the same, but faster, cheaper, better. We need more time to search for and experiment and discover some of these transformative capabilities that these tools definitely have. I mean, think about the mid 90s, when the internet was hitting higher ed. And, and people were saying, "Oh, I know exactly what I could do with the internet." And it was all the things that they had done before. Like, I could distribute my syllabus using the internet. I have to distribute my syllabus, that's the thing that I've always done. This might make it a little faster or easier. Now I don't have to print them. So I can put my syllabus online and distribute it that way. Right? It took some time living with the possibilities of the internet to really start to imagine the kinds of things that we could do. And I would argue that 25 years later, higher ed is still really lagging behind some of the more interesting things we could be doing with the internet in education. But at least we've had, we've had some time to kind of think about that and to explore, and we haven't had policies about "this is how you can use the internet in your teaching." You know, that kind of put you in a box and say this is out of bounds, and this is clearly in bounds. So I just worry about the policies coming along too early, because higher ed is just infamously slow to change. And once the policy is on the books, I feel like it's going to be devilishly hard at some point in the future to revoke that policy or to amend it in some way. Because even two years from now, or three years from now, it'll be the way we've always done it. And so I, I hope, I hope that the policies that are there, or if schools feel like they have to create a policy, I hope they put a time bomb inside it of some kind, that it's only good for two years, it's only good for some period of time, and it has to be rewritten. It can't, it cannot be readopted in its current for at that point. Some, something has to change. Because we just don't know all the things we need to know to make effective policy. It would be too easy to preclude us from doing things that would be really powerful, just because we can't see over the horizon to what they are at this point.