– All right folks, we just broke 300. We have over 800 folks who registered today, so more might come in. And if you’re not here live, you’re probably watching us on the recording. Hello to you all watching later, you’re an important part of this experience as well. We are so excited to be here with you. I’ve been both nervous and excited all day to get this started and to talk with you all and to learn from you all because I am in… This is a picture of me recently. No, this is a meme from the movie “Jaws” if you’re not familiar, where the police captain who’s hunting the shark is saying, “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.” So this is kind of the vibe that I bring to the party lately and what we’re here to discuss today. I was sharing about some of my challenges on LinkedIn and Niya and I and many others got to talking, and Niya and I said, “We’ll put something together for a few of our friends.” And we’ve been really enjoying seeing all the people register.

So happy to be here with you today, again, to learn with and from you. If you haven’t already, please say hello in the chat and keep chatting if that serves your learning needs. If you have sent in an external AI note taker, we ask that you remove them. We have tried to block the main ones. I saw one pop in that I took care of. Dasha’s gonna be looking for that. But we wanna keep this human space as we discuss these challenges today. You are in fact hopefully in the right place in the Asynchronous Online Teaching and Course Design in the AI Era with Karen, that’s me, and my partner in crime, Niya is here with us as well. And we’ve got backup from Olivia who’s listed in the chat as OneHE and Dasha, who’s also in the chat. So I will have a little bit of my eyes on the chat when Niya and Niya and I will take turns there. But you’ve also got Olivia and Dasha here to support you there as well.

Okay, we are here, as I said, to learn with you. So you are, congratulations, you’ve just been promoted, you are co-designing and creating this workshop with us. We need you here, sharing your ideas and engaging and we’ve created a few ways for you to do that. So the chat is open, there’s now 354 people here, so that can get a little wild and messy, which is fun for some of us, not so much for others. So if it works for you, keep it open and engage there. If not, hang back from the chat. Backchannel, social media, doodling, self-reflection, taking notes, perhaps those of you watching asynchronously. And we also have the Q and A set up, we’re in Zoom Webinar. And Dasha and Niya and I met the other day and we set it up so we believe you can comment and answer each other’s Q and As. So if you post a question in the Q and A area and we aren’t able to get to it and respond to it, our hope is that you can respond and answer each other and share resources and ideas. And we also wanna allow ample time, I’m gonna be realistic and say 20 minutes for discussion and questions at the end. And we’ve got something else for you that I’ll share in a minute about how you can continue to engage after today’s session. Again, if you haven’t already, please say to hello in the chat, if that serves your learning needs. So Olivia did a lovely introduction.

Just real quick, here’s me, I’m Karen. Outside of Higher Ed… Higher Ed is, you know, our jobs I think are often the least interesting things about us. Outside of Higher Ed, I love to read, watch sports with my family. And you can see a picture of my book, which is coming out January 20th, “An Educators Guide to ADHD.” All of these wonderful resources, including my book and Niya’s book, are linked in the speaker’s notes in the slides, which I just put in the chat again. So if you need those links, you can grab them there. Niya, will you say hi and let folks know what’s up with you and what you’re doing outside of Higher Ed?

– Yeah, well, hi everyone. Outside of Higher Ed, you may see behind me, I like to grow things like plants. And I also volunteer at a dog rescue ’cause I love to take care of things. I don’t know why I like to add more to my plate, but I do. And you can see my book there, which was a collaborative effort with the Feminist Pedagogy for Teaching Online collective.

– Thanks, Niya. So we wanna invite you into the chat. How are you? How are you really? Tell the truth. So if you’re feeling up to it, you can share a word or perhaps an emoji. If you click on the little smiley icon… Oh, I see a lot of the melting emoji.

– [Attendee] Melting, spider.

– Someone asked if I’ve watched the news. The horrified emoji. There’s a party emoji, sunglasses. Great, thank you all for sharing out, keep them coming. A resource that I like to share with my family, myself, my students. It works, it’s one of my favorite resources. It’s called the Feelings Wheel. So I’m gonna pop that in the chat, feelingswheel.com is a fun little exercise if you need to check in with people’s emotions. This is not only did I want to get you all into the chat and doing something, but there’s a lot of power in naming what’s going on with us, naming how we’re feeling and checking in with each other. So thank you for doing that. We wanna start from that place of noticing what’s going on and welcoming all of those emotions. So here’s our agenda today. We are gonna share with you first and foremost, how you can stay connected after this webinar. And Niya and I have chosen our favorite three resources of the moment that we can recommend to you, because I know there’s a lot of content out there about this topic. So we have chosen three pieces to keep it simple. Niya is then gonna share a few tips with you about how she’s thinking about this topic and her teaching. And I’m gonna share a few tips with you about how I’m thinking of it.

Just so you can sort of cognitively plan, Niya is going to take sort of the big picture visionary approach. I am gonna take more of the practical, what do I do today type of approach. So I know, I see names in this room, and I know some of you prefer the former and some of you prefer the latter. So we’re hoping to cover bases and get everybody’s needs met today. And then the best part will be we’re gonna open things up for you to chat about how you’re feeling. You will have the option to ask questions in Zoom. You will also have the option to raise your Zoom hand and we will be able to call on you and you will be able to come on audio if you would like to ask your question or share a comment. Q and A implies that Niya and I have all the answers and we do not. And if anyone is spreading that rumor, it’s not true. We’re here to learn with you. No breakout rooms today, we will be together the whole time. That would be a lot of breakout rooms.

Okay, so we have set up, I think, Niya, I’m speaking for you a little bit. One of my biggest goals, I’ll pause. I think our shared goal is that we wanna connect people, we wanna connect people in this work and help you, specifically this group of asynchronous online educators, I think we’ve been left out of the conversation and I think these AI shifts are most challenging to us in many ways. So we want a way for you to stay connected after the session. So we have set up a LinkedIn group, and I’m linking to that in the chat. Again, that’s in the speaker’s notes of the slides afterwards. And by setting up a LinkedIn group, I mean Niya and I don’t really know what a LinkedIn group is, but we are going to model doing the best we can to make progress on this issue and to support each other. So we have set up a LinkedIn group, Niya and I are in there and we’ve got a couple volunteers that are in there to support folks as well. I wanna be clear that this is a peer-led group. So Niya and I are not running this group. We’re not gonna be like managing it in terms of like, you know, solving everybody’s problems. We are in there as your peers, and we invite you to come in and share your ideas, share your questions, share your resources. If you have ideas about supporting educators in this work, please reach out to Dasha at OneHE. Dasha, I’m gonna pop your email. Dasha, can I pop your email into the chat? It’s in the slide. Oh Dasha’s ahead of me.

– I’m on it.

– I know there’s a wealth of resources and ideas and experts in the chat and in the group. So if you would like to offer up a webinar idea to OneHE, please reach out to Dasha, just as Niya and I did with this idea, okay? So I hope to see everybody in the LinkedIn group and we will look forward to learning with you. All right, so we’ve got three things to share with you. Again, these are in the speaker’s notes. These are three of the best things I’ve read in the past two months. Dr. Alex Rockey, Alex, I see you here, “An Educator’s Guide to Managing AI.” Alex, if you, yay, hi Alex. “The EdGenerative AI Readiness Checklist.” That’s a great resource to share with your administrators. And then something that I read, this one’s a little, those two are very like practical and resource oriented. The third one is really like in the struggle of this, it’s called “A Matter of Words: What Can University AI Committees Actually Do?” And there’s some really tough questions asked in that article. So those are linked in the slides. So do check those out. In the sea of information out there, those are three of the things I’ve read lately that I would recommend and you can share them with others. Okay, I’m gonna go on mute. I will be in the chat sharing and learning with you all. And I’m gonna pass it over to Niya, who’s gonna share a few tips with you on her approach to online async teaching in the AI era.

– Thanks, Karen, okay, well, as Olivia mentioned, I am getting ready to defend my dissertation. It’s next Friday. So I am thinking in frameworks all the time, even when I don’t mean to be. And one really relevant framework for me is feminist pedagogies. You saw the book earlier, but this is a way for me to center pedagogical care, trust, reflexivity, and to really interrogate things like AI tools and their place or not in these educational environments. And especially for me, who gets a little anxious and agitated in this AI chaos world that we’re in. Feminist pedagogy really helps me stay connected to my pedagogical commitments. And so I’m not gonna read these tenants, there are more on the website, which is linked here. But what I do wanna say is that when I root myself to this framework or these frameworks, I undergo important shifts. So I’m not thinking about policing anymore, I’m thinking about pedagogy. I’m not thinking about products, learning products, I’m thinking about learning processes. And I’m not thinking about control ’cause I really don’t care about control and I don’t wanna be doing that with learners. I’m thinking about care. And so it’s these shifts that I’m gonna talk to you a little bit about today.

Next slide, please, Karen. So I mentioned I’m a little agitated, I’m a little tense. Someone said they need an emoji that can encompass all the feelings and that’s kind of what I’m feeling today. And as my 13-year-old would say, “Facts,” AI can do the work instantly. It’s not always good work. It doesn’t always meet the requirements, but it can generate work instantly. And so in a world where product is immediately possible, it makes sense that we’ve got concerns about integrity. But I think to focus on problems and to take the mindset of fixing rather than fixating a little bit is a mistake. And so I’m gonna suggest that we all do one of my favorite things, which is called ‘Pause and Ponder.’ And we need to ask by pausing and pondering, how can we invite learners and ourselves into slower thinking in the era of AI speed? And how do we build trust through transparency, not surveillance techniques? And how do we create dialogue and open conversation about whether, how, if, when to involve AI or acknowledge that it’s often already unconsciously involved in some of the learning and the tools that we’re using and doing? Next slide, please. So I mentioned that I’m not really interested in compliance for me personally as an educator, I don’t really wanna focus my time on catching cheaters, looking at data timestamps. For me that’s a deficit first approach. Now that isn’t to say I don’t value integrity, of course I do. That isn’t to say that I don’t want learners to be empowered by their own creativity and reflection. Of course I do, but I don’t wanna spend my time looking at reports and trying to figure out if something was generated by AI or not. I’d rather do that pause and ponder stuff that I talked about earlier, which is a little bit of contemplation.

So really reinforcing transparency, talking openly about through pedagogical conversation and partnership, what the learning values are for that experience, that time and place. Having that dialogue about whether or why AI is or isn’t a good tool for what we’re doing together. Involving some kind of reflection and metacognition. So if we are using these tools, if we’re even just considering using them, if we aren’t both ways, why? How are our choices impacting the process that we’re undergoing? And again, regardless of whether AI is involved or not, always taking a human-centered caring approach. All right, next slide, please. And for me, what emerges from that approach is a space where educators and learners can focus on process, can focus on their choices, can think critically about things like purpose, not just what they’re doing, but why they’re doing it. And so we all together become aware of some of our unconscious habits, the things that we skip, the patterns that we default to, the moments where we’re all truly engaged versus on autopilot. And AI complicates all those things, right?

Sometimes it’s involved in ways we don’t even know or we don’t consciously consider. But when we take it to critical thinking and consciousness, things become pedagogically visible. And there’s power in that visibility and transparency. And that power comes from learners and educators understanding that knowledge making is active, intentional work. It’s not passive consumption. And so the real crux of the thing is here that it’s not really about AI, it’s about cultivating learners and educators who are awake to their own processes, who can name their choices and who can evaluate the impact of those choices on the learning process. And that’s what’s important, that’s what transfers and that’s what’s empowering regardless of tools or technology. And last slide from me. All right, so what does all this make possible? This is philosophical, Karen’s gonna do more of the practical. But what are these approaches doing for us? When we’re slowing down, when we’re prioritizing process. When we’re promoting transparency and trust, we’re allowing, we’re inviting, just like we’re doing here today with you, learners to become co-investigators of their own learning and their processes. We’re leaving behind those false binaries where we’ve got rule followers or potential cheaters. We’re promoting transparency about the process. We’re replacing things like detection and policing with things like process and learning and care. And we’re not focused on the assignments, the interactions as products.

– Okay, the chat is lively, the chat is lively . As I suspected it would be. And I am learning and I’m seeing different stances. And I’m gonna start today by sharing my stance. So to be honest, for the past three years, whenever this sort of took off, I have been taking the stance of the ostrich. I was still dealing with pandemic problems, So I was just like, “I don’t wanna talk about AI, I don’t wanna think about AI. Maybe if I ignore it, it’s gonna go away.” And it hasn’t. And you’ve might’ve seen me post on social media. I’ve been teaching online asynchronous… I’ve been teaching since 2006 and teaching online asynchronous since 2008. And this term has been by far the most challenging term of my career. And that has forced me to this sort of reckoning of asking questions about what can I do, what can’t I do and my own relationship to AI. So on the left, you’ll see a LinkedIn post, it is linked in the speaker’s notes. One of the questions that I am asking myself is, what if the critical AI skill for this era is not about how to use it, but how to resist it? I am particularly very concerned about some of the job implications in terms of mass unemployment as AI appears to – there’s a lot of smoke and mirrors out there in the AI game

– but appears to be replacing not only human jobs, but entire job sectors. And that is deeply concerning to me. At the same time, another part of my stance is this combination of resisting and regulating. I’m feeling extremely curious about where the learning management system leaders are on this. Particularly as we’re seeing the influx of agentic AI where students can kind of pass over, what’s the word? I’m losing my words. They can pass over their agency, they can pass their approach over, control, I heard that word before, of their browser over to an AI and have it go in. I saw a report of somebody completing a Coursera course using an AI agent in 16 seconds. So Anna Mill, I don’t know if Anna’s here today, Anna Mills is on LinkedIn and is taking a lead in this conversation. This morning I took a minute to throw together the estimated public valuations of three of our biggest learning management companies, Instructure, D2L, and Anthology. You can see here, they are totaled in the billions. And up on the top left, you’ll see my current evaluation is $3,000 per course. So the math ain’t math in here for me, in that the learning management systems appear to me to be making their stance appears to be for faculty to put some pedagogy on it. And that’s not working for me. So I really wanna, I am increasingly asking and calling for our learning management systems to step up here and support online educators. Okay, so now that we got that out of the way, the promised practical strategies.

So I’m not an expert on AI, I’m not sure I even believe there are such things in terms of teaching and learning in that this is such a new thing and things are changing by the day. But I’m gonna share with you how I’m thinking about it. I have been teaching online async for quite some time and what I’m doing. And this approach is really, I want to put tools in the hands of online asynchronous educators to get you through the next day. Because if you’re like me, you’re feeling like that’s a question mark. Like how am I gonna get through this experience teaching. This is really, really hard. So that’s what these slides are geared toward. So save your bandwidth and remember that this is hard, emotional work. So teaching has been increasingly relational work. And with the, you know, certainly the pandemic, which persists, and I won’t even begin to name all of our current challenges, showing up and learning with our students is hard, emotional work.

So I want you to think about organizing your AI strategy so that you’re taking care of your bandwidth as much as possible. One of the ways I do that is I have created in the past month a Notion… I’ve always had a Notion, not always, but I’ve long had a Notion page for my teaching. So I’m an adjunct. I teach at multiple institutions. I think a lot of us teaching online async are at more than one institution. I have all of my places where I teach with things like grading deadlines. Who do I contact for this? Common issues that I need to, like student services office. I have that organized in a Notion page. I have recently created a Notion page just for the places where I teach their academic integrity policies and their artificial intelligence policies. Because what was happening was every time something would happen in one of my courses, which is daily, right? I was like, “Oh my God, this again, I don’t wanna deal with this.” And then I would have to scramble and find all the stuff that I needed to, you know, to be helpful and follow the rules of that institution and to best support that student and myself. And I would redo that every single time. I’ve taken that out of the equation and everything is in one place. So I do it in Notion, which is the database management tool. I love Notion. You could do that in a Google doc. I suppose do it in your bookmarks or analog, but don’t try to figure out the whole AI scheme every time there’s a new issue because you’ll be spending most of your time doing that.

So as I said, I have links to all of my institution’s AI policies. And by AI I mean both artificial intelligence and academic integrity. I also have started developing outreach language. So I have announcements, discussions, emails, and I’m saving the language so that I can use them from term to term and I can repeat them throughout my course. And I am being more proactive about telling students what the policy is in my course and why that policy is. And that language looks something like, “Part of the reason that you can’t use AI in these ways is because I believe in your capability and I believe in you, and I want you to learn and grow.” So I’m giving them the why. And this is everywhere, this is in course announcements, discussions, emails. I’m seeing lots of hearts. I’m glad that’s resonating with people. So I was being very reactive and ostrich like before, it’s now like upfront, let’s talk about it, wherever I can put it. I also have language that I have saved for responding to student submissions. And this is a fraught topic of course, I don’t think we can know with any degree of certainty whether students are using AI. And in particular, I’m now getting tons of reports of students who are saying, “Well, I used Grammarly,” or “I used Copilot.” Like, the lines are just, they’re not blurring, they’re exploding. So however, when I feel like there’s a communication that needs to take place with a student for whatever reason, I have language for myself that I can reuse.

So I have certain generic language that I can use, maybe linking them to tutoring services, for example. And then I might personalize it in some way. So I’m doing anything I can here, you can see, to maintain my energy reserves as I do this hard emotional work. The other thing I’ve started to do is we all have sort of that our brains all have that negativity bias. And some of us were blessed with more of that than others. I am trying to remind myself when I spend time in one of my online courses, when I would see what appeared to be an AI generated submission, it would feel like all of my students were doing that. And that’s really not the case. So something I’ve started to do is to be more intentional about tracking how many times I’m seeing this in my courses, and noticing all of the students who are, you know, genuinely engaging in the course and just celebrating the positives as much as possible.

Okay, tip number two is step away from the internet. So I try to give myself… The answers to this I don’t think are gonna be found by doom scrolling. I say that because I’ve tried or trying to read every single thing that’s been written on the topic that’s online. I tried that and that did not work. So this has been what’s helped me. I try to take a 24 hour break once per week. Usually for me that is like Saturday into Sunday where I’m not in my classes and I need to do that for myself and I need to do that for my students. Ind also take daily downtime so I’m not in my classes after dinner. This is gonna look different for everybody, but I wanna share this with you to get you to think about, we need breaks from this now more than ever. Online async professors are notorious for not taking breaks. That’s not our fault, it’s just the way things are. But I really wanna encourage you to think about finding a long break once a week and some daily downtime. I also want folks to think about their consume, to create, to chill ratio. A lot of us are consuming so much information through the aforementioned doom scrolling or trying to read everything on AI, on the entire internet. And our brains just aren’t designed to hold that much information. So I look for ways to limit the consumption and to increase my creation, which is expressing things, whether it’s about, you know, higher ed through my writing or through workshops like this or other ways that I create, like going to a pottery class. I try to make sure I’m putting out as much as I’m bringing in. And then of course making, I’m not a good, I have ADHD so rest is a fraught topic for me. But things like playing a video game is one of the ways that I wind down. So checking in on how much you’re consuming is important. I recently started back with my morning pages. Where are my morning pages folks? I’d love to hear from you.

Morning pages is the work of Julia Cameron. I’ve linked it in the speaker’s notes. It’s three pages of free writing every morning. And for me, the first two pages is to complain about all the things in the world that I can’t do anything about. And then the last one to half page is, what can I do? This is the best way I found ever to figure out an answer to that question of what’s my role? I can’t save the world. I cannot fix AI. I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you cannot fix AI. But what can you do? You can do your part. And the morning pages are a system for figuring out what that part is. And then as the kiddos say, “Touch grass,” get outside, or I have been going on a coffee date with myself once a week. Get out of… A lot of us work from home, us online async folks. So to the extent possible, step away from your devices and go out into the world.

Okay, tip three, friction. Has anybody else heard the word friction more in the past month than their entire life? I have, it’s the new buzzword in AI. Yep, I’m seeing some thumbs up. So friction is, a few words about friction. So part of my background is in mind, brain, and education science. So I have a certificate in neuroscience learning and online instruction. And what we know is that learning happens when you have that feeling of reaching, I don’t know how to do it, I don’t know how to do it. Oh, I, oh, now I know how to do it. It’s that feeling of reach. That feeling is learning happening in your brain that reach or trying to recall something is learning. So we need friction. We need that feeling of, I can’t figure this out, in order to lay down those neural pathways. And AI, as far as I can see in many cases, is often a frictionless experience. So we’ve gotta sort of look for ways that we can build… There’s no learning without that moment of friction. So we’ve gotta look for ways we can build that into our courses.

Another thing I’m thinking about is the old saying that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. So I’m really, I align with Niya in this way. I have no interest in… I have zero interest in policing my students. I don’t wanna do that. I wanna work with them and meet them where they are and help them learn and grow. So I’m looking at things like that proactive outreach and how I’m designing my assessments and my assignments in order to best support my students. I’m hearing a lot, I saw this going on in the chat, this question of trust. I trust my students, but I do not expect purity from them. So I do not expect my students to resist apps and software and programs that were designed by armies of behavioral scientists hired by billionaires in order to create the most addictive products in the history of humankind. I do not expect my students to resist that. I trust my students, but I do not expect them to resist those temptations. So I’m going to be putting increasingly friction in between them and those less helpful uses of AI as much as possible. One of the things I’m planning on next term is starting to require Google Docs history as a way to add some friction in between students and AI choices. So I’ll report back on that and let folks know how it goes. I’ll be trying that at one of the places where I teach research methods and I’m hoping that it adds just that layer of friction that puts a pause in between students and the frictionless AI.

Okay, tip four is to practice openness and relevance in our teaching. I have a link in the speaker’s notes to one of my projects from one of the courses I teach called Active Hope that y’all can check out and borrow and rework. This is what I do in one of my discussions. I call it KWLR. I love an acronym. I ask students, what did you know about this topic before this week? What did you wanna know? What did you learn and what aspect of the reading or which reading stood out to you and why? So this is very open. These are the best discussions I’ve ever had in 15 years of teaching online. And they seem to be authentic, more so than in other discussions. I have a course I inherited where the discussion is very prescriptive, very traditional, very specific. It’s not performing well. I am seeing a lot of what I suspect are AI generated responses. So I will be using KWLR. It’s a process, but it’s been interesting to have the comparison because the more open discussion is performing very well. I’ve also found that my term-long, iterative, student-designed, local action projects, and I’ve given you an example in the speaker’s notes, are performing very, very well. Students get to choose their topic. They design a solution to a local problem. They call in resources, they do all sorts of research. I structure it week to week. You can again borrow it. It’s in the speaker’s notes. I am seeing those perform very well and I’m getting some really authentic and engaged student responses. Okay, I promised 20 minutes, we’re gonna be able to do 23. So I’m gonna be opening it up to questions and discussion. Before I do, a reminder, if you came in late, we have a LinkedIn group set up. This is a group to continue the conversation about teaching online, designing online, async. Dasha has already got me covered. Dasha’s always one step ahead of me. And if you’re interested in pitching a webinar to OneHE contact Dasha and we’re eager to keep the conversation going. Okay, so questions and discussion. So we’ve got some guidelines for folks. We’ve got a very big group here. So we need everybody to remember that you live in a society, okay? We’re gonna all be on our best behavior. My son loves that, I’m always yell… When I’m driving, that’s my most used line. I’m yelling at, I don’t give people the finger, I yell, “We live in a society.” So yes, please remember you live in a society. If you would like to ask a question or to share out, please raise your Zoom hand, okay? Please, that will bring you on audio so folks will be able to hear your voice. If you are sharing out that way, please share the air and honor time constraints. We have a very large group. We will navigate between Zoom hands and the Q and A. More a comment than a question is very welcome here. So again, Niya and I don’t have all the answers, so if you have a comment that you would like to share, please do so. And you can respond to other people in the Q and A. And finally we ask, we know everybody’s gotta make a living, but no sales pitches here today, please. So a couple questions for you to think about that you might wanna use to guide your shares. What’s going well? What hurts? Practical strategies. What’s feeling scary? What do you wish your admins were doing? What can you do? What can you offer? And what do you need? Okay, I see questions coming into the Q and A. Oh, I see a hand raised. Okay, how do I find, oh, it’s Jeff. And Jeff, you are allowed to talk. Jeff, hi.

– [Niya] I unmuted you Jeff.

– [Jeff] I will share on the what do you wish your administrators, executive leaders were doing? I am feeling very strongly that disclosure is key to a lot of things here. That when students complain about faculty using AI or when I complain about the email newsletter from administrators being AI, what I want to see is all of us building a habit of affirmatively disclosing our AI use, even when the answer is none. So that we notice when we have, let’s call it emotional friction. So if I’m about to say, “Here’s how I used AI,” and I’m hesitant to say it out loud, that’s a really strong signal that I need to slow down and think about what I’m doing. Or if I’m happy to tell people how I used AI, then I think go for it and we can have a conversation. And the person at the other end can decide how they feel about that and what kind of conversation they wanna have. But I think we gotta model this for our students. Not in the classroom, not just in the classroom, but across the entire university. I wanna know when someone emails me with AI, I wanna know when they write a report with AI and I just them to tell me, I don’t wanna stop them. I just wanna know.

– Jeff, thank you so much. What a lovely way to start off our audience participation. Jeff, you have some fans. Jeff, we don’t mean this a bad way, but I need to like un… Okay, I’m gonna mute you again. Okay, thank you. I love that. Somebody said in a workshop I was in the other day, you know, this question of like shame is part of it. And I, you know, that brought up a lot for me in that I don’t wanna shame my students, but I also think a certain amount of guilt, guilt can be a very adaptive emotion too. So that feeling you just shared of like, if I’m like hesitant to share this, then that’s an interesting thing for me to reflect on. But those situations where I might be like, “Yeah, absolutely, I did use it.” And I also love what you said about disclose if you didn’t use it. So Niya, I don’t think we used any AI. This is a shock since this was, you know, such an advanced presentation. But no, I don’t think we used any AI in this today.

– home grown. first. We did use some.

– Yeah, awesome.

– We did use some.

– Okay, I’m gonna take a look at the Q and A and if folks want to raise their little Zoom hand and come on and chat like Jeff did. Jeff modeled that for us and that was awesome. Elizabeth asked, “What do people think about BoodleBox as they seem a bit different from other Ed tech companies?” I have never heard of it. Niya, have you heard of it?

– Never.

– Okay, Toyah is in the chat or in the Q and A and responded to you, Elizabeth. So I hope you got some feedback from Toyah. Yeah, my concern about, oh, there’s more… Oh, Flower is excited about BoodleBox. Okay, I’m gonna have to check that out. You know, my fear about that, some people know where I’m going with this. I’ve had two really Google Jamboard and a product called Kahoot that I kind of loved. My two little ed tech babies and they’ve gone away. So I’m like really hesitant to fall in love with any products because I’m afraid that they’ve gone away or that they will go away. Constantine, “Have you all tried Perplexity Comet Browser and seen how it can find outstanding quizzes, discussions, and then redirections, et cetera, et cetera?” Yes, I posted a video on LinkedIn the other day with a Facebook ad from Perplexity’s Comet Browser where it’s saying like, “Wanna kick back and relax while your courses get taken, you know, AI does your courses for you?” And my understanding is this is being, there’s multimillion dollar ad spends on social media advertising that. So Constantine, thank you for asking that. “What does this say about any value that async online has in the age of AI?” What it says to me is that it’s why we’re here today. It’s why we need to continue to ask and demand learning management system folks to step up. It’s why we need our executive leaders to step up as well and support us. I’m not a fan of one size fits all solutions, but every department, division, school institution needs to understand the reality of agentic, all AI, but certainly agentic AI. And I will continue to fight for online async because it provides access to so many students who would otherwise not be able to access it. And that’s not something I’m gonna give up. Okay, Liz, can we unmute Liz? Liz is here. Hi, Liz.

– Hello.

– Hi. What do you wanna share with us?

– [Liz] Can I tell on my camera? I don’t know if I can.

– No, you can’t. I’m sorry, we tried.

– You can’t do that in webinar, but we can hear your lovely voice.

– [Liz] Okay, well, I just wanted to say, and this is definitely in the more of a comment than a question, but I’m just thinking about how overwhelmed so many of us are feeling about all the AI stuff and I want us to also think about how each of us having our own kind of relationship to AI and policies around AI creates an awful lot of noise for our students. So I definitely agree with you, Karen, about like, you know, we wanna trust students, but we also need to, you know, be aware that, you know, sometimes they’re going to use tools in ways we may not want, but it may also be that they just like can’t keep straight which professors want you to or not want you to or disclose or don’t disclose. So I just wanted to add to that thought into this great discussion.

– Thank you so much, Liz. It was great to hear from you. Yeah, I wanna say something, then, Niya, I wanna check in with you on this. That’s what I shared with you all about, like creating my little dashboard with all my AI stuff and coming up with all that proactive feedback that was born of me feeling like I was starting to be so overwhelmed by this that I knew it was starting to roll off onto my students. And what I saw somebody mention, Michelle Pacansky-Brock’s, “Humanizing Online Learning” earlier, I cannot, like, again, I keep repeating this to myself, I cannot solve AI. Like I cannot fix AI. Okay, this is bigger than my courses. It’s bigger than any one institution. It’s bigger than higher ed. I cannot fix AI, but I can care for my students. So I caught myself I think getting frustrated with my students when I suspected AI, that frustration is valid, but I am being more intentional about where I’m putting that, like my morning pages and front loading care for my students. So I really appreciate that Liz. Liz, you can maybe see in her profile picture a book called “The Present Professor.” Niya, did you wanna say anything about that idea of like all the noise and how it’s impacting our students?

– I think you spoke pretty well for me. I think that’s why I’m going to the relational elements, especially because at least in my case as an online adjunct, I don’t get to control curriculum. I teach what they call the canned courses. So some of those courses require AI integration and I have no choice about it. But the way that I talk to learners about it, the way that I help them reflect on it, the way that we try to make sense of the chaos together in a caring way is basically how I’m handling it.

– Awesome, and the chat, I mean, the chat’s just like an entire world. I wanna answer Allison’s question here. Allison said, “Regarding your KWLR,” I like this question because it’s something I know the answer to. Allison, thank you for this. It feels like a concrete question. We love it. “Do you provide guidance to students for peer responses? If so, what does that look like?” Yes, the guidance, I use a three part recommendation for student responses in online async discussions. The first is, I encourage them to reflect back what they heard in their own words or what they read I should say. Put what you read into your own words. The second is compare and contrast what that student said with your experience. So what’s similar and what’s dissimilar. And then the third is to ask questions to further the conversation. And that has just like Alison, the thing about the KWLR is they’re just very organic and honest. And I am creating a space where students are saying, “I don’t know. I didn’t know anything about this and I want to learn this.” Rather than expecting them to say, “Oh, I know the answer to this.” It’s a space where they can say, “I don’t know.” And that’s creating really interesting peer responses. So I think it’s kind of teeing them up for interesting responses, okay. Niya, if you see anything in the Q and A or if I miss a hand or anything, just yell at me. Oh, “Maha I saw that question.” Okay, done. Bonnie asked a question. “Can I say that bit again about trusting students, but not apt developers funded by billionaires?” Yes, I trust my students, but I think it’s unrealistic of me to expect of any person to resist these products that are being designed to hook us. So I mean, this is, we know that the people who designed the things that are feeding on our dopamine needs, after they make their first few million designing it, then a couple years later they usually write a book telling us how to resist it and make their next few millions. So yeah, there are teams, armies of behavioral scientists and folks who are hired to design these things to make them irresistible. So no, I don’t expect my students to resist that. I just don’t, I trust them to be human and to make the best choices they can. If you’ve seen this, please post it in the chat. There was something the other day about how ChatGPT is designed to keep you talking to it. And that has stopped me from like 90% of my use. ’cause I’m like, oh no, you’re not tricking me. Because do you notice how I… And I do use it, I didn’t use it today. Thank you, Jeff, for asking me to be accountable. It’ll keep the conversation going. It’ll say, “Well, would you like me to do this? Would you like me to do this?” And I’ve said to it a hundred times, don’t ask me questions. It keeps doing it. It’s deep, deep, deep in its programming. It wants to keep you on there. So yeah. Thank you, Bonnie. I’m glad that was helpful for me to reiterate. Okay. There’s a lot of questions in here. I’m trying to find the ones that don’t have people who’ve responded. Okay, Amy. Hi, Amy. “What is compelling to instructors who want to use AI detectors and report all instances uses to their academic integrity units for plagiarism?” I don’t know. Niya, do you know?

– [Niya] I think, I wanna hope that it’s coming from a space of goodness. People want authenticity. They want people to experience the beauty of creating something on their own. But that feels a little policey to me. I don’t know.

– Yeah, you know, that was a nice frame to, and a generous frame. So I appreciate that. I don’t know, I don’t know. I think I’ll point to what Niya said and hoping it is coming from a good place. I don’t have that compulsion, quite the opposite. It’s literally the last thing that I want to do. It’s time consuming. It’s not what I signed up for and yeah… Allison is saying there, and I’m sure there’s academic integrity folks here. Allison is saying that some places use a restorative justice approach. And other times not so much. So Allison and Amy, you all might wanna connect and thank you Allison for that lens. I’m familiar with restorative justice, but not in the context of academic integrity. So yeah, for me it’s just, there’s not enough hours in the day. Like there’s so much I wanna do in my courses that I don’t have time to do. Like I wrote a book about making videos. In two of my courses I haven’t added the videos that I wanna add. You know, like that’s a priority for me because I know that that is so important to my students and to their learning experience and to my creativity. So any, you know, I don’t wanna be pulled out from that. Oh, we have a Zoom hand. Joseph allowed to talk. Hi Joseph.

– Hello. Can you hear me?

– I can hear you and I’m so excited to hear you. How are you?

– I’m going to be bold. First off, I appreciate both you and Niya for making this space.

– Oh, thank you so much, Joseph.

– [Joseph] It’s been beautiful. Something that has really been sitting, has been irking me, is an insidious notion of the commodification of time and how this has kind of insidiously played into our learners’ minds about how if something is taking me long to do something, I’m bad at it. And I really appreciated your comment on productive pauses. But my concern is in the asynchronous online context I’m having.. and I’m also an instructional designer, I want to create or design more spaces for them to sit in the beauty of the slowness of things, you know? And how to design in the cold, awful place that our LMS is, spaces of community where sitting and pausing is a cherished activity. Not something that is taking away from them doing something else. So like, would love to collaborate or talk about how to turn learning management spaces into these spaces of slow work. ‘Cause I think it is so important to combat the rush of generative AI.

– [Niya] I’m with you. And a lot of it’s a us are talking about assessment, right? Because sometimes that’s where our brains go as educators. But I think what you said about creating alternative spaces, that might be like where the magic is in the future. So I’m really glad you reminded us that there’s other interactions that are valuable.

– Joseph, thank you so much. I’m obsessed with what you just said. And I wanna mention there is someone I’ve been following on LinkedIn named Brielle Harbin. I’m trying to, like, my desktop is wild right now. I’m grabbing Brielle’s LinkedIn. I reposted something Brielle wrote this morning about a professor she had heard of had students read in… This was an onsite synchronous class, but she had them read together. And she wrote a really beautiful post about slowing down. And I need to think about that for online async. And if folks have ideas about that, please share them in the chat. I think one of the places where I would start that is by talking to my students about it. Which, when I’m stumped on something, that’s usually my favorite thing to do is talk to my students about it. So they’ll know the answer. But yes, I agree with you. I think that’s really… These AI are so fast. They’re not only fast in the responses they give us, but the development of them. Like, I feel like I get like a little bit of a grasp on something and then the next thing comes. So I love this idea of like slowness as part of our resistance. I see a Zoomie hand. I’m gonna, Anastacia you are able to share. Can you hear me, Anastasia?

– [Anastasia] Yes. Can you hear me?

– I can. Thanks for sharing. What did you wanna share with folks?

– [Anastasia] Just to piggyback off of my fellow instructional designer, I am also trying to create spaces where students kind of slow down and I have them sit with either a YouTube video or an Instagram reel. Somebody that’s kind of sensitive and really investigate what they just heard, like to substantiate some of the claims that they heard or possibly find something against that claim. And instead of just, you know, we look at social media as this instant thing that we just kind of scroll past, but you know, really be intentional about who you follow, whether they’re communicating, you know, like I follow the people that are trying to restore native grasslands in the south and I do listen to everything that they say and then I go on to Claude and we figured it all out. We can restore the Everglades against big sugar. We can do all the things with red tide and you can just find all the answers. But to use AI for good I think is really important. And I learned AI from IBM and from OpenAI and from Google and all the developers, our students are learning AI from social media. I think we need to learn AI so we can teach our students how to use AI and to be really intentional with it. So I teach information literacy and I also teach AI literacy in my first year writing courses. They have exercises where I guide them through how to use AI models and then they have the option to use that exercise as part of their assignment. They don’t have to, the students really like choice. Some of them are very conscientious objectors, but they do like being guided on how to use AI. And I have good conversations with them. I use it all the time. And I tell them when I’m disappointed, when I find it successful. And please check out APA and AI Citation ’cause they went .. they just updated in September. You have to make your chat public and then you share it. And so that way you can see the prompts, you can see the output, you can see how both of those were being used in an assignment. And then ask your students to reflect was it useful, was it not useful? Would you use this model? Would you recommend this model? I think that that’s really important.

– Thank you, Anastasia. I appreciate you sharing the sort of how to mindfully engage with teaching it. I am increasingly probably falling into the conscientious objector category and I like that we ended with sort of another perspective. And there’s a lot of information here, which we knew there would be. The LinkedIn group Jason is saying is now at 479 members. So this conversation can continue because Niya and I… Niya has gotta take care of her plants and her kids and some animal that needs her. And I’ve got my 16-year-old. Thank you OneHE for hosting us. Thank you to folks whatever you did here today, we are so appreciative of you. We hope this is helpful. We love our fellow online async educators. Come chat in the group. Keep reaching out to OneHE. Do a webinar for OneHE. I know there’s some webinar folks, lots of brilliant minds here today. And let’s keep taking care of each other and our students as best we can.