AI Cheating and Controversies in Education - DTNS Weekend

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2:07Hello and welcome back to the Daily Tech News Show weekend edition. I'm Tom Merritt. And as promised, joining me again is Kevin Metcalf, Associate Vice Chancellor in IT at Foothill De Anza. Kevin, welcome back. Hey, thanks for having me again. Appreciate it. Thanks for being willing to do all the positive good stuff in one episode and then addressing all of the controversies in another. I appreciate it. Yeah, no worries. So if you missed the first episode, Kevin, let's do a real quick who you are for somebody who might be new. Sure. So I'm an associate vice chancellor at the Foothill De Enza Community College District.

2:46I've been in education for a little over two decades now and have a little over a decade of experience in the classroom as well. All right. So we moved all of the questions about cheating and controversies in education to this episode so we could give them our full attention. We've got a couple of questions to kick us off here. Zero asked, how has AI impacted cheating? How do you plan on combating cheating with AI. And then Zio wanted to know if there's pushback from faculty members and how you deal with that. Yeah, no, those are great questions. I mean, on the teaching front, the elephant in the room is cheating, right?

3:22If I ask a student to write a five-page paper on Moby Dick, can they just ask the AI to give it to them, right? And this is sort of the modern spin on asking your buddy who passed the class last year to write the paper for you or paying somebody online to do it. Or in my day, going to the world book and just copying the entry, right? Yeah, exactly. It's always weird. After being in higher ed, as long as I have, I'm still always surprised when I find out someone is willing to pay for an education, but not get the education they paid for. So it's always been possible to cheat. But yeah, the LLMs make it quite a bit easier, really lowers that barrier to entry.

4:00And so faculty are having to get creative with assignments. Maybe that looks like designing an assignment around applying course material to an experience that the student has lived through. Or meet with the students one-on-one and have them read through their work and explain their reasoning for that. Or if you want to teach them how to use the tools, give them a prompt. Tell them, hey, push this one through an AI and then critique what it gives you. What did it get right? What did it get wrong? What did it miss? And a shift that may need to happen is just really communicating to the students why it's important to actually understand the material.

4:35If a student really gets why it's important, they're both less likely to cheat and they're more motivated to learn. And I think part of what's going on here, the issue is that education has really shifted over the last several years. It used to be that colleges and universities were in the information business. If you want to learn something, that's where you have to go. They would hire people with the most knowledge and hope that they were capable of imparting that knowledge to others in a way that they could understand. And that's really changed. I mean, if I want to learn something, I don't take a class on it.

5:07I go to YouTube, right? And so colleges and universities are basically in the certification business now. We put our reputation on the line every time we say, Jenny knows all this stuff about computer science because she got a degree, right? And so employers use the degrees we award when they're evaluating whether somebody really knows their stuff. You know, it's kind of a shortcut. If HR gets 300 resumes for a position, they don't always have enough time to just go through all of them in detail, trying to make sure, does somebody have the knowledge they need? Do they have the skills? And when I'm hiring folks for my team, you know, it depends on the job, whether I'm looking at a degree or not.

5:45If this is for, you know, a college president or a dean, you know, They probably need to have a graduate degree just to show that they understand what it's like to be a student in higher education. Right. Yeah. Yeah. But but if I'm hiring a technician that's going to be sitting down with a faculty trying to walk them through a hardware or a software issue, I'm less likely to care if they have a bachelor's degree, as long as I can see somewhere on the resume that they've done something similar before. Right. So you're trying to be the place that can vet that they got the right YouTube video and understood it, basically.

6:18when they taught themselves. You can certainly go to YouTube to learn the information, but then how do you convince an employer of that? The degrees are the shortcut that HR tends to rely on. For me, I don't even get all the resumes. They're all pre-screened by human resources to vet them for certain minimum qualifications before they even get to me to then evaluate. On the IT front, if staff and faculty are using AI and I don't know about that in IT, that can have some ramifications that end users probably haven't considered. Depending on what kind of school you are, AI-generated meeting transcripts could be subject to a public records request.

7:01They could become discoverable in potential legal action. And I'm not suggesting that people are doing things they need to hide or anything like that. Just that for IT, it means that as part of our work, we have to be able to find those documents. We have to be able to track them down. And that's something that currently happens pretty easily with email, right? Email tends to be centralized. And so it's easy for me to just tell my system administrator, hey, these are the keywords you got to search for. Find it, export it, turn it over. But if some staff member just adds a random AI bot to a Zoom meeting, how does IT know about that?

7:37How do I know to go look for that. You know, we don't want to be in a situation where there is something that should be public record, but we don't know we have it to turn it over when it's asked for. Yeah. It took a while for people to realize that about email. Episode prep gets messy when research, Slack threads, and script trackers are all in different places. That's where ChatGPT work comes in. Give it the goal and connect to the tools where work happens, like apps and files, and it can help pull the pieces into a draft you can review without you having to re-explain the project at every step.

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11:19Watch HydroJug's story at advertising.amazon.com slash rising-stars. 500 orders a month was manageable. 5 ,000 is madness. Embrace intelligent order fulfillment with ShipStation, the only platform combining order management, warehouse workflows, inventory, returns, and analytics in one place. What used to take five separate tools, ShipStation does in one. Automate fulfillment and rate shopping to ship up to 15 times more with up to 90 % savings. Go to ShipStation.com and use code AUDIO to try ShipStation free for 60 days. that it wasn't just temporary stuff that you sent and no one saw you know and and now email's been around a lot that that people kind of are accustomed to that so it's getting accustomed to what those things are with these tools i think yeah and we we still see those uh episodes in dtns where somebody finds something in email it's like oops that was something that should not have been in email.

12:20And so that sort of leads us to this idea of all of the issues that the administration has to deal with. Like many governmental entities, education doesn't always move very fast. If you put a bunch of people in a room that are generally paid to think about things, they tend to overanalyze things. So developing AI policies can take a while because people want to get it right. And they'll argue over the minutiae there. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. A lot of times people jump to the conclusion that the folks making the policies just don't know what they're doing or they don't get it. And when a lot of times they're just they're just being careful.

12:59Yeah, yeah. Well, and it has, you know, has impacts on our accreditation cycle as well. That's one of those education terms. So in order to prove that a school is actually doing what they claim to be doing, and in higher ed, so that our students can get financial aid, schools go through an accreditation cycle. And that process involves producing a report stating what you're doing and just a massive amount of evidence to back all of that up. And I'm oversimplifying this, but the details are boring, so we'll gloss over that. So folks from the accrediting body will spend a lot of time looking into everything the school does in order to make sure it's legit.

13:39Well, a specialized LLM could help compare the report to the evidence and suggest areas where the accrediting body should really concentrate their scrutiny, right? So that they're not having to spend all of their time looking at absolutely everything. You know, you're not taking the experts out of the process, but, you know, people get fatigued looking at mountains of paperwork. And so, you know, that second set of eyes that we talked about, you know, that doesn't, they don't get tired, right? The model doesn't. And that can be incredibly helpful, you know. And even the courts are still trying to figure this out.

14:10I mean, if you just do a Google search using some variation on school, AI, and lawsuit, you're going to get a whole gamut of things. You know, parents are suing because their child was accused of using AI. Or I think a while back there was the story about the student that was suing the school because they thought the faculty had just used AI to teach the class, right? Yeah, yeah. It is a lot of things that are being worked out at the moment and a lot of processes that are happening. We've got another question from JJ who says, based on your findings and what you've seen around the campus, are students using AI more than the faculty or more than the administrators?

14:47Or is it the other way around? How would you rank those three groups as far as their AI usage goes? Yeah, I will say it's a recent enough development that I don't have a lot of hard evidence. But from talking with my colleagues, I would say that students probably use the tools the most. I think the students would tell you, yes, we use it the most. And different students use them in different ways, right? Sure. Obviously, some cheat, but some use the tools as tutors to help them learn. And I would suggest that it may also be tied to where the students are coming from. Are they really motivated to learn, or are they just going through the motions because they have to?

15:24Some students coming to our colleges, they're coming from these really high-achieving schools in the Bay Area, and they're very motivated to actually learn. But ultimately, it's going to be up to every teacher to really help students understand the positive and the negative ways to use those tools. Between faculty and administrators, it's a little harder for me to answer. But I do know that my colleagues in IT management around the state use these tools pretty regularly. Most educational institutions are just underfunded, right? And there's no end to how much work there is to do. you know, if I can leverage a tool to help me get my work done in 60 hours a week instead of 80 hours a week.

16:02Yeah, that's a big win, right? Yeah, I think that gets lost a lot of times when people talk about like, oh, these tools are going to, you know, reduce the need for workers. A lot of times workers are being overworked. And, you know, there are not great ways to make sure that someone is working the required number of hours or the expected number of hours. So being able to get that closer to what that is could be helpful. A couple other questions here. These are along the same lines, so I'll give them to you both at the same time. Nick from Australia asks, where do you see opportunities for LLMs and similar AI to enhance the educational experience for students?

16:37Could they be leveraged to customize curricula, which we talked a little bit on the last episode, to maximize learning for each individual student, perhaps? And then Jeff in Chicago asks, are there any indicators of AI entrenching a have and have not dynamic that might penalize those that can't afford to use it? Oh, man, these are great questions. This is the kind of thing that gets me out of bed in the morning, figuring out how do we work on this? You know, there are so many opportunities for efficiency gains on, you know, operations, administrative tasks, you know, things like that. In terms of, you know, just enhancing the education experience.

17:11I mean, education is a mystery, right? A student going from, I should go to college, to I have a degree, that student is not walking an obvious path, right? You have to apply to be admitted. You have to figure out what you want your major to be, register for all the right classes. Well, if you don't know the language, that's a huge hurdle, right? Well, what if your guidance counselor could work with you and your personal AI assistant to come up with the optimal schedule? I mean, maybe you're planning to go to school full time and the regular course schedule works for you. But what if you're a single parent and you're working a couple of jobs and you can only take online classes or classes at a certain time?

17:50Well, an LLM that's been trained on the course catalog and historic scheduling data, that could be the difference between getting your degree in four years or getting your degree in eight years. As for the haves and have not question, I think AI can actually also help level the playing field. If your parents and your siblings went to college, then they can probably answer your questions if you get lost in the process, you know. But for a first-generation student, where do you go? You know, it's an AI that's been trained on the various student services that are available at a school can help them figure out what to do next or where to go for help, you know.

18:26That can be the difference between getting a degree and dropping out of school, you know. Imagine if your phone periodically had a pop-up from the AI agent asking, what are you struggling with this week? And so you talk to it and it just automatically creates an appointment with the appropriate staff to, you know, provide that help that you need. Would you say that most students that you encounter have a smartphone these days? I would say the vast majority of our students do have a smartphone. I would say a lot of our students, I don't know if I would say the majority, but definitely a big percentage of them are phone first, if not phone only.

19:00Yeah. You know, they just don't even have laptops or anything like that. So, you know, finding ways to ensure that, you know, we're not using just the tools that are convenient for us, but are meeting the students with the tools that are convenient for them, that's a really huge benefit to them, right? I'm just imagining that most students can hop on community college Wi-Fi with their phone and then use some chatbots that are available for free and be able to access stuff. Yeah. And our schools are even looking at specifically having AI-based chatbots that have been trained on the material from the website and some of this stuff.

19:34So it's not a total hypothetical. We're in the process of starting to see these develop in real time. That's great. And another way that these tools can help with this kind of stuff is in the area of predictive analytics. So if all of our instructors are using the learning management system, if you've taken a class in the last five years, you definitely know what this is. It's a tool like Canvas or Blackboard or Moodle, basically an online shell where the instructors can put their assignments and can store their grades. Well, if all the instructors have their assignments and grades there, an LLM can process all that data in real time and advise the counseling department, hey, you know, this student is falling behind in multiple classes.

20:12You know, for me as a single faculty member in one class, that's something that happens. And I don't know, it's not just my class, right? You know, and there's a chance there to reach out to the student and see what's going on, you know, provide additional resources if needed, or, or at least have the, you know, the counselors talk to the faculty and say, hey, you know what, this student's going to need more time on their assignments. They got to get caught up in four classes, you know, otherwise, you know, again, they get overwhelmed, they drop out. And that's something that just no one wants to see, right?

20:38Yeah, yeah, absolutely not. And that would be worth it. And it's all data that the school already has access to. It's just putting it in front of the right people. Yeah. And it's making sure, again, with that data governance piece that the school owns the data and not the vendor that's running the tools on the backend. All right. Last question comes from PJ Less. How do you view education's role in educating students and even faculty in ethical use of AI, not just in education, but business as well? Yeah, this is one of those ones where I want to be very clear that I am wearing my personal experience hat and not my, I am a manager at this organization hat.

21:20Sure, sure. You know, I think you've hit on the core struggle here, you know, that education is facing right now with respect to AI in general. You know, our goal as educators is to teach students to be informed and empowered digital citizens, not just people that have been trained to use a tool. You know, I think about how much the world of technology has changed since I graduated in the 90s, right? There's no reason to think that the next 40 years won't see that same pace of change, if not even something bigger, right? I can't even imagine what that would look like. So it's about teaching ethics and not tools, you know, and a major struggle that I'm seeing is that it's not just computer science, right?

21:58A lot of people think, well, AI, that's the computer science world. Well, nearly every area of study needs to update their curriculum around these questions. Imagine if you are taking an accounting class or a journalism class, and they thought this was a computer science issue and didn't bother to talk about AI in their curriculum, right? That could be a problem because it just impacts everything. So we need to make sure that we are appropriately embedding these critical thinking skills in every area of study, right? And if students are going to graduate without those skills, they're going to have a hard time finding a job later on, right?

22:33And that's part of what we're here to do is to certify, you know, again, that they know how to do these things that are necessary. So, you know, to really prepare our students for their career, schools have to figure out how to provide resources to the faculty that are building these courses. You know, we can't expect every faculty and every discipline to become an AI ethics expert overnight or even at all, right? So at our colleges, we actually have full-time staff who are experts in online pedagogy, and there's another one of those fancy words. It just means how to teach effectively. But any faculty member who wants to teach online has to be trained by the staff in order to learn what works online and what doesn't work online, you know, and we're going to need to have something similar for the use of these tools.

23:18So, you know, if you understand education and you're an expert in AI, hey, there's a consulting opportunity for you right now, right?

23:29So, but I guess that sort of takes us back to those policy questions, right? You know, and I know it's boring, but it is important. You know, in any sufficiently large institution, your corporate policy dictates how the business should be run. And in most public schools, those key policies have been written by the state or federal legislature. So, you know, a colleague of mine jokes that, you know, for every dollar of public money we spend, we're required by law to spend about$5 tracking it and making sure it's being used effectively, you know, so all that to say, you know, that there's a lot of people working at the, you know, on this at a lot of different levels.

24:04And it seems like the goal posts move pretty much every day as the technology evolves. So, you know, I'm personally hoping somebody comes up with an LLM that's designed to quickly create policy that everybody agrees on. That would be wonderful. I'm not sure if everyone would trust it, but it would be a good step. Yeah, we're still in the hockey stick part of this, not the blade, the handle part of the hockey stick. But yeah, it's going to keep changing. And so I really like your point about we need to teach the ethics, not the tools. We need to teach how to approach situations, not the particular tactical ways that the situations are done.

24:45because I think that has a more longevity. And eventually we'll reach cruising altitude with this tool. We'll wrap our heads around it, right? And then there'll be something else. Yeah, it's the same thing that we'd had to do to wrap our heads around when the internet was first introduced to us, right? It was the same kind of learning. And so now everybody talks about how do you integrate digital literacy into your classroom? You know, things like that. So it's not that it's a brand new thing that's happening. It's just a new technology that we need to make sure we wrap our heads around in order to be able to have folks use it effectively.

25:17Well, Kevin, thank you for multiple things. Therapy's biggest impact doesn't show up in some dramatic breakthrough. It shows up in the smallest moments. You bite your tongue instead of escalating. You put your phone down instead of firing off that text. You say what you actually mean instead of what would hurt someone else the most. Nobody applauds those moments, but they quietly change your life. That's what growing feels like. And that's exactly what Grow Therapy is here for. Grow is therapy that works, covered by insurance. Sessions average$21 with insurance, and some pay as little as$0, depending on their plan.

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26:41Some days, getting the work done isn't the problem. Staying locked in is. AlphaBrain is Onnit's daily nootropic formula for cognitive support, designed to support memory, focus, attention, and mental clarity. Its formula with science-driven ingredients include theanine and Hooperzine A to support focus and memory, and it's caffeine-free. So when you're deep in the work, AlphaBrain helps support enhanced productivity and tune-out distractions. Get focused on what matters. Shop Alphabrain now at onnit.com.

27:39old one. So I think we deserve a pat on the back for being able to talk around that as well. Any last messages or thoughts that you want to tell people before we wind up here? I mean, I would say experiment with the tools. If you haven't done it before, if you're not sure how they can be used, you can even ask the tools, hey, how do I use you? What kinds of things are you useful for? Just because you're not in school doesn't mean you shouldn't take the time to learn about this stuff. And the more you know about how these things can be utilized in your career, whatever that happens to be, I mean, that's gold when it comes to looking for that next position that you want to get to.

28:19Gotcha. Gotcha. Well, Kevin, thank you so much for being willing to do two episodes about this with us. If folks want to find out more about you, what you do, where should they go? Oh, yeah. You're welcome to check out my LinkedIn profile. I'll head over there and make sure it's up to date. It's Metcalf with an E at the end, folks. Kevin Metcalf. And Kevin, thanks once again for all of your amazing support of the show and your ideas and your thoughts over the years. I really appreciate it, man. Sure. No E at the end. Oh, there's no E at the end. Really? Oh, I'm going to update everywhere that I've typed your name.

28:55How did that sneak in there? I should have had an AI double check. There we go. You need that second pair of eyes. There is no E at the end of Metcalf. But there is an L, right? I'm right about that. There's an L in there. Okay. It's where you meet the baby cows, the Metcalf. Metcalf. See, easy to remember. It's literally where it comes from. Thank you so much. I appreciate it, man. You're welcome. Anytime. And thank you folks for supporting us at patreon.com slash DTNS. It's one of the reasons we do these bonus episodes on the weekends. We'll be back on Monday. Talk to you then.

29:33The DTNS family of podcasts, helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

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30:41For a limited time, go to stamps.com and use code podcast for a free welcome gift. Taxes and fees apply.