How AI is Good for Education - DTNSB WEEKEND EDITION

0:00This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade-in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. Hey, I'm running out to drop off a stack of letters and packages. Need anything shipped while I'm gone?

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3:18Please welcome to the show Kevin Metcalf, Associate Vice Chancellor in IT at Foothill De Anza. Kevin, thanks for taking the time to talk with me, man. Hey, thanks so much for having me on the show. I've been a supporter of DTNS for a while now and figured, hey, I have a way to contribute something. Yeah, no, this is great. And big thanks for all of your support of the show over the years as well. You're one of the pillars in the community as far as I'm concerned. Well, thank you. Yeah, yeah. Happy to help. Well, let's start with who you are for people who don't know. Where's your perspective in on this topic?

3:52Yeah, so I'm currently, as you said, Associate Vice Chancellor at the Foothill De Anza Community College District. That's in Silicon Valley. I actually started my career in high tech in the Silicon Valley, did some startups, did some big name companies. But I landed in education when the company I was working for basically blew up during the dot bomb era when the bottom fell out of the dot com boom. And so I worked for the college. I just built custom solutions to support education, usually online, you know, things like that. And then I jumped over to IT when the state of California decided they were going to give everyone a free course management system.

4:30So I couldn't compete with free. So I have been a project manager and in management roles at the IT organization for the district ever since then. I've got about 20 years of experience as a Linux system administrator and a little over a decade of adjunct teaching experience, although that's less of my focus these days. Gotcha. Let's start with you as someone in the educational arena. How do you use these generative models and these tools? What are a few things you've done in the last month, let's say? Sure. Yeah. So I would say, you know, for starters, I'm not one of those people that says I definitely want to use AI to do my job for me.

5:15You know, I like to use the tools, but when using the tools that generally involves a whole lot of editing on top of that. But, you know, I have ADHD. And so a tool like, you know, ChatGPT can really help solve that writer's block that, you know, you sometimes get when you've got a really huge task or something like that. And, you know, I'll ask for strategies around specific solutions. You know, if I have a faculty that comes in with a particular need, you know, it's nice to have something that you can just bounce ideas off of. Would this work? Would this work? You know, things like that. Just providing alternatives, right?

5:46Yeah, exactly. You know, sort of where should I start? You know, and, you know, it's helpful when you have to like wordsmith a delicate email. I mean, obviously, from a data governance standpoint, that can get dicey if you put too many details into the prompt. But being vague and just asking for general advice, that can at least get you an outline that can help overcome, again, that writer's block there. I've also used it when hiring new employees. And that's something that a lot of people are like, oh, you're evaluating resumes. No, no, that's not what we do. That's a really bad idea for a lot of reasons.

6:22But you can upload a job description into the system and say, hey, I'm going to be interviewing people. What are some good questions I could ask that'll make, you know, let me know if someone can do the job. Again, like idea generating for you, not dictating what you do. That's interesting. Yeah, exactly. And it's also helpful for formatting. You know, I have pretty bad carpal tunnel. So it's nice to be able to just throw an agenda at it and say, hey, you know what? Organize this, format it formally, and, you know, add some timestamps or whatever. And, yeah, again, for huge projects, if I've got a really big project and I just don't know where to start, you know, you could just throw that into the LLM and say, hey, give me suggestions on how to break this down into smaller tasks.

7:03And you just repeat that until you know how to do all the smaller tasks. And there you know where to start. Yeah, I see some overlap with the way you use it, the way I hear most people using it, which is like a sounding board, an alternative generator, a point point me in the right direction kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. All right. So when we think students, I think a lot of people immediately jump to they are using it to write their papers. They're using it to cheat. But what are some of the beneficial uses of these tools for students? Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of things that we can, you know, a lot of ways that we can use these tools to sort of, you know, improve student outcomes.

7:42You know, one of the things I've noticed that students do is the instructor communications. So when I was faculty, my ESL students were sometimes, you know, shy about reaching out for extra help just because of the language. English as a second language. Oh, yeah. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Students for whom English is not their primary language. Yeah. And so, you know, that that language barrier, you know, would would be a problem. And the the LLMs have actually allowed them to put together the communication in a way that they can send it with great English and get the help that they need. and so it helps reduce that friction and it was something I hadn't anticipated but it really did help my ESL students I had a couple of years ago a student that came in and I had interacted with them online a lot through text and then asked them to join a Zoom session and when they were in the Zoom session it was almost impossible to communicate but we could just go back to those text-based communications and it worked perfect for them So, yeah, another thing that I've seen are tools like tutor bots.

8:46So if you're familiar with Conmigo, this is Con Academy is the organization. It's it's so KHA and MIGO. It's basically an AI that rather than giving you the answer, you give it a problem and it walks you through the steps of, you know, sort of giving you hints and teaches you to sort of think creatively, you know, about things like that. So those kinds of tools can be really helpful. And, you know, also just getting started, right? If a student's, yo, got the writer's block issue, you know, just ask it for some writing prompts, you know, for creative writing class or something like that. So what's good for the prof is good for the student, right?

9:22Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. All right. We got some specific questions here. Chris wanted to know if the curriculum is being changed or has been changed for students to account for the fact that they have AI tools available. Yeah. Yeah. And it's sort of the idea, you know, you see the benefits to students and there's also, you know, benefits to the instructors, right? So you can use it to evaluate your assignments or your lectures. You know, are there places where my assignments are, you know, confusing or I could more effectively teach them a different way? You know, let's say I'm a kindergarten teacher that, you know, needs to teach a lesson about number comparison.

9:59Well, you know, I might ask the LLM for some innovative ways to teach less than and greater than. And that may mean that instead of using, hey, the arrow points to the smaller number, you use the greedy alligator always eats the bigger number, you know, something that sticks out in students' minds, you know, things like that. I also like to use it for, you know, something like if I'm evaluating a paper that a student's written or something like that, you know, I can go through and, you know, do all of my edits, add all of my feedback, and then push that into the LLM and say, hey, you know, is there something I missed?

10:29Or, you know, is there some way that I could more clearly communicate that? It's this idea that if you've been teaching for a while, then you likely have a bunch of templates that you've put together of frequent responses for students. I used to teach the Perl programming language, and I would often get these assignments from students where it was clear they didn't really understand the difference between an array and a hash. And so I had a few different ways that I could explain that, depending on sort of what their code looked like. Well, if I had an LLM available, then you could just put the feedback templates into there, and then you could just say, hey, you know what?

11:00highlight line 26 and insert a comment from the hashes and array template, you know, kind of thing. And so really speed that process up. So not using the tool to do your job, but using the tool to streamline the work that you're already doing. You know, my father was a junior high teacher. And so, you know, he would frequently come home from like an eight or nine hour day of teaching and then just spend hours every night grading papers. You know, people like to joke about teachers getting the summer off. But, you know, looking back, I would say it's kind of ironic. My dad probably worked more hours while I was growing up than I did when I first started working in the tech sector in Silicon Valley.

11:35Wow. Yeah, that's saying something for sure. Yeah. But in terms of actual changes to the syllabus or the curriculum, that can be helpful. Sort of bounce some ideas off it again, like you were saying before. If I swap some topics, would it make learning easier? Sometimes it's clear that certain topics should come before others. Maybe you need to teach multiplication before you can teach exponents. Are there topics that it's not intuitive that it makes students think differently? And maybe if I swap them around, it would put the students in the right headspace to think about an upcoming concept or things like that.

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12:43Get started at ChatGPT.com by selecting Work Mode. Available on Plus and Pro plans. This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge, and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade-in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One.

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15:23Yeah. Again, a lot of these examples are second pair of eyes, source of ideas. That all makes sense to me. Yeah. And I think that's really sort of something that's going to be driving into the curriculum just about in every discipline is you're looking at that second pair of eyes there. Another benefit that I think people often overlook is professional development. And this is true for basically any field, right? Try telling your favorite LLM what field you work in and then ask it, what kind of skills should I focus on learning? What skills am I going to need in this field in the next two to three years?

15:54Maybe just feed it your resume and see where your blind spots are. Oh, here's my resume. What three skills should I focus on learning? You might even discover, Oh, I already knew how to do that. I should add that to my resume. Yeah, yeah. No, that's all good. And I think that's all positive stuff. Even so, I think a lot of people are just like, okay, sure, AI, AI, AI, that's all we hear about. KV wants to know, are there some other technological advances that are making their way into education to help students or instructors? Yeah. And it's kind of funny because if I say, you know, some technology that has absolutely no AI in it, that sort of really narrows it down because it's such a broad category, right?

16:37But yeah, there's lots of like translation tools, which are especially powerful, you know, again, for those non-native speakers. You know, something a lot of folks take for granted these days is videos with real-time captions. But for your non-native students, these are really, really helpful. I recorded the lectures for one of my classes back in the early 2000s and added captions to it. This was back in the real media days to sort of show how long ago this was. But when I did that, the average grade for my non-native English speakers jumped an entire letter grade that quarter. Wow. And I ran into a student later on that said, you know, he had now the ability to slow me down by 50 % and read the captions.

17:17And that was why he ended up not dropping the class. And that had the added benefit of teaching me that, oh, I talk really fast when I'm teaching. I need to slow down. Yeah, that is a good reminder for sure. Yeah. And I think another thing that's really been emerging as an interesting extra benefit to students are things like OER. That's Open Educational Resources. So folks mostly know that textbooks are kind of notoriously expensive. And there's been a real push in the community college system for faculty to adopt either a free or a low cost textbook, something like that. You know, I'm not currently teaching, but the next time I do, I'll probably write my own free textbook so the students don't have to pay for one.

18:03And, you know, that's an area where an LLM could be super helpful, right? You know, as an example, I've broken my intro to Linux class down into about 40 lessons. And each one has like a reading assignment, a video lecture, lab assignments, test quiz, you know, all that kind of stuff. Well, for each one, I could upload the material and then ask the LLM to give me a draft of a chapter of a textbook for that lesson. You know, there's still a lot of work, obviously, you know, making sure things are clear, making sure it's not hallucinating, all that kind of stuff. But it would definitely save quite a bit of time.

18:32Speed it up. Yeah. Yeah. And the more you do that, the better the tool can become at learning your voice and your tone and, you know, how to make it sound like you. Yeah. No, agreed. Right. And that's where on-device, memory, those sorts of things become really, really important. So let's get to a couple of questions when we finish up here about data, privacy, and security. Alan wants to know, how has data protection and privacy management evolved as classrooms become more digitized? He says, where could there be improvements? What difficulties do you encounter to protect student data while still allowing students or staff to access these tools?

19:12Yeah, I mean, that's definitely an issue, right? And that's an issue for every organization. But schools have to be really careful about what technology they adopt, especially when it comes to SaaS tools, software as a service, so online tools, things like that. If we contract with a vendor to use a system that's running in the cloud, who owns that data? You better make sure that data governance is thoroughly outlined in the contract. Does the vendor have to help you get the data out of the system if you want to move to a different platform? Will the vendor use our student data for training purposes on their LLMs?

19:43You know, things like that. Do they have to completely delete it when the contract expires? And what happens if they don't? And FERPA is also an issue. So FERPA is the federal regulations regarding how institutions have to treat student data. And so, you know, as custodians of our student data, we're required to vet every tool that we use. There's a lot of great tools out there, but every new vendor you partner with becomes a data exposure risk, a cybersecurity attack vector. So you can ask the tools, do other schools use them? Have they had any issues with them? And this is actually an example where the California Community College system does a pretty good job of collaborating.

20:25There's over 100 community colleges in the state, and I'm involved with an association of CTOs and CIOs from all those schools, and we communicate with each other. So, you know, a vendor that has a bad track record can very quickly find itself persona non grata in that system. Yeah, that's something that I think a lot of people don't realize. And when we had that court case we talked about on DTNS recently, you may have noticed that enterprise and education were exempted from the judge's rule because they weren't keeping the data because a lot of these rules. Yeah, that's exactly right. Right.

21:00And it's the same with parts of health care, et cetera, you know, because they have HIPAA and other regulations like that. Yeah. And so, you know, the questions come up from time to time about just not using these tools at all. But a major issue right now, especially in the community college systems, but in higher ed in general, is this idea of fraudulent students. That's, you know, bad actors who register for a class in order to commit student aid fraud. you know and so at our district we've been working with an ai company to help us find ways to identify you know those individuals and and remove them from the class so that legitimate students can actually get into their classes that they need you know even before the classes start and i was talking with my my cto last night and it turns out that the department of education at the u.s federal level is now putting out new guidance around this and they've explicitly called out the community college system in California and our district specifically in how we're using some of these tools.

21:56So hopefully we're going to be able to take a lot of the stuff that we've learned and, and, you know, get that back into the community and start making sure that we can, you know, cut down on that fraud, cut down on the abuse and make sure that our students can get into the classes they need so that they can actually graduate, you know, on the schedule that they're looking for. Yeah. So real human students that are really taking the classes could get the benefit. Good. Kevin, thank you so much for talking with me. I know people want to hear you talk about the cheating side of this that people talk about all the time.

22:26So I'm going to ask you to come back and we'll do another episode just on that. Okay. Yeah. Be great. Sounds good. If in the meantime, folks want to learn more about you or anything that goes on, do you have any resources that you want to point people to? I mean, realistically, the place you'd probably find me is LinkedIn. I don't tend to post a whole lot. I was pretty big on Twitter until it stopped being Twitter. And I sort of stopped using a lot of social media at that point. So frankly, I just got too busy in my new administration role. So no worries. No worries. Well, thanks again, Kevin.

23:02And you'll hear from Kevin again soon when we talk about cheating and controversies with AI. Thanks, everybody, for supporting the show at patreon.com slash DTNS. Hope you have a great weekend. We'll talk to you on Monday.

23:25The DTNS family of podcasts, helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

23:38This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade-in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. Your daily supplement routine doesn't need to be managing a handful of different bottles. Onnit's Total Human brings key research-based vitamins, minerals, herbs, and amino acids together in convenient day and night packs.

24:21One all-in-one product designed to make supplementation easier. The day pack supports cognition, focus, and cellular energy production. At night, the night pack helps you wind down and supports a calm, relaxed state. Less time managing your supplements, more support for your day and night. Shop Total Human now at onnit.com.