00:00:08.64

Kathleen Sestak

I am joined today by Dr. Dax Parcells, Department Chair of Education, Psychology and Sociology at Palm Beach State College. Thanks for joining our podcast this morning, Dax.

00:00:27.35

Dax Parcells

Good morning. 

00:00:28.75

Kathleen Sestak

So Dax and I met several months ago at a conference and I was really anxious to be joined on a podcast today so that Dax could share his his background and journey into AI in higher education and his role in integrating AI into the curriculum design and instruction for the courses that he teaches. So we are I'm excited to have this conversation with you, Dax. And I just wanted to just quickly lay out the agenda around discuss the discussing the current state of AI in higher education and your approach to integrating AI in the classroom. And can you share your experience of driving AI initiatives at your college for the past year and what have been some of your key lessons, key takeaways?

00:01:22.15

Dax Parcells

Absolutely, so much to respond to in that question.

00:01:25.14

Kathleen Sestak

Yeah, that's a big question.

00:01:28.20

Dax Parcells

But let's start with sort of, in a sense, my background and where it come from. I've worked in research in big data and in education for over 25 years. I am a former 912 math teacher. And as you mentioned, Kathy, I currently teach at the college psychology courses and education courses, and I'm also the department chair. So I'm excited to join you to sort of speak from different hats in terms of how artificial intelligence has become center stage in my own work, in some of my research, and then also in the work that I do with other faculty and also at conferences like you mentioned, where I met you this summer at NHETC. So for me, really the artificial intelligence came around like for most of us in November, I would say of 2022, if I remember correctly. And it was sort of this big buzz of, gosh, there's this concept of Generative AI, and you can ask it to write almost anything that you want it to do. And I remember when I first heard that, I thought, “Eh, not interesting, not important, not valuable.” And then we happened to be in an academic integrity meeting at the college, and other faculty were very concerned and alarmed, in fact, about and the irony of the whole situation honestly is that prior meetings, I sort of, I wouldn't say it was laughing, but it was sort of comical to me in some, to some extent that a lot of our math faculty, science faculty were concerned about students cheating. Well, guess what? Students have always cheated. Students then still cheat and likely students will continue to cheat into the future. But I thought it was sort of interesting because my coursework, the courses that I teach primarily, the assessments are writing-based. And so I say that I've sort of laughed at them in a sense that they were expecting students to regurgitate, to produce things that could easily be produced by machine, by calculators, by problem solvers. And when this conversation came about now that students couldn't generate text, then all of a sudden my eyes were opened because my assignments were writing-based. And so my vision immediately was, oh my gosh! students are simply going to ask AI to generate a response to something that I've asked them to sort of critically assess, analyze, and think about.

So yeah, I think in November 2022 that sort of launched and since then I guess going on um almost two years now I can't believe that it's been that long. I wanted to just sort of really dive in and learn as much as I could about what artificial intelligence was, to try to understand also that AI is not necessarily new. It's new to us in the education space in terms of the utilization in particular by students. And so it became such an alarm and the bells were sounding in terms of people writing articles about, you know, the college essay is dead and all these notions, then that writing was not going to be a way that we could assess our students.

And I just wanted to learn as much as I could about it. I have a background in data science and big data, as I mentioned. And so I've worked in machine learning. So I was already sort of cognizant of many of these concepts and the ideas of things like reinforcement learning that we use in the AI space and so on and so forth. But the generative notion was new to me as it was to the majority of the world. Outside of some of these big data corps like Google and Apple who have obviously been working on some of these technologies well in advance. So I've really spent to answer your question the last year and a half or more just trying to get as much PD professional development as possible on the topic, to sort of interject myself in spaces where I ask questions, where I share what I know, and sort of do exactly the same thing that I do in my own teaching style and philosophy with my students, which is to be curious, which is to ask questions, which is to share what you know, yeah, and to sort of go based on what do you currently know and what do you want to know.

00:05:32.86

Kathleen Sestak

I love that. yeah

00:05:39.68

Dax Parcells

And so it's really been an eye-opening 18-plus months in this space. I've had the great luxury of being a part of a Palm Beach State College, University of Florida partnership, where we spent a summer, two weeks during the summer, last summer, learning from the professors at the university in terms of what exactly is AI. What are the fundamentals of AI? And also we had great conversations, discussions on AI ethics as well. The idea behind that partnership was to have the 22 or so of us as faculty members from the college learn from the professors who had already been doing a lot of this work at the university and ultimately to then share this out with other faculty at our college. And so I've had ah the great fortune in the past year of facilitating other faculty through the development process that we went through during the summer in an intensive two-week training program, but over a span of a semester-long course that they do where they work with individual faculty members in their discipline or close to their discipline as possible to try to integrate the use of AI for themselves, but more importantly for students in terms of the ethical approaches to using AI to still maintain critical thinking, to ensure that we also can work into a new space in a sense of individualized learning. So that's been a buzz phrase and term for many, many years about individualizing education, but now we sort of see a potential opportunity with AI to do that. And so I think we'll have some conversation perhaps around that notion and other components as well as we continue our dialogue today. But I hope that sort of sets the stage of sort of where I've been, where I currently am. And of course, we can talk toward the end, I suppose, more about sort of where I see us moving in terms of the future.

00:07:30.82

Kathleen Sestak

No, that was great. And I appreciate that that's that scenario of where you so you know where you started with AI and your evolution in the AI experience. And I think your experience with AI is similar to a lot of other faculty and you know, two years ago, a year a half ago, alarms going off around this new tool and not really understanding or sure how it was going to impact teaching and learning. And students' ability to think critically for themselves, which has always been the ultimate goal of education, But I love that at Palm Beach State, you're utilizing a really key tool of teachers training teachers um and helping teachers, other faculty but at your university understand and embrace a tool that's so new. So thank you for that.

00:08:28.64

Dax Parcells

Absolutely. Yeah, I think it's a really wonderful model and we've had great success so far with it and we're looking forward to continued success as we sort of reach a broader audience of not just our full-time faculty, but also our adjuncts as well.

00:08:41.28

Kathleen Sestak

Can you just elaborate so some of the key takeaways again, just for me, just kind of like your top three over the past year and a half, two years of your work in in this area?

00:08:53.85

Dax Parcells

Oh gosh. And so I would have to say the number one honestly is keeping the student at the center of all decisions that we make and what I mean even more importantly, obviously putting my psychology hat on is the emotional space. And so I've been fortunate to work one on one with students in this, in this way, in terms of trying to understand their process.

So they're not being shamed in, oh my gosh, you used a tool that goes against or violates our academic integrity policies. But it's a conversation, it's a dialogue, it's an opportunity for growth. And I think that's an important piece that all faculty need to remember is that when we're in the space, that students are likely going to cheat, they are looking for the path of least resistance. They oftentimes don't fully understand what we as faculty might be asking of them and it's funny because just this past week, I had a very um similar situation or a situation that sort of will help us understand this and unpack this a little bit further.

So I had a student who i I flagged her work for potentially using artificial intelligence to complete it. She had a meeting with me and in the meeting she said to me, she said, but professor, your assignment clearly says to paraphrase your work. And I said, it sure does. And under that word paraphrase, there's a link and the link takes you to practice. And so of course I wasn't saying it in this way to her, but I'm sharing it with you that the link was intended to be an opportunity for the students to learn ways in which they can paraphrase from having read a text or some other source.

In her mind, she said to me, she goes, but I did paraphrase. I used Quilbot. So Quilbot is a beautiful technology that students have access to that essentially is known to paraphrase. And so it takes words. And she was brilliant in explaining to me what her words were. So I understood that she knew the material. She fell into the trap then that she felt that it had to be prolific. It had to be prose-worthy. And of course, then that was also important. And sort of the key takeaway for me is that those of us that teach in the humanities and are not necessarily teaching creative writing or English in more formal ways, we need to sort of step back and help our students understand that the work that we're asking them to produce in writing needs to be an authentic personal voice of their own thoughts, their own thinking.

And so one of the things I've really tried to repress to try to impress upon my students is talk to me in your writing as if you were talking to a classmate, a friend, a family member. So some sort of, I don't want to use the word average person, but just another person, let's say so a person who you're trying to help them understand the concept in your own way, as opposed to feeling, yeah, appear, as opposed to sort of feeling this sense of, oh, my gosh, like, the professor speaks in this really, um you know, sophisticated way, and he's he's so he's so smart, right?

Ha ha. um But he wants me to write in a way that's very prolific and prose worthy, and it's necessary to embellish and to make things sort of sound greater than they really are. So long and short of that is that she really understood the material. She was utilizing a technology which I've used myself and I tell my students and share with them all the time that there are appropriate uses of these technologies. But in this particular case, when she's being asked specifically to produce her own work that has her own voice, it is much better to essentially produce what she did as opposed to turning it into a piece of software that then spits out or generates new content to simply use the content that she had created on her own. So again, I think it's really important to sort of as a key takeaway that we meet students where they are, we help them to understand the technologies, we help them to respect and honor the codes and guidelines that we might have at our you know colleges, universities, and institutions, um and essentially treat them with respect in the sense that they're learning. And these are opportunities to help them to grow and not just simply to be punitive in the sense that got you broken the code and now you're in jeopardy of failing the course. And I think in that vein, a lot of the conversations that I've had with students have been very positive. I've also had a student who early on, probably in January of 2023, who used AI, she initially wanted to shy away from me and not have the conversation. But once we had the conversation, she became an amazing student. And in fact, I just heard from her the other day, she's now at the university level and studying clinical psychology, which is always heartwarming right to know that you know students taken up and study the discipline that you've sort of taught them and that they've moved forward with their education even though she said to me essentially that if she hadn't had me she had considered dropping out of college and maybe if we didn't have that conversation where she felt that personal one-on-one connection that she wouldn't have had that engagement to be able to understand the appropriate use of technology and the appropriate ways to communicate with faculty, um not just in the sense of, I don't understand something, but how do I do this appropriately, ethically and so forth.

So we had lots of great conversations and you know we still keep in touch by email where she checks in with me just to sort of you know go over um sort of what's happening in her world.

00:14:14.82

Kathleen Sestak

That's wonderful. and both of those examples are just really why I loved talking to you at NHETC and why I asked you to join me on this podcast. Just your ability to communicate with your students. And I think students coming out of ah you know K through 12 education are a lot of times taught to regurgitate and to memorize and and spit out and then and and when you go into higher education space, the assessment changes and the the expectations change and the way that you're able to help your students make that transition and understand what the guidelines are around AI is really impactful.

00:15:01.80

Dax Parcells

I think you make a really valid point. And so, you know, I felt in teaching even middle school that in middle school and elementary school, we tend to see much more curiosity, much more sort of risk taking in terms of knowledge building from students and then something sort of shifts in high school where students feel, you know, they're pushing close to the end, perhaps, and they just want to be done. And many of those students then move on to college and they sort of pull that with them, but we in the college space ah generally want to sort of extend their learning. So you've regurgitated, you've perhaps been curious, wherever you've been, and now all of a sudden you're here in my space in the college and the university level and the expectation is more grand in terms of what you should and can produce. And so that's also been sort of a key takeaway for me. So I'm happy that you mentioned that. And it sort of makes me think also of just the style in which I try to teach my classes, which is to be sort of focused on active learning.

And to me, it's there's a great article that came out just a couple of weeks ago in the Washington Monthly that really focused on the idea that we as professors don't necessarily know how to teach and that we really need to go back to school in a sense to learn how to teach. We learn our content. So I might have learned psychology in school, but I didn't go to school originally for a degree in education. I've since gone to school and earned a doctorate in education and so I've been able to adapt and implement a lot of what I've learned in that space into my teaching philosophy, which is really truly simple.

It's about good teaching and I know that might sound ridiculously subjective because it is, but the idea being that we go back to the drawing board and we really think about, like you were saying Kathy, what do we really want our students to learn? And so utilizing things, and we obviously can have conversation about this in a different space, but utilizing things like universal design for learning, utilizing things like backward designs with some of those education speak components that many faculty may not be familiar with become critical. And I've had the great opportunity having earned my doctorate in education to really apply curriculum and instruction from a theoretical perspective into the actual living breathing space where students engage with be technology with me with that their peers and the content to really build this idea that we want them to engage, we want them to explore, we want them to be able to explain, elaborate, evaluate. And the biggest thing for me, which is really where I've been pushing and I think AI can help us, is helping students engineer. It's something that I learned about when I was taking a graduate course in problem solving. And so we started studying the idea of the 5E learning framework. um for lesson design and the five E's that as I learned them were engage, explore, explain, elaborate, and evaluate. And so most people listening in, especially who teach um at any level have likely utilized those even if they may not call them by those particular names. The evaluate of course is some sort of assessment. We might give a formative or summative assessment, a test, a writing assignment, and so forth. So we're familiar with these notions. But I think now that AI has sort of the trains left the station, we know that. So we've got to get on the train somehow. And one of the ways that we do that is to really push students into this space where they're actively involved in those five E's, but also adding what I would say in the last five to 10 years been so proposed as a sixth E, which people might call extend or i prefer to call engineering because I've been trained in STEM education. As a STEM coach and a STEM educator, my focus has always been on helping faculty in any discipline and my students as well to understand that every discipline connects to philosophy on the end, but also connects to engineering in a sense at the other end.

So your discipline, whether it be math, whether it be psychology, whether it be English, whatever it may be, has a philosophical basis. But that philosophy translates into what you may be doing sort of currently in that particular subject area. But that subject area has magical connections into engineering or the space where there is some sort of an extension of that content into an application that goes beyond where you are. So that's really been one of the drivers and I think one of the key takeaways for me is that we likely need more faculty development in that space and really getting faculty back to the classroom, so to speak. And I know that there obviously are multiple modalities and in which we all teach and it depends on whether your students are live in person in front of you, whether they're, you know, synchronous though with you on Zoom and so forth.

All these things may differ. But at the end of the day, if we truly want, like you mentioned before, students to learn content material, we ultimately need to connect into their interests. We've got to connect into um their level of current understanding and then we've got to push and promote, which to me has always been a big piece of this gradual release model that we've all probably learned about, is that we ultimately want them to be able to write. So we write these learning objectives. We've always been sort of taught learning objectives should be written in a way that it says students should be able to right so we want them to be able to do something but we should really want them to be able to do something that connects back to their interests and also to where they are currently but also has greater application and extension into the future.

00:20:23.85

Kathleen Sestak

I love that. Thank you for that. We've skipped all over our agenda, but I just want to make sure that we're hitting some of the some of the key points that we had talked about in our preparation for this call and you've talked about, we've talked a lot about the fundamentals of AI through a discovery-based approach and what challenges you've encountered. Is there more that you want to elaborate on before we move into the our next segment of this conversation?

00:20:57.53

Dax Parcells

I think perhaps just one other key takeaway is that even today we've been talking a lot about the notion of generative AI as if it's the only AI and I think students are perhaps very much in a headspace currently that that's the only that AI only exists in order to generate stuff to help them to make things easier and so forth. But I think faculty also are in that space as well. And so whether it's professional development for faculty through their colleges, universities, or even through our publishers potentially, or whether it's, you know, self-directed sort of learning on their own. Faculty need to try to understand and this is what I loved about the partnership we had with the University of Florida is that those faculty spoke at an engineering level and the majority of us in that Initial sort of meeting were sort of like what on earth are they talking about neural networks and deep learning and all these components that sound theoretically just too abstract, um but we need to as faculty learn that natural language processing or NLP refer to as short is just one of five or six different components of application spaces of artificial intelligence. So other things like machine learning that I mentioned before, we've all engaged with in some way, shape, or form, computer vision, we've likely engaged with that in some way, shape, or form as well. And so really and truly at the end of the day, we need faculty to understand rather that generative AI is not the sole type of AI, and that there are other application spaces that we want to get students into. So they could use generative AI, for instance, to help them develop a computer vision model. Now we see that we're extending their learning away from sure they're quote-unquote cheating by using generative AI to create something, but might that generation be something that allows them to more quickly move into a space where they're now putting it into an application like computer vision or automated reasoning or robotics, which I think we all have a better understanding of as well.

So I think we sort of think of AI as initially before gen AI came around, it was sort of the robots, right? The robots were going to take over the world. And when I play iRobots in my classroom for psychology, and even before generative AI, students recognize the value and the importance of the placement of that material in my curriculum. um And then all of a sudden, it was like, well, now we don't think about so much the robotics, we think more about the generative component but are there other ways in which the higher ed space can branch out into these notions that AI is not purely generative AI but also other aspects of our artificial intelligence that we need to not all become experts on necessarily, but we need to be cognizant of them and recognize that we want to try to move students in that space where they're starting to generate content of their own and develop and engineer things that are more original, yes, rather than just regurgitate or use generative ai as sort of a quote-unquote cheating tool.

00:24:13.38

Kathleen Sestak

I love that. And I think that's a really important point. And you these these students, especially the freshmen this year, are technology natives right for the first time. They have been using technology since the day they were born, pretty much.

00:24:25.73

Dax Parcells

Absolutely.

00:24:31.16

Dax Parcells

absolutely

00:24:31.25

Kathleen Sestak

And so their level of comfort is completely different. And I've speak for myself. then then somebody you know who's challenged to keep up with all the new things that keep coming, where they just embrace it, right? and And how they, so I'm sure as a faculty member, as a department chair, you're constantly challenged with this as well. And you've talked a little bit about that this morning in this conversation, but um no, your points are very well taken.

00:25:05.23

Dax Parcells

Thank you. And to that point, to to sort of extend on that, I think we need to return to a space of co-creation. And so we sort of hear these buzz terms that come and go, but we need to you know really have students be a part of the creation of knowledge, the creation of content as well. And so one of the things I've really been pushing in my classroom is that I give students later in the semester, not early on, because I still am sort of a pretty strong proponent of that gradual release. So early on it's sort of we're doing a lot of things together and I'm showing you a lot of things as well, of course, initially.

But later on, I want you to sort of be more exploratory to really engage with the material in a way that helps you navigate um what your interests are, what you want to learn, and what you want to get out of it. Because as I tell my students often, what you put in is what you're going to get out, right? And so if you just want to learn the basics, then you can just learn the basics. But if you want to dig a little bit deeper, I tend to include assignments in my course that I call enrichment activities instead of calling them extra credit, even though essentially It's the same thing. They get extra points for it. So it is extra credit in that regard. But there are extensions that move them beyond purely just learning the basics of the material. So they have an option, a choice to be able to do that. And in those assignments in particular, and in my classroom more generally I've been trying to do this, is really just create a space of co-creation so that students have the opportunity to design their own assignments even. So what is the assignment that you want to do for meeting this course learning outcome?

00:26:33.18

Dax Parcells

So I'm not going to let you stray away from that course learning outcome, so you've got to be able to walk away from this course knowing whatever this CLO says essentially. But what do you want to do in order to learn and understand and master the concepts related to that course learning outcome? And so I think we really need to sort of push in that way. And generative AI can be really useful in that space as well. I've used it in this way in particular myself where I ask um ChatGPT or other programs like copilot to create an assignment where or to give me ideas on how and so on and so forth and I also model that for my students so I show them ways in which I do that and so I ask them on some of these enrichment assignments on other assignments that have been creating more recently is to go to ChatGPT or their chosen generative AI tool and to ask it to use the course learning outcome that you're trying to target and to develop an assignment that would meet that particular outcome. And then to have the generative AI ask the student questions. And so one of the big things I've really been pushing with the use of Gen AI is getting students to ask the generative AI to not stop asking them questions until it knows everything that they need to know or it needs to know before it produces or generates a response. And that I think is forcing the envelope to help students think about, you know, we hear about this and we've heard more about this idea of prompt engineering, but it's pushing prompt engineering almost on steroids in a sense, that we're not just engineering one singular prompt, but we're forcing the AI to say,

All right, well you said I need to keep asking you questions and I still don't understand what you're asking about this or what you need for this. And so it's going to respond to the student by asking a question. The student then responds with their answer and the generative AI may at that point decide that it's received enough information to be able to create content that would be relevant for them.

And so I think the way that we use generative AI is powerful. But again, like I mentioned before, it's ways in which that we can use that. Because I don't mind if a student wants to create content that they're then going to use in a different way to apply it, whether it's again like in that computer vision idea, um then that's wonderful. That's brilliant. That's moving technology or using technology as a leverage um to be able to accelerate sometimes what we need you to do. No different, honestly, than what we've seen happen with the calculator and so that's why really I teach and I guess I'm fortunate that I was a previous math teacher and I got a lot of pushback from students, from administrators even, and from parents that the first semester essentially when I taught K-12 or 9-12 high school for the most part, the first semester I didn't get a lot of my students to use a calculator. Students learned in class about what a calculator's use and intents are and then in the second semester the calculator was rolled out because now we were working on more real-world models that had numbers that weren't just for 5,8,9,12 but now we're talking about 4.683. And in those cases, I don't need or want my students to be bogged down in some of those details, which are important, the point so and so. But if they understand what the addition function is doing and the subtraction function is doing from the first half of the term, then I see more value in that and being able to now use the calculator as a tool that accelerates continued learning and application. And I think we need to get into that headspace with AI as well, for instance, what I've been proposing so far today is utilizing GenAI in some way to allow students to feel a sense of success, a sense of accomplishment in creating or producing something they didn't create it or getting it created rather for them or generated but then how are you going to apply that? How are you going to use that? And it could even stay within the Gen AI space as well. So it's, oh gosh, like I love what you've created for me, Chat GPT but I need more on this point, or I need less on this point, or I need you to remove this sentence and so that interaction is where I see that the learning and the critical thinking that so many people have sort of assumed that gen AI in particular, and I'm saying gen AI to be very specific now because of the conversation we've already had, because I think most people would be saying AI is doing this, where it's reducing critical thinking, but it's the gen AI that they're truly talking about. But how do we leverage that technology using generative AI to create space where students can individualize their learning? They can be critical thinkers. They can be developers of content that moves perhaps out of generative AI space and so forth. So I think there we have so many opportunities and it's unfortunate because I know last week, for instance, I was at an Ed Week webinar and one of the poll questions was related to things in which people are faculty and teachers are afraid of AI and what it might do in terms of concerns for the future. And a lot of those concerns still revolve around and probably will continue for a while around cheating, around reducing critical thinking, around misinformation, and disinformation and not to undermine any of those. Those are all very valid concerns and questions and things that we're going to continue to tackle.

00:31:42.74

Kathleen Sestak

Absolutely. man

00:31:43.97

Dax Parcells

But it's really pushing us into accepting that those are and what can we do about it? Not to change it necessarily, but to use that as an opportunity, especially for those students who truly want to learn in the way that we've been defining learning to help them push the boundaries of their own thinking to push the boundaries of the application of technology and getting them even to understand simple things, Kathy, like Where is AI good? And again, I'm saying Gen AI. I want to be, I said AI, but I want to say gen AI. Where is Gen AI really good at a particular thing? And where is it maybe not so good at a particular thing? And so I've even created an assignment that I've done recently in my class called Break It. And the idea is that I want students to quote unquote, try to break the Gen AI to see where it falters in a sense, where is it not giving them what they think it should be giving them? What's missing? And of course, some of that, they may not be able to fully master or understand because they're not experts in the field. But they're starting to really truly grapple and think about it. And I'm pushing and forcing them at the same time to look for validation of those concepts in our textbook to look for validation of those concepts in manuals like the DSM in my particular courses and so forth. So again, I think we have so many opportunities. There are so many problems, right? But you know, my favorite boss always said, don't come to me with a problem, come to me instead with three solutions.

00:33:17.14

Kathleen Sestak

Well, I prefer to call them the challenges, too, right?

00:33:17.21

Dax Parcells

And so I think that's our challenges. And so and so that's that's a wonderful way to think about it, right? So we we we have these challenges. The challenges will not go away. Education is a beautiful space to be in for that reason exactly. But we know that education also tends to not be the space in which change happens very quickly. But our generations change quite regularly. and our student tree changes as well. And so the expectations they have, whereas the expectations we have in sort of positioning faculty versus student, it needs to move away from that. Just like in, you know, the courses I teach, we used to talk about nature versus nurture, but we know it's neither one nor the other. It's both. And so we need to say faculty and students, faculty and student and other students and AI. And we need to add all of these with ands, right? So it's a, it's a cumulus. It's things that are bringing together more so than separating or pulling apart or hitting one against or versus the other.

00:34:18.14

Kathleen Sestak
Such a detailed response and thank you for that. And so many just important points brought up around In the calculator, I love that example. you know early on, a lot of people equated Gen AI with the induction of the calculator and how that changed students' thinking. But it ended up elevating students' ability to perform math, especially somebody like me who was not strong in math but found comfort. But I love that you started out the semester not letting them lean on that giving them the confidence, really, around their abilities in that space, and then introducing a tool that can be helpful. And I think, you know, in this conversation, talking about AI in education, and really Gen AI, to the point that you can keep making, is but the same process is happening within the education space with these new tools. And we keep hearing about our I keep reading about prompt engineering and how important these prompts are and you're going to your response out of Jenna is going to only good going to be as good as your as the question that you ask and so we're all learning to be better question askers, if that's an awkward word, but um leveraging that.

00:35:34.81

Dax Parcells

Mm hmm. Sure.

00:35:39.34

Kathleen Sestak

So I'm going to change the conversation a little bit just around um addressing student engagement in the age of Gen AI. And you talked about a few minutes ago around the different types of environments in which students now have the ability to learn in in class, remote, synchronous, asynchronous. And I was just wondering, you know, you've noted that some students want to return to campus. Some students don't. Some students have gotten very comfortable joining a Zoom call and learning that way. And I'm just wondering, with all these different learning environments and trying to address each individual student's needs, how do you think AI can help reengage students in all these different environments?

00:36:37.30

Dax Parcells

So that's a loaded question, of course, in terms of especially the way you ask in all the environments. So I'll focus first, at least, on the in-person synchronous, not Zoom-based environment.

00:36:44.52

Kathleen Sestak

Yeah.

00:36:51.17

Dax Parcells

And that's one of the spaces that I've been working a lot in. I am fortunate that I have access to at Pompey State College, an active learning studio. And that active learning studio revolves around three things I mentioned before, which are technology, space, and theory. And so the theory, of course, most of us have been exposed to that, if we actively engage with material and others, we are more likely to learn, remember longer, yada, yada, yada. So the theory is sort of, I wouldn't say generic, but I'm gonna use that term for now whereas the active learning space then promotes the use of technology so i have five screens, large screens that students can project an individual laptop to. So they might be working in groups and they can project onto those screens individually. So there could be five different things happening in my room at the same time. So that goes back to some of our conversation earlier about student interests. And so sometimes formulating those groups requires a little bit of movement. And fortunately, because of the space the chairs do move and they slide around in the tables and everything. So it's a beautiful approach that I've been able to utilize to really engage students. And the students who walk through my doors the very first day of class are always just wowed, just in the space itself. And I think we need to create more of that, obviously, in person. Second to that, however, is, as you mentioned, we've got then Zoom, which is more synchronous, but not in the same space and so on and so forth is creating similar sort of opportunities where we create that wow moment. And it's not, I remember when I taught 9-12 and we'd have our evaluations as teachers, it was always sort of thought of like, gosh, you got to put on the dog and pony show today. So it's not in that regard of just throwing things out there just because you want a high mark on your evaluation, but it is truly about engaging students and recognizing something that I never fully understood for many years, which is when we started talking about Generation Z, there was this notion of they have eight seconds, excuse me, faculty, instructors, teachers have eight seconds of attention from a student before they need to shift something. And we, I think, as faculty, as teachers thought that that meant we had to literally shift completely. So if you were doing a reading, all of a sudden now you were doing a writing, or then you shifted instead to a walk around or some other sort of activity. And it may not require that. It may even just be what I just did, which is a change in inflection, right? But we needed to sort of recognize, appreciate, and understand that these students require more change. And so that eight seconds really sort of floored me in thinking, there's no way on this green planet that I would be able to every eight seconds change what I'm doing, even if it's a change in inflection, it doesn't seem reasonable, but likely you're going to do it, right? You're going to do something that sort of engages the students in that way.

00:39:44.28

Kathleen Sestak

yeah

00:39:47.51

Dax Parcells

And so I think we need to sort of think more about the way in which we pull that lived experience of the wow moment when a student walks into a space like my active learning studios, how do we translate that online into a Zoom room? And then I think the hardest part is how do we translate that even further when it's completely asynchronous. But it's creating those moments that I think are really powerful, whether it's with visuals, with videos, with different media, so that students can connect in a way that we still use the 5E or the 6E framework for learning, that we need to hook them, essentially, early on. And from that hook, whether it's, for instance, one of the things, like I mentioned before, that I've used is just a clip from iRobot. And when I play the iRobot, students walk into my classroom and they're going at this professor, like, where are we? Like, what are we doing today? And that immediately creates interest. And the conversation that we have following that short clip is amazing. I do this even in my human growth class, we watch an even shorter clip, that clip of iRobots about eight minutes that I that I play. The clip of the Lion King that I play in my human growth class is one minute long. And they've all likely seen Lion King and they're easy to sort of extend beyond the story that I've shown them in that one minute clip but I forced them to think about what have you seen in this video that is a metaphor for human growth and development that has been anthropomorphized by the lions. And just creating those prompts, creating those curiosities, but creating it in a way that it's something that they can connect to is really relevant. And so that engagement, we can build that engagement, in fact, using artificial intelligence, whether it's using gen AI to generate voice, that may not be your voice. We've all sort of, I remember when I taught 912, one of the big things we had PD and they would come around and they say, do these one-minute videos of yourself teaching, then play it while you're in your own room with your students and students at first are sort of looking around going, like wait a minute, he's over there, he's not talking, his mouth is sealed, but I can hear him, he's on the screen and it's a one minute video that just sort of had a moment It's an opportunity to sort of create multiple of you, which we've all sort of wanted, especially if you've ever taught in the high school space or in K-12 in general, right? It's like, we need more of ourselves and so it created at least a duplicate of ourselves that they were being pushed to focus on the screen on the video that you were playing. But they also knew that you have your own physical embodiment, your presence in the room as well as sort of a second part of who you were.

And so we need to sort of pull on a lot of those notions and and integrate ways that yes, no, we're not changing every eight seconds. I meant to say that yes, no. We are not literally changing every eight seconds to go, okay, we're doing this now. I hope it's been eight seconds and we're shifting, we're changing, we're doing something else. But getting into a space where whether it's in person with an active learning space that is easier to perhaps create that although i've seen active learning studio spaces that don’t create positive learning environments because professor may not know the theory or understand or apply it or they may not utilize the space or the technology in the appropriate way. So again, it's that re-learning, it's that re-energizing and honestly teaching Kathy in the active learning space has re-energized me and teaching with AI has really invigorated my style.

00:43:22.42

Kathleen Sestak

I can tell.

00:43:23.62

Dax Parcells

And being able to just connect with students and to hear where Where are they? What do they know? What do they not know? What do they want to know? And so sometimes I tell them, like, I'm going to pretend I don't know any of the answers to any of your questions. And you I just want you to just spout the questions out. And I just stand there dumbfounded, like, nope, have no idea. And we just sort of let the questions wash over us. And then eventually we might pick one of them up and we explore them. And I tell them maybe what I know. I ask them what they know. And so we have this dialogue that creates this almost like eruption in a sense of aha and early on in the semester, students always tell me they're looking at me, all of them, and they're going, we're not sure where you're going or what you're wanting from us. And I go, I want to ultimately, which they get to the point, to not even worry about that. I just want you to be transparent, to be vulnerable, to be responsible, and to say what comes to your mind when I ask the question, or i give you a prompt is not about what i want because sometimes what I want isn't the right thing anyway, and might create greater questions, more opportunity for learning from something else, in fact, that somebody says. So really it's been and just awe and inspiring for me to use AI to create assignments, to be my assistant in a lot of ways, to be able to be creative like I mentioned before, like you know having audio of yourself or a different voice that AI can do, having students engage with the material in the same way where they can create voices they can ask the AI to speak in the tone of the voice of the poetry of and so on and so forth so giving them these opportunities to really be directors of their own learning. So I like to still think of myself as that facilitator, but they're the director. So I facilitate it, but in a lesser way than a director does in terms of saying, okay, now you will do this and we will go here. I'm going to create as the facilitator. These are the course learning outcomes. so These are today's learning objectives. From that, where we go from that is based on your own self-directed learning approach. And so to me, it's been transformative. It's been welcomed by students. And it's made it much more exciting for me, even in the asynchronous space. So I know I talk a lot about the active learning space. I don't currently teach in sort of that synchronous Zoom or teams space, but I also have asynchronous classes where students are just sort of on their own. But I still create videos. I still create excitement. I still create things that promote them to engage with each other and to engage with me as much as our college policies and our technology allows us to. But I think we still have plenty of work to do in trying to perhaps reimagine what online learning looks like, not just as simply pushing in-person learning online online on a computer.

00:46:33.18

Kathleen Sestak

It's so important, and you brought up so many great points. And I'm just going to put a note. I want to see what your active learning studio looks like. I would love to see a picture of your classroom.

00:46:44.77

Dax Parcells

Absolutely.

00:46:48.77

Kathleen Sestak

You talked a lot about a lot of different strategies and in that last segment. you know In space, synchronous, and Zoom, and asynchronous. can you Just give me your top three like your top three takeaways there.

00:47:05.03

Dax Parcells

in terms of strategies for...

00:47:06.66

Kathleen Sestak

Yeah, strategies that you found effective for building this act active learning. It's such a broad question. And there's so much detail and and and in depth that can be involved.

00:47:18.12

Dax Parcells

Yeah.

00:47:18.88

Kathleen Sestak

And I know that it's still evolving as well. But just like what's your top three that would be helpful for folks?

00:47:27.92

Dax Parcells

Let's see if I can make three. I know I can, I can probably give you at least two. So here's number, number one for me is, the individualizing that we can do. So individually based on student interests, student personalities, and so forth. And the other really is meeting students where they are and trying to understand what it is that will be more valuable to them. So for instance, after rereading ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’, a classic, of course, I, came away with wanting to create an assignment for students where I was going to ask them to ask generative AI to create a map in the form of a table of job fields or disciplines, specific job titles with questions you might ask somebody if you met them at a party. And then I went, huh, is that realistic for them? That they're going to meet a software engineer at a party and that they're going to ask these questions. It may be in five years, 10 years, but most likely not now. And so we've got to be able to, as faculty, as teachers, take where our expectations are of the way we think and bring it again back to the students level in a way that engages them more fully.

00:48:43.49

Kathleen Sestak

It's such a great point.

00:48:46.74

Dax Parcells

And so I had to pivot and think about, The language that they use, which ChatGPT, believe it or not, helped me with a lot. I had the idea, but I wanted to sort of use GPT to help me push the envelope, is that they don't speak in terms of disciplines and fields and all these sort of terms, but they all likely have declared a major, studied particular courses, classwork and then it's not perhaps the question that you would ask, but what are the fundamental concepts within that particular course? And so just being able to bring it back to a level where it's not just that students get to pick willingly choose based on their interests, their personalities, and so forth, like my first point, but giving them the respect that you know where they are currently. And sometimes that might mean asking them or saying to them, like, so I was going to do this assignment where you were going to create a map, talk about job fields, disciplines, et cetera. And they look at you like, huh? That is your takeaway, right? That you know right away that you've not met them at the level that you want to meet them in order for the assignment to be effective. And so again it's really about that engagement. And engagement to me perhaps as a third point is that co-creation. So it's not just you saying here is what will be, but having students sort of self-direct in a way with your approval, of course, that yes, I agree that this is gonna meet the expectation for that course learning outcome or today's class learning objective, but being able to utilize the technology to create things that are relevant. And so for instance, one of the assignments I've done um that I haven't done this semester, but I did last semester with my students was to have them create thinking through an intro psych course concepts of cognition, language, and intelligence for them to create a personal assistant. They all know about Alexa and Alexa may respond right now. So I maybe shouldn't say that out loud and the other one, right? We know some of the other ones, but that one's really close by on the phone. So I won't, I won't say the name. but you know, asking, these things to generate or create things, um, they're familiar with. But they hadn't ever stopped to think about until I gave them this assignment, the details behind the design and to hear the students engage Kathy, in conversation about language and then the need for multiple different languages. And then within a particular language, a particular set of dialects, accents, and so forth, they started to really appreciate, well, gosh, this is why when I say a certain word to one of these devices, it doesn't understand me or it may think I'm saying something else, right? But then we also need to, which sort of to that break it assignment that I mentioned before, you might break it today, but in five months or in three weeks, that technology may have improved so much better that you can't necessarily break it like you did before. And so my point with that is that, you know, these devices that are personal assistants as students recognize in the assignment that I gave them have changed and have adapted. And so there's this growth, there's this reinforcement, there's this learning, which is called machine learning. And so they start to recognize and cue to some of the key concepts of what artificial intelligence is at a space that's much larger than just asking a device to produce a response.

00:52:22.99

Kathleen Sestak

Wow. I just, there's so many key points in there, but meeting students where they are just to me really resonates. I think, you know, asking my 18-year-old about what his life is going to look like in five years, you just, you know, I'm not going to have that conversation right now. So just really, really, really good points. So thank you for sharing.

00:52:47.68

Dax Parcells

It's funny you mentioned that. So I've been dabbling in a series of stories called AI 2041 and I'm thinking about ways in which I can use that even with students to your point about you know your 18-year-old um and just helping us try to think about in 2041, which is not terribly far away and there in their perspective. What is the world of technology going to look like? And so some of these stories are quite eye-opening and just, again, getting them to think beyond where they are, but we can't assume, and especially the things that we want them to do, that they're already there, right? And so I think you're right, that we need to meet them where they are, but always think about ways that we can push them beyond where they are. And to me, that's truly what learning and teaching is all about. because if you came to my class and I just taught you what you already knew to reinforce it. It's amazing. It's great. But was learning really happening by extension of knowledge? And the answer in that case, I'm pretty sure isn't it is an astounding no.

00:53:56.29

Kathleen Sestak

100% agree. No, it's, and you're painting a very detailed picture of what learning what what learning can be and what the opportunities that can avail itself with new technologies. So just really, I'm really and enjoying this conversation. Let's move on to about the role of AI in enhancing the learner experience. I mean, we talked a little bit about, actually a lot about student engagement, and individualized learning and meeting students where they are and the co-creation of opportunities to learn. But you know one of the key aspects of your teaching in using AI is fostering creativity and you've already given us so many great examples of how you're doing that and critical thinking. But can you share some more specific examples of how students have used AI to become content creators rather than passive learners?

00:54:57.96

Dax Parcells

Yeah, it's something that I would like to build out much more fully. But one of the main assignments that I originally sort of conceived of was to have students code using Python a chatbot and it started by just having students first ask Gen AI which of course is the easy part for um Well, they had to come up with first questions. They had about a particular disorder like depression anxiety and so forth um whether it's what's the heritability of the disorder? What is the prognosis of the disorder and so forth? So they had liberty, I gave them I can't remember exactly now, but I think I gave them four or five sorts of standard questions that I wanted them to ask and then they had to come up with additional questions that they were curious about related to the disorder that they would ask generative AI to respond to. They then had to vet the information. So that, to me, is a key part, that they're not just consuming it as, oh, wow, this is amazing. AI is God, right? And it knows everything. But instead, they're vetting it using content that I've told them and we've accepted is sort of a reputable source, like our textbook, our DSM, and so forth, the ICD-10, et cetera.

But then I wanted to think about ways in which I can move this outside of just sort of ethical use, not cheating using generative AI in that space but to go towards your point of helping students be creators. And one of the things that we've all become very familiar with is the use of a chatbot. And so I pushed the students to create a chatbot where I provided for them because of course my course is psychology, it's not a coding course. Although I'm planning on teaching a coding course that's going to utilize this assignment and extend upon it next semester. But this, yeah, so this was it an initial sort of attempt to get students to use a shell of Python code that i provide for them, where they still, though, are putting themselves in. They're putting in personality. They're putting in musicality. And so in some cases, I asked them to use lyrics from their favorite artist, for instance, in order to do the responses in that voice or in that tone or in that particular language.

So they had to think about ways in which the content that they received from generative AI after being vetted could be used by somebody who is now asking a chatbot that they are creating about these questions related to the disorder and their responses would then be in sort of a creative way um using different languages, different approaches, different lyrics, and so on and so forth to be able to respond. And it's seemingly quite simple. Of course, initially, students think of it as complex because you're mentioning coding and computers and programming and it's sort of like, wow, you're asking me to lift the hood of the car and really look into the engine. And it's like, yes. because I want you to try to understand what are those nuances, what are those pieces that you interact with and make assumptions about every single day, but that somebody in the engineering space had to truly pause, reflect, and create solutions for the challenges as you like to refer to them rather than problems, right?

And so um It really pushed them into that space where they were, perhaps somebody might say they weren't truly generating new content, um but they were utilizing a proxy of generation that required them to go beyond purely just having something generated for them, even though they were using what was generated for them in a way that they could then generate something for somebody else and so it also created a great opportunity to talk about in my course, we talk a lot about the difference between a primary source and a secondary source.

And so it lent itself very nicely to having that conversation again, that the generative AI gave you a response. You then vetted it, checked it, but you may have changed how it was written. And now you're using lyrics, which could potentially even change the way that it's presented and now we see how knowledge can shift and the ah perspective can change. And one of the things I've been trying to push more recently on is how do we then engage with things like synonyms? Because perhaps the person asking the chatbot doesn't say heritability because that's a big fancy word but they say genetics or genes. So getting them to think about ways in which coders have to really narrow down when they're building something is that they're not necessarily having to then generate that, but I always push them to think about, at least in a theoretical space, what are those things then that you are so suggesting that a coder would really need to pause, reflect, to think on, and to find a solution for more so than just, oh, here's the answer. That's what my lyric said we're done for today.

00:59:56.78

Kathleen Sestak

You know In that example, thank you for that you you've provided to me, you're giving the students an area in which they're comfortable, music. you know most people and love music. It could be a variety of genres, but they can they can choose their their genre and and then individualize it that way. But you're also encouraging your students to to flex a little bit and Python, to me, would be intimidating. And I'm sure to a lot of students in humanities and social sciences, just the thought of that is intimidating.

01:00:26.35

Dax Parcells

Yes.

01:00:31.70

Kathleen Sestak

Yet you're you're giving them a platform in which they can play in that space that is secure and and they're and they can be comfortable. So really incredible. 

01:00:49.78

Dax Parcells

Yeah, it's actually been really fun because the thing about it is that I tell them you can't really break it, even though they can they can misplace certain things, but the code is written in a way that it essentially tells them and I sort of walk them through the process of, all right, so that lyric that is responding to that question, you're going to place it here. And so there's a lot of handholding in that way to ensure that the students, A, don't feel like they're in another course, and B, even if they feel like they're in another course or they feel comfortable in it, that they're not sort of left hanging to sort of know you know that not have that knowledge rather to be able to do that. But I think it's it's a way that moves us beyond purely just knowing information.

It's knowing where to find the information. It's knowing how to check the information. And then it's understanding ways in which we can translate that information in a different sort of media or a different platform. But it's also, again, to our points that we've been talking about a lot today is really focusing back on the lived experience of our students. And so you and I didn't grow up with these fancy chatbots that did all these amazing things for us, but they're already living in that space. But it's super easy. And this is something I used to talk a lot about with my high school students more so is that it was super easy to think about like, Oh gosh, I just like put my card in the ATM and I got money out. Well, they don't even think in today's world about ATMs and money, like ATM is at the moment, right? It's like it doesn't even have translate in the same way as we might have had that conversation back in the day. But we take for granted a lot of things. Where does our electricity come from? I still don't fully understand that myself as a professional, right? So it's like, I just have an assumption that when I flick the switch, we're going to have power and there's electricity. And yes, that's sort of what I want my students to recognize is that electricity is sort of, it's not that it's beneath them, but we've made sufficient assumptions that it is, at least in modern world. And so now we've got a more accelerated technology or a new technology. I don't even say if I want to call it more accelerated, but a new technology like AI and what's underneath the hood of this AI. Try to understand it sufficiently so that you can have good conversation with people. And that's what I really, really push with my students is regardless of whether it's AI or just general content from my course is go home and practice using our vocabulary, talk to people about the things we talk about in class. And so I think with the AI space, that's really what I've been pushing more so is getting students to take this knowledge outside of the classroom. And I have students that come back and they go, you know, professor, I was talking to a friend of mine and they were trying to tell me that AI is just the same. Gen AI is just the same as Google. But because of our conversation in class, I was able to explain to them that it is a probabilistic model and they feel amazing to even say sometimes the words or sometimes they don't remember the words, but they remember the idea. And to me, that's what's brilliant is that we need to not just teach students things that they're going to put on a test or on a paper but to teach them something that they can use in the real world and that they can apply in conversations and that's why I had thought about that, you know, how to win people ah concept of having them create questions if you went to a party, because those are things that might be relevant to you and I, right? So we might go to a party and it's like you meet somebody who is in software engineering and all of a sudden you're going, I don't know anything about software engineering. What am I going to say to this person? But if you had done your homework and sort of. asked AI to generate some prompts and questions, some vocabularies and terms you could have learned about this. And so I think it's important that again, we meet the students where they are with the technologies that currently exist, but try to get them to appreciate and understand, even if they don't become the engineer, is having them witness the engineering design process so that they have respect, appreciation, and understanding of the way in which their knowledge, their content can be applied. And one of the terms I love using with them for anything is transferability. So think about how you can transfer what you know, what you have learned into a new space. And the only way I see to do that is to model it, to show them, to engage them in ways that pushes them to do exactly that transfer process.

01:04:59.82

Kathleen Sestak

Wow. Well, thank you for just talking about the methods that you use to help students really engage in AI and utilize activities and tools outside of their disciplines, such as coding. It's really important. Alright, so I'm gonna move on to bridging the gap between AI tools and education. When we talked a lot about this in general throughout this conversation, and just bridging the gap for students is really important, but also being able to apply what they're learning and you were just talking about having those conversations outside of the classroom. Go home and talk to you know your suitemates, whoever you're your family, who you're living with, and have these conversations and kind of dip your toe right and get comfortable with the with the language and the conversation. and you'd be surprised at how interesting it is to others as well, what you're learning. so one of the areas that that you've touched upon is that you've worked with publishers to improve the user experience in just in their products in some of your past work. And just wondering what are the the main gaps you identify between publisher offerings and what faculty and students actually need. That's a big question.

01:06:22.95

Dax Parcells

That is a really big question but I love it because like you mentioned I've spent some time working with various publishers as just sort of a here are some ideas here's the feedback that my students are giving me here's the feedback that I have you know as a doctor of education myself just looking at the curriculum the instruction the assessment those components and honestly I would say I have a couple of insights. One of them being that what I've noticed is that a lot of publishers are tending to start introducing AI which is great. However, AI in particular when it's being taught is relegated to sort of perhaps the last chapter or an appendix and that I think is very problematic because it's seen then as an add-on. I can say and I won't name the publisher but I've just recently been reviewing a book for the course that I'm thinking about teaching in the spring in data science and you would think being a data science course that AI and artificial intelligence would be embedded throughout.

But this book has, as it says, new content in the very final chapter. And so I think it's very important that publishers recognize that if we continue to put AI sort of at the end or in an appendix, it doesn't really send the message that AI is here and AI is integrated. And so giving those opportunities for students to see the way in which AI is relevant to their particular discipline. I know that I've had to sort of source a lot of that on my own in some of the examples reference that I shared today. this is Those are not examples that I found in any publisher material. Those are things that I created myself, or I use generative AI to help me generate, and I molded them in ways that would fit into my particular classroom. So I think that we really need to find ways in which, and I mentioned this point before, that AI really is not just about computer science. AI is not just about well, you can relate it to psychology because you talk about human intelligence. And so AI is artificial intelligence. So there's a, there's a connection and that's the connection I made originally, at least for my purposes. But AI is relevant to teaching English. AI is relevant to teaching political science. And that's really been the brilliant part of being able to facilitate a lot of the faculty that are going through what we call our AI across the curriculum, professional development, is being able to see and to push and to encourage them to develop ways in which their discipline utilizes artificial intelligence, whether again, it's generative AI, which we generally focus on or other types of AI that might be very useful and so i think one of the big takeaways for me has been that we really need to emphasize that and second to that really is the need for additional professional development in that space. And I know I mentioned this before, but I'll emphasize it more here, is that publishers could do a better job, for instance, even in instructor resources. They give us PowerPoints. They give us all these great things. But within that is to provide opportunities for professional development for faculty.So that again, we have some basic understanding of AI fundamentals. What's the difference between a supervised and an unsupervised learning model and so on and so forth. So the details that are broadly relevant to all disciplines and then perhaps within that particular discipline, something that's more specifically relevant so that we can impart that as faculty to our students. So I think that professional development piece is really relevant. I know I mentioned I attended a webinar last week from um Education Week and one of the things that came up there was exactly this question, whether or not people on the call, which were people who were obviously interested and in the space of PD for artificial intelligence because it was about digital literacy and AI literacy and the question was really focused on whether people had received PD and people started wondering and asking, do you mean that my school, my institution provided it for me or that I sourced and found it on my own? And when that was sort of broken down, then the results changed quite considerably, where the majority of people on the call were saying, of course, that they have received PD. But then once they sort of took it to the through the lens of, did you get given PD? Then the answer was no. Fewer people say yes, rather and so I think publishers have an opportunity in that space to be able to do that. And my mind runs runs wild in terms of you know badging, conferences, having all sorts of amazing things that we can do.

01:11:12.64

Kathleen Sestak

microcredentialing.

01:11:14.46

Dax Parcells

Yeah, um In that space, they're obviously in the business of of of making money. They should be in the business, of course, of education. So it naturally lends itself to the education of faculty, which then is imparting knowledge upon students. But it could potentially create avenues for generating revenue as well on their end in providing professional development. All of us as faculty in some way, shape, or form are curious about PD.

01:11:41.98

Kathleen Sestak

Yeah, absolutely.

01:11:43.04

Dax Parcells

We're required to attend PD to write about and reflect about our professional development and annually. So I think, you know, we all use publisher materials or most of us do and so it would be a great opportunity for publishers to sort of venture more into that space. So those would be sort of faculty-esque components. And if you'll afford me another few moments. I really want to reflect upon something I've been thinking a lot about in terms of students.

01:12:08.57

Kathleen Sestak

Sure.

01:12:12.81

Dax Parcells

What I love about what I've seen in the use of AI so far in the technologies of the different platforms that I've used is this notion of what's called a walled garden and I don't know if you're familiar with that term or the broader audience would be, but essentially that we are walling off or creating a concealed closed in garden, so to speak, that we don't allow the weeds or the extra stuff which might be what we might consider external influence or bias to be in the garden. So while garden approach to artificial intelligence, especially in the gen AI space might look like, for instance, a publisher taking their textbook. And it only searches within that particular book. It doesn't search the internet at large. It doesn't look at any other documents. It may not even look at the actual references that the textbook uses by pulling the material from that reference. It will use the reference because that's what's in the textbook, but it's not going outside of anything that the textbook itself says. So that's brilliant. So publishers are using this wall garden approach where they're also allowing students to do things like highlight a portion of text and have it explained to them. Or to highlight a portion of text in this, I like it even more and quizzing them, right? And so it gives opportunities for students to engage with AI in a way that extends their learning and really potentially engages them in just construction of knowledge. The struggle that I have with a lot of that is that it goes against a lot of the assignments that I have for my students so many of the assignments and we didn't really have much time to talk about this today, but a lot of the assignments that I've redesigned in my course require students to annotate to source information. And I see the opportunity, and I don't know that students are thinking in this way quite yet, but I want publishers to start thinking very much in foresight, pushing beyond you know the way that students might start to utilize the technology in not appropriate ways. Where if I ask a student to give me the annotation and then summarize what that annotation says, the student could simply ask their textbook to summarize what they've highlighted then take a picture of what they've highlighted and wham, it's done.

01:14:35.35

Kathleen Sestak

Yeah, right yeah.

01:14:36.54

Dax Parcells

Yeah, so again, I'm not sure that students are thinking at that level yet, but I want faculty to think in that way, not again that we are the police or that we are you know not gonna allow students to se use technology because it can accelerate their learning, it certainly they can.

01:14:50.48

Dax Parcells

And good students will likely use it in appropriate ways. And although I've also seen that the ACT has recently done a survey that it's the top students that are using artificial intelligence to generate a lot of work in some cases, which may or may not be appropriate. And so, you know, I take the statement back earlier that which is not only the good student necessarily that might, you know, use it in good ways and the bad students, quote-unquote, using it in bad ways, but just being able to think about ways in which it could be used and then really pushing instead to move into or and into the direction where I think of, for instance, that the training with the University of Florida that we did last summer, or two summers ago now, wow, I know it was last summer, I'm gonna take that back, summer 23. Time's just all over the place, yeah.

01:15:37.50

Kathleen Sestak

Time flies.

01:15:39.53

Dax Parcells

But summer of 23, when we did the training with the University of Florida, we really focused on different technologies. And one of the technologies that came up was the use of Khanmigo. Khan Academy’s chatbot, essentially, yeah, and I'm sure most of the audience by now is sort of familiar with how that sort of operated, and the notion behind that was, gosh, like we obviously don't want to just have students go to this, quote-unquote, tutor and say, hey, tutor chatbot, just tell me how to do this problem. So instead, what Khanmigo has generally their approach has

is that it asks students questions in similar ways that I was suggesting before that I ask my students to tell chat GPT to keep asking them questions until it's gotten sufficient information, which to me is how learning happens, right? As opposed to just saying, hey, tell me everything you know is going to spit it all out. And so I think publishers need to think in that space as well in terms of when students highlight a piece of text that perhaps there is a second prompt of a question that's returned and reflected to the students to say, highlight for me the key words in this sentence, or identify the words within that particular paragraph that are confusing to you, right? But something that moves beyond purely just, I've highlighted something, I don't know what this means, tell me what it means. Because usually, in my experience, the reason that a student is highlighting something to ask what it means is not necessarily because they do or don't understand it, but because they don't want to read it. And they want to do less work. And so if you can highlight a big paragraph of text and essentially ask it to give you a sentence that summarizes it, you may have gotten the main point and the gist of the idea, but you may have lost a lot of the details as well.

And so the way I teach is really focused a lot on the details. So I make grand claims to students. I might just say a statement, but I say to them, we're in your textbook. Is there information that supports this and I'm working with a great publisher where they have these author comments where the author has made comments in the margins of the book itself and the author is sort of pushing students to think by giving them questions based on what they've already taught. And so it just seems much more authentic in a sense that it's not just a question at the end of the section, that's sort of a quiz question or a check for understanding question, but it's really sort of provoking the students to pause and to reflect. And so I think really that's where publishing needs to move is that yes, we've now digitized material. That's great. We generally are moving away from print. But within the digital space, what do we want our students still to learn? And it hasn't changed from when it was in print media. We still want them, A, to be reading as much as possible. B, to be understanding vocabulary and so that's one of the huge components in my class always is we need to be able to define terms we can't say that thingy especially when I taught math that was a thing because it was like well it's square root it's squaring it's cube roots but you can't call it that thingy because there are many things right especially in math. And so, you know, knowing the vocabulary comes to me from having read to see the context, but then also in knowing the details. And so you may have a summary statement that your publisher content tells you if you've highlighted a paragraph and it gives you sort of a sentence, but now you've lost the context of where did that information came from. What kind of research study was it? Was it a longitudinal study? Was it a cross-sectional study? Those are the details to me that matter.

And that the dialogue, if we're going to call it that between chatbots, for instance, in the publisher material and the student, needs to be more interactive. So I know they've sort of, some of them that I've talked to have sort of said, well, but we can, the students can ask for a quiz question. And again, like I mentioned before, I think that's great. That's amazing. But within the rest of the space in which students are going to use it, which is more likely to summarize, there needs to be more of an engagement of a click and drag.

And I'll say in general, that's been something that I've sort of seen is missing in a lot of publisher materials. I was creating a test, in fact, this morning for one of my classes and going through the test bank. And the test bank gives me the option to filter by type of question. And one of the types of questions, I won't tell the term that they use, but it's essentially a click on like (i) that and identify the parts, for instance. And there weren't any, except for one chapter.

01:20:12.14

Kathleen Sestak

Wow.

01:20:12.60

Dax Parcells

And so to me, that's a missed opportunity. And if we're going to assess, though, in those ways, which I think is why perhaps this is missing, we need to teach in those ways as well. And so my point essentially is that publishers need to, in their AI to utilize of their utilization of AI in their text, is to encourage and to push students to click, to drag, to move, to swap, to do whatever it might be that's engaging them critically in understanding and dissecting material, so that when it comes time to take a test that requires you to click, to drag, to dissect, to move, to whatever, that they've had experience. Because we all know that if you've listened to music while you studied, the suggestion is that you test with the same music. And no different than that if I give you these types of questions or ways in which you engage with material while you're learning it, then I can more effectively and validly and reliably measure your learning from it if I've given you opportunities to practice it. So I think really the push would be to to vamp up professional development for faculty but also to enhance the engagement component for students when it comes to the use of the current use of AI, which again, I know it's new for everyone. So this isn't sort of a whipping and a lashing for the publishers to be like, they've done it wrong. I think they're moving in the right direction, but I hope that they'll hear my voice and the voices perhaps of other faculty in this vein that we really need to push the engagement.

And I know that's been a big part of our conversation today is the engagement sort of in class. but a lot of the engagement that I think I'm seeing that's missing is the engagement with content from textbooks in particular and so we really need to encourage publishers to move into that space where the material truly is engaging in a way that certainly can utilize artificial intelligence and even it makes me think and just sort of off the cuff. When I think of other assignments that I have my students to where they perhaps have to answer two questions for each concept in order to get full credit. We need to integrate machine learning more fully into those types of questions. So it's great now that you've gotten those two questions on this concept. But the questions that you got wrong related to it also connect back to a different concept. And so we need to find ways that we then reintroduce those concepts for retesting or for reeducation, if you will, um so that it's not just sort of one and done. So you've answered questions on topic one or concept one, and you've got two of them right, even though you answered three of them wrong.

Well, now we move on to concept or topic number two, and you just need to get two of those right. But we know that materials, connected materials linked. And so I'm not saying just, you know, keep adding on more questions for students, but looking for ways in which we truly use artificial intelligence, or in this case, in particular, machine learning and big data to be able to understand, “ah huh!” maybe I can fine-tune what a student doesn't understand about topic number two or concept number two, based on the types of questions or the ways in which they answered questions from topic or concept number one. And so I think that's a huge challenge, but a great opportunity for publishers to be able to fill this void of students truly being able to connect through their content and or artificial intelligence to master the material in preparation for class.

01:23:52.35

Kathleen Sestak

I think those are really key points and you know I appreciate you sharing your advice for faculty around integrating AI into their coursework. but and I think the the advice for publishers around the engagement piece is really important and I think like the rest of us, some we're all playing catch up and trying to stay ahead of the curve of something that's just moving so swiftly currently and will probably continue to do so. But keeping it you know keeping as you talked about, the faculty development piece and with the goal of student engagement is really is what the goal of education for everybody, publishers included, is all about. But it can't be an afterthought. 

01:24:44.56

Dax Parcells

That's right. Yeah, and I think if nothing else was resounding, I think that's got to be the message, right, that we want this to be integrated across the curriculum, which is why I love the partnership with the University of Florida that they have called it AI Across The Curriculum and so it could be within a particular worse or discipline but then also across subjects but within our textbooks it would be amazing to see artificial intelligence as not necessarily the center stage, but again, it's the representation of where it can be used, what it's good at, what it may not be so good at. And I understand, of course, especially for print media, this may be sort of concerning because what we publish right now may not be what is true in five weeks or five years, right? But what I love about what's um ah possible in the digital space and what a lot of publishers are already doing is looking at this idea that they can introduce new material much more quickly in the digital space where faculty in some cases may even get to choose whether or not they allow that particular content to be updated or changed. So giving that freedom I think is valuable and important, but recognizing that now that we are less reliant upon print media in that way, in the higher ed, that we have the option or the opportunity in digital space to really make those changes and to try to stay as current as possible and not just create addenda and say, hey, this has changed or here's what publishers always do when a new edition comes out. We've got a list a laundry list in the front of the book about what's been updated or what's been changed but really it needs to be sort of shown like what the changes are, what it used to be so that we can reflect upon what was and also always sort of pushing the envelope of what might be and what could be which is why I valued the partnerships I've had with many publishers that they like my contributions, they're always excited to sort of chat with me and hear what are some of the things that I'm curious about what I want to see more of and many of the things like I've mentioned to you before that I've asked for them have been put on their roadmaps and even some many of them have come to fruition some more quickly than others but it's really great to see that we've got that sort of partnership and dialogue that I think is crucial for higher ed and all of the education really.

01:27:11.37

Kathleen Sestak

I think that is a great way to wrap up this 90-minute conversation, just talking about you know advice and future outlook and those calls to action. But the way of, you're talking about publishers helping educators because it is a partnership of the integration of the technology into the content to help students understand where the connections are. But just any parting thoughts on you know the next two or three minutes about the future of AI in higher education and where do we go from here?

01:27:52.18

Dax Parcells

Oh, goodness. um, I should have anticipated that. I feel that I've shared a lot. 

01:28:02.35

Kathleen Sestak

You have.

01:28:06.54

Dax Parcells

And I think the future is ripe with opportunities, like you've mentioned. I think we need to expand those partnerships. I know I've worked with some publishers that have faculty who they work with, some of them paid, some of them not paid. They have different meetings or symposia that they might invite us to, et cetera, et cetera. And I've had the great privilege of participating in some of those, but to keep that going and to really push more so about engagement and yes I get it they are in the business of making money but if we start with an end always with the focus on the student where of course a student-centric approach requires in some ways a faculty centric approach as well. So that notion we mentioned before of providing PD for faculty with the idea then that that will translate into what they do with their students. So it is very much all about the student at the center, but I sort of think I sort of think of this as an ecological model. So the student is at the center, but we expand out from the center with the faculty, we expand out from that through the publisher we expand out from that to society and so forth and really always trying to ensure that all of those circles concentric circle is essentially have a voice and that those voices are heard and that we also sort of check in a lot of ways, perhaps the bias, like we talked about the wall garden and the idea then that nothing outside of the garden is introduced because that might likely be sort of more biased or misinformation or misguided information, if you will. But ensuring then that we we create those moments for allowing um those voices to to to enter the conversation um so that students are exposed to in a critical way not just what a publisher or an author might think about a particular topic or the research that they may have synthesized, but really just helping them see where that knowledge came from and how that knowledge could be different from what they might see elsewhere. And I think AI is potentially quite helpful in that way in all of us sort of asking if we generate something to then ask those pointed questions. What is the logic behind what has been generated? and What are the flaws in the logic? And I've asked AI some of these questions, and they come up sometimes with brilliant answers. But again, it's at the space more so that we that are educated and perhaps have completed college, et cetera, et cetera. It's easier for us to do, and but we can't expect that students are at that same level of being able to know what's valid, what's not valid, and so on and so forth. But still promoting and pushing for them build toward an understanding of where knowledge is created, how knowledge is created, how knowledge is vetted, um and recognizing that there are naturally biases even within our walled garden because of human voice. Human voice is biased. Artificial intelligence and the gen AI voice is biased. And are the biases the same or are they different, right? Those are sort of things and conversations I think that not just in philosophy classes, but in all classes are you know potential avenues for exploration. And I think one of the biggest things that we really need to think through even more so is the age at which we expose students to technology in general, but artificial intelligence more specifically. So I'm currently reading, listening to rather an audiobook, The Anxious Generation by a social psychologist who really spins the idea that the invention of smartphones and mass production and access in say 2009 has really changed the mental health of our adolescents and our children in general. um And so I think it's it's important to start to unpack what that all means and what that looks like in terms of the artificial intelligence space. I've heard examples of student in kindergarten being exposed to the idea of what AI is. I'm not saying here right now that I either agree or disagree that that's appropriate. But we've always had those conversations in education about, you know, age appropriateness. And I think this is an opportunity to really deepen that conversation. You know, we've sort of made the assumption, for instance, that with social media platforms, 13 is the magical age. Some of that is based on science and from human growth and development and so forth and others of it just based on sort of feelings or 13 is the first teen year. So it's sort of like, is it really legit or is it just sort of arbitrary? And so some of the rules and the laws federally state level will become quite relevant in terms of things like COPPA. So we move away from just FERPA and HIPPA compliance and all these sort of components. But what are we exposing students to in their use of artificial intelligence? What are? What is artificial intelligence exposing students to, right? So we're exposing them to it. The intelligence is exposing them to it. What are they wanting to learn? What do their parents want them to learn? So I think there is a larger conversation, you know, at the social level and beyond that needs to become a part of sort of our dialogue as well just understanding, yes, it's great. We can apply professional developments in artificial intelligence. We can promote in higher education the use of active learning spaces and getting students to engage with material and return to campus. All is sort of the lineage of our conversation today. But what is the appropriate use of technology and the age-appropriate use of technology will, I think, continue to be of relevance.

Returning finally I would say to things like Bloom's Taxonomy. What I love about where we are is that we've sort of come to a place where a lot of these things are being revisited and so we have this notion of Bloom's Taxonomy revisited where it looks at distinctive human skills versus how Gen AI can supplement learning. And so I think all of us at every level and need to engage in that way, but we need to really hear the voice of our faculty and our students that we interface with in order to build a conversation that helps us address and understand these questions more fully, more so than just relying upon, for instance, legislation or, you know, hard science from research. All of those things are great and need to be part of the conversation as well but how do we integrate all of those voices in a way that makes it truly something where the student again is at the center of every decision that we make and their learning is the key focus and primary goal.

01:35:01.46

Kathleen Sestak

Well, Dax Parcells, I think that's a fabulous way to wrap up this Tech in EdTech podcast this afternoon. I want to thank you for your time. I think we definitely need a phase two of this conversation.

01:35:11.20

Dax Parcells

It's been a pleasure.

01:35:16.16

Kathleen Sestak

So thank you for joining me today, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

01:35:20.88

Dax Parcells

Absolutely. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for the platform just to share some ideas and definitely hope that our listeners will engage in dialogue and conversation on some of these topics and perhaps request that we talk further on specific aspects of things that I may have mentioned today.

01:35:37.08

Kathleen Sestak

No, it's really great conversation around AI for learners, re-engagement, critical thinking, and curriculum design in higher education. Thanks, Dax.