AI, Data Governance, and the Classroom Revolution in Higher Ed

00:00.54

Dan

Hi everyone. This is Tech In EdTech. In this podcast, we discuss technology that powers education and improves learning for all. In today's episode, we'll be focusing on AI and data governance for education. I'm your host Dan Gizzi from Magic EdTech and our guest today is Michael Lyons, Chief Information Officer at Massachusetts Bay Community College. Michael, thanks for joining me, and welcome to today's show.

00:26.75

Michael Lyons

Thanks for having me. It's really a pleasure to be here today.

00:29

Dan

Yeah, we appreciate learning a little bit more about you and your background as well. Um, can you give us a little bit of history and how you got into education and more specifically how you got into your role as Chief Information Officer, your CIO role?

00:41.40

Michael Lyons

Yeah, so I'm a thirty-year IT professional, actually started off my career working in higher education, computer store at my college, at my university UM Boston. They trusted me enough not to break things, so they started training me at the campus. As I went along, I moved up into different positions, I served as a systems librarian, and I had an opportunity to switch over to Tufts University, so I really started off my IT career in higher education. At one point during the dotcom boom, I relocated down to Connecticut. I started working inside of what's called the mail services companies now. But used to be more break-fix shops. So did that for a while worked as the network manager for Fairfield University, worked with several as I said managed services shops doing large-scale migrations for hospitals, Fortune 500 companies, and a lot of different companies. Came back to Massachusetts, and worked again for another managed services company but got the opportunity to interview with MassBay Community College, then with associated with MassBay now for over 12 years, absolutely love the place, it's really transformative. You know, I think one of the most beautiful things in the world to see is our commencement ceremony, where you see you know, different generations kind of achieving dreams. Um, it really does bring a lot of purpose and meaning to me, to be working with a school that really cares so much about students and seeing its impact. So yeah, thirty-plus years the majority of in higher education. Great field. Absolutely love what I've to do, I truly think I found my calling.

02:11.49

Dan

Such a great journey and always amazing how in education how you always seem to find your way back or many of us tend to find our way back. It's always I enjoy hearing about other people's journeys back. Um, similar background as well. I managed the Mac labs back in my day. They trusted me not to break the max back in the late 90s. So like, I can relate to that side of your story as well.

02:37.92

Michael Lyons

Yeah I mean, it's it again, it's funny that I'm basically walking the halls, so I was working for a supermarket at the time and they just need somebody big enough who could lift heavy boxes, and then after that, they had enough trust in me not to basically break, the printers or the computers while I was working on them. So I started off doing Mac repairs with the old Mac classics and I still have the scars on my knuckles because those chassis weren't really built for a big guy like me.

03:02.51

Dan

Hahaha, that's funny. That's a great story. I would love to understand now, as we you know shift away from the hardware part of the discussion and some more of the technology in the current state of education. You know, where is MassBay currently would you say in your use and exploration of the newest and latest greatest technology such as AI, artificial intelligence?

03:23.30

Michael Lyons

Yeah, it's a very big topic with our school, not just our school but all of higher education in Massachusetts. You know one of the advantages of a head, one of the reasons I'm glad to be back, with MassBay, is I've actually started teaching again. This past year, I kind of returned to the classroom along with being the CIO. It's really kind of built-in a great experience to kind of see what my students are experiencing with our technology, see if there's any gaps, I always like to place myself in that position. You know one of the things, I went back and got my master's degree. So, I served in the role of a student, served in the role of a faculty member. So it's kind of good to have those first-person experiences. But, the interesting thing with AI in particular ChatGPT, is when I started my spring class in January, you know during our second class, I was teaching about, It was an introductory class, I was teaching about search engines and you know stuff like wolfram alpha and I said, “Oh who knows about ChatGPT?” and nobody in the class had known about it. So fast forward, it's a fifteen-week class, we're basically entering into presentations. So, with three weeks left to go in the class. So again, overall probably twelve weeks later, I asked the class the same question “Who's heard about ChatGPT?” and every single one of them had heard about it. The reaction on our campus was, you know, mixed. I was really pleased that a lot of our senior faculty members, especially around the English department, were engaging with it. They're like yeah, we see this is coming. We see this as a tool. Let's talk about it and they really led a lot of the conversations. So, we had a number of different workshops throughout the spring and into the beginning of the summer sessions where we started talking about, what is this? What is it going to do? Is it a cheating tool?  You know, one of the first reactions from anybody, and not just with me but other schools is “Okay, how can we detect this on our learning management systems? How can we block it? ''. And when you start to kind of break it down, you know, and I kind of share this with a lot of people's like, well we can have a detection tool and a detection tool came out but there is about fifteen, if not a hundred videos on Youtube saying take what's inside of ChatGPT, put it into Grammarly, change it around a little bit and then all sudden, it's undetectable. So, it's been a real hot topic, I mean there is some conversations about, is it cheating. Is it augmentation? I've been trying to frame the conversation that it's not artificial intelligence, it's augmented intelligence, kind of similar to like when wolfram alpha came up and a lot of people were like, well it's gonna do, it's gonna do our students' math homework and, or even when a search engine came up and it says well, it's going to take the place of all the research we wanna do with the lab, at the library. So a lot of conversations around it.

06:01.24

Dan

And yeah, that lightning speed in fifteen weeks I can only imagine the experience you were having in the classroom with that. Knowing that the technology and adaptive adaptiveness of the technology in and of itself has really changed the game for just general how education’s going to operate going forward. But I think they're so some good points you brought up there about you know, the things that have been in the past and you know, all of what we would expect of you know, well least great thing with a search right search engines we're going to get rid of the libraries or get rid of the use of that. I think it's you know that ability to us, as humans to adapt as well is going to be important. What would be some of your advice to your other academic peers? You know, knowing obviously that you've got the role of the CIO, you tend to you know probably stay up to speed with the level of technology, at least the adaption of it. Um, what would you say to a non-tech savvy colleague of yours that's teaching, that's going to be impacted by this or potentially have to think about the impact of that in their classroom?

07:04.30

Michael Lyons

Ah, stay connected. You know there is a great website out for this called there, there is an AI for that and it's a great way of kind of staying on topic. You know, seeing what the new iterations and new, you know, innovations are coming out. I mean there's also a podcast like this great podcast to kind of keep yourself up to date and keep yourself in the game. I mean, one of the things that you know, when it comes down to the idea of Moore's law and Moore's law basically says that over X amount of time, technology will double. Well, it's no longer true just for hardware and software, it's true for AI you know, just looking at there's an AI for this. You can just see the explosion of how more and more tools have been coming out for this, everything from image creation, everything from you know, tools geared towards higher education like one of the ones I like to mention is Cactus AI which is really geared towards will, will help you produce your papers and materials and things along those lines. So, having an understanding of what's out there, having an understanding that it's not just ChatGPT, it's a lot of other things. And also have an understanding of where you know ChatGPT in particular is going. You know with its partnership with Microsoft and the investment they've made in there. Microsoft is doing a huge push into this. They're integrating you know pieces of AI into the Office. So you're going to see a lot of the functionality be brought directly into Office and you know, it's one of Microsoft's goals is to use AI to have more people interested in its Office Suite than using the free services like Google. Now, on those lines, Google has barred now, that they basically do their acquisition of Deepmind and everything they went along with that. So there's where they're pushing into. So, so I think the first thing is keeping up-to-date with it. You know, basically get yourself either a nice podcast you'll like to listen to. Subscribe to there's an AI for that so you can start to get the information and just be aware of the conversations that are going on and ask a colleague.

09:02.77

Dan

Those are great talking points that you brought up, for particularly regarding Microsoft's and Google's usage and and more importantly, the implementation of this. That leads us into the other talking point that we have for today would be around data governance, intellectual property, or however, we want to label it for today. Where would you say you feel at a university level, would be some of the pitfalls that you think you're going to have to watch and avoid around that data governance to ensure that you're protecting the, the use of the of what's going into those large language models?

09:39.25

Michael Lyons

Yeah, it's similar to any time you look at what's the terms and conditions of any agreement. So you know through a security review, we're always looking about what we're sharing with other applications and you know, what is their protection model around the data. Um, if we're basically loading up data into a system, we want to know how it's being securely stored, if it is compromised, and what the reporting requirements are for it. So it basically starts with the regular bedding process that we do for any product that we bring on and we go through. Okay, how's the data going to be protected? Is it in compliance with all state and federal regulations that we need to adhere to? Secondly, and this is actually not just with governance but it's in the use of AI, it's, you know the curation process of it. So it's having the ability that even if it's going to write something for us, for example so say if we asked it to give us a draft for a new GLBA policy. Um, you need to have the vetting process, you need to have the proof of it to make sure there's no bias, make sure that it's incompliant. Um, you know, I've heard recently about a lawyer using ChatGPT to write, write its briefs and basically got in trouble and I believe got disbarred for it. So I mean there's you know there is a responsibility that whatever is produced, you're going to be responsible for the outcomes of it. So it's having that curation, it's having that due diligence, it's doing that fact-checking. It's not just, say okay, we'll feed it into the robot, have it spit it out to go faster. It's like nope you got to double-check the work still the same way you would double-check the work if a person did it. Um, on that is like having the rules around it. You know for us. It's the idea of what's acceptable use of AI and academic purposes. You know, you know one of the things in my CS18 class I teach, it's about scripting and it said students could easily go in, go to ChatGPT and say write me a PowerShell script that does X, Y, and Z and I said well do you really know it or is it just you basically using the robot to get the information. So I think, those are all different things that kind of come around it. I think having for us, having where the use of AI fits into our cheating policies and academic integrity policies, again due diligence around security and data protection and just in general, you know and understanding that, you know you're still responsible for the work that the AI is producing.

12:08.15

Dan

Yeah, that ethical implementation of AI is going to be something that I think is going to be very important to seek him out there. I'm glad you brought that case up about the lawyer because it's that same thing you know, there's going, going to be ethical lawyers around AI and the, you know, the legality of the use of this is going to be very interesting. Um, I almost wonder how your peers are feeling that are involved, you know, the academic integrity sign of the house when it comes to cheating you know, obviously, it's always been policy I'm sure at a university level around. You know, you know things like turnitin.com or those kinds of technologies but wonder what's going to be next from an AI perspective to ensure the ethicalness of the data being created is valid.

12:51.90

Michael Lyons

Yeah, that's the real conversations going on right now like um, our learning management system is black, is blackboard learn, and actually, I have my LMS expert out at their conference and the apology world conference, and the number one task I gave him is, tell me what the conversation around AI and AI checking in as you explained ‘Turnitin’ is an option. But as I said before there's you know, for every one of those solutions that's in place. There's a tool out there that says feed it into this, feed into that, and you can pretty much whitewash the content. You know, it almost gets into a stance where some of our faculty saying well we will do more in-class work, some have actually said “Well I don't care if you create it as long as you're gonna fact check it and you're responsible for it” and even some faculty quizzing students on the paper that they, they sent in to kind of see if it's their original material. So. Yeah, there's a couple of different approaches to it that's gonna need to take place you know again for me with the classes I teach since it's so technology related. I lean into it, as just another tool, but explain to people you know, like everything else you're going to be responsible for it, here's how you use it responsibly, but it's, it's an open topic again. January, nobody in my class knew about it, were now almost you know, almost seven months later, and it's the number one topic on most IT people's minds.

14:13.73

Dan

Yeah, the lightning speed of that's amazing. It's gonna be almost interesting to see how what the fall does to the language models and how quickly if I think 4.0 is already out for mass consumption on the ChatGPT side at least.

14:18.73

Michael Lyons

Oh, yeah, and then there's the announcement of what's it called? Ah, Twitter wants to do. It's called X, I think it's called X1 but they want to, again, one, Elon Musk is one of the original investors in OpenAI and he really wanted to be an open system. So he's thinking about basically building his own version of AI and how he's going to build in his language model is feeding in all the feeds from Twitter. Um, you know one of the big things with Bard is all the data that Google has to feed into it. So you know, not only just within the big thing with Google this isn't just you know, search engine materials and materials from documents and everything else along those lines but it's all the voice you know, and recognition they can add in because of Google voice and because of Youtube. So, lot of content that they can ingest into Bard. So, it's gonna be interesting to see what the next six months look like.

15:20.53

Dan

I definitely, I think ah, one of the points I'd like to address a little bit more with you so that push for more of potential instructor led you to know, obviously you know being blackboard learned as well, I'm sure with, with all the change that happened you know with the, over, the move from pandemic you know are you doing a lot of online curriculum still at this point as it been moved all back to the classroom you know is that going to impact you know, maybe some of those other strategies, you think, that have been implemented over the last few years?

15:48.98

Michael Lyons

Yeah, so it was a big piece with MassBay that we did asynchronous on distance learning during Covid like everybody else did, but typically our remote classes are you know, are, sorry we did synchronous remote learning pardon me, are traditional models asynchronous remote learning. So it isn't an in-person classroom and it's really meant for people to kind of work the class around their schedule. Um, you know, our president really believes strongly in it and the statistics back it up that you know the best outcomes for our students are those interactions, our in-person classes. You know, passing rate or failure dropout rate of having the interaction, having connected with the person. Initially, college is a lot more than just passing grades, it's about meeting people, having a social experience. A lot of times you know, some of our students, their only college experience will be community college and we want to make it the most rich and warming and inviting environment possible and a lot of that happens when you come on campus. So, it's been, It's a priority for us to have people come on campus, interact with other people in their class, interact with you know, the various departments on campus and you know really make that connection with their faculty member and really make a connection with the institution. Um, so along those lines. It's like in you know, it really does open us up to a kind of having some more controls around the use of AI because it does open up for that more in-class work that's going on, that doesn't allow so much to kind of be isolated being able to submit stuff without having it looked at, in other ways. So it's one of those benefits that we have in that sense. Um, you know again Covid taught a lot of stuff. It taught a lot of around technologies. I think one of the big things that's starting to come cover itself and this is something I've talked at length with our school is and it's about a term called Tech Shame. Um, there's an assumption that you know, Gen Z students are naturally tech-savvy and, the real situation is they, they were born with technology but their interfaces were smartphones which were really locked down devices and they didn't have a lot of under the hood experience that you know, with my generation of Gen X or even with the Millennials after me that we had and what happens is, they're not used to you know getting into more of a traditional desktop computer. They're not naturally inclined to everything they're just more used to “here's the app I open it up and the app takes me through the interface” which is good but you know, there is some gaps inside of that. So, it's a lot of times just throwing more and more technology at them isn't a natural thing for them. It's one of the things with orientation that we're looking at and it's actually one of the things we're hoping AI can help out with and especially with what Microsoft's doing with integrating more on Office where you almost have the next generation of Clippy. I know we all hated Clippy but um, it's having that guide saying “Okay, I see that you're trying to do this and create ah, a resume” or “I see you're trying to do this, create a term paper” and you have somebody who's kind of doing that over the shoulder action even when a person's not available.

19:01.56

Dan

It certainly does feel like it's our us, Xers' time to shine, doesn't it? We have most definitely come full circle with Clippy. 

19:06.13

Michael Lyons

And, we were yeah, now we basically we, you know, Xers’ predated the internet and we were the first ones to kind of pick up on it. So yeah, now it's interesting. It's just it's interesting to kind of see how it's gone again. Haven't done this for over 30 years. I keep seeing the circles and like we want all home computers, now we all want mainframes, now we all want home mobile computers, now we want everything in the cloud and it just goes around, around, around and so again Clippy's getting his comeback on us right now.

19:36.63

Dan

With, that in mind, you peer into the crystal ball and you're gonna give some advice to your peers out there that may not have experienced the tear out of the machine, what's some of that advice that you're going to give to them?

19:48.94

Michael Lyons

So um, well again, what happens today is gonna happen again. So the idea is the foundations of what we do is always gonna be the same. How do we get people what they need to do their work? Now again that can take a lot of different forms and you know, but the basic practices. If it stays the same. You have to protect your data. You have to have backups of your data. You have to make sure that you're not going to compromise your data. You got to make sure that the end-user experience is a good end-user experience. I think a lot of times with some organizations they want to get so tech-heavy that they kind of lose, you know, the bottom part of their audience where it becomes too complicated to it. So we always really emphasize the need to be customer focused. We want to build a customer-focused IT organization and again the more and more we can do kind of tools, whether they're videos, whether they're stuff like AI that's augmenting helping along. I think it's gonna help out an awful lot. The, you know, the biggest experience I can tell you over 30 years, is people always appreciate that you're really smart, you can get stuff done but they appreciate more when you can talk to them and explain the topic because you know, it's, it's foreign to them, it's alien and they want you to kind of break it down for them and make them confident so that they're not worried about it and not in the, it doesn't introduce any more anxiety into the workplace. Does that make sense?

21:16.67

Dan

It does Michael. Thank you for joining me today on the latest Tech in EdTech Podcast. We appreciate your insight and look forward to you in our audience joining us in future podcasts.

21:27.26

Michael Lyons

Well, I appreciate the opportunity. Thank you so much.