Once upon a time, educators worried about the dangers of CliffsNotes — study guides that rendered great works of literature as a series of bullet points that many students used as a replacement for actually doing the reading.

Today, that sure seems quaint.

Suddenly, new consumer AI tools have hit the market that can take any piece of text, audio or video and provide that same kind of simplified summary. And those summaries aren’t just a series of quippy text in bullet points. These days students can have tools like Google’s NotebookLM turn their lecture notes into a podcast, where sunny-sounding AI bots banter and riff on key points. Most of the tools are free, and do their work in seconds with the click of a button.

Naturally, all this is causing concern among some educators, who see students off-loading the hard work of synthesizing information to AI at a pace never before possible.

But the overall picture is more complicated, especially as these tools become more mainstream and their use starts to become standard in business and other contexts beyond the classroom.

And the tools serve as a particular lifeline for neurodivergent students, who suddenly have access to services that can help them get organized and support their reading comprehension, teaching experts say.

“There’s no universal answer,” says Alexis Peirce Caudell, a lecturer in informatics at Indiana University at Bloomington who recently did an assignment where many students shared their experience and concerns about AI tools. “Students in biology are going to be using it in one way, chemistry students are going to be using it in another. My students are all using it in different ways.”

It’s not as simple as assuming that students are all cheaters, the instructor stresses.

“Some students were concerned about pressure to engage with tools — if all of their peers were doing it that they should be doing it even if they felt it was getting in the way of their authentically learning,” she says. They are asking themselves questions like, “Is this helping me get through this specific assignment or this specific test because I’m trying to navigate five classes and applications for internships” — but at the cost of learning?

It all adds new challenges to schools and colleges as they attempt to set boundaries and policies for AI use in their classrooms.

Need for ‘Friction’

It seems like just about every week -— or even every day — tech companies announce new features that students are adopting in their studies.

Just last week, for instance, Apple released Apple Intelligence features for iPhones, and one of the features can recraft any piece of text to different tones, such as casual or professional. And last month ChatGPT-maker OpenAI released a feature called Canvas that includes slider bars for users to instantly change the reading level of a text.

Marc Watkins, a lecturer of writing and rhetoric at the University of Mississippi, says he is worried that students are lured by the time-saving promises of these tools and may not realize that using them can mean skipping the actual work it takes to internalize and remember the material.

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“From a teaching, learning standpoint, that's pretty concerning to me,” he says. “Because we want our students to struggle a little bit, to have a little bit of friction, because that's important for their learning.”

And he says new features are making it harder for teachers to encourage students to use AI in helpful ways — like teaching them how to craft prompts to change the writing level of something: “It removes that last level of desirable difficulty when they can just button mash and get a final draft and get feedback on the final draft, too.”

Even professors and colleges that have adopted AI policies may need to rethink them in light of these new types of capabilities.

As two professors put it in a recent op-ed, “Your AI Policy Is Already Obsolete.”

“A student who reads an article you uploaded, but who cannot remember a key point, uses the AI assistant to summarize or remind them where they read something. Has this person used AI when there was a ban in the class?” ask the authors, Zach Justus, director of faculty development at California State University, Chico, and Nik Janos, a professor of sociology there. They note that popular tools like Adobe Acrobat now have “AI assistant” features that can summarize documents with the push of a button. “Even when we are evaluating our colleagues in tenure and promotion files,” the professors write, “do you need to promise not to hit the button when you are plowing through hundreds of pages of student evaluations of teaching?”

Instead of drafting and redrafting AI policies, the professors argue that educators should work out broad frameworks for what is acceptable help from chatbots.

But Watkins calls on the makers of AI tools to do more to mitigate the misuse of their systems in academic settings, or as he put it when EdSurge talked with him, “to make sure that this tool that is being used so prominently by students [is] actually effective for their learning and not just as a tool to offload it.”

Uneven Accuracy

These new AI tools raise a host of new challenges beyond those at play when printed CliffsNotes were the study tool du jour.

One is that AI summarizing tools don’t always provide accurate information, due to a phenomenon of large language models known as “hallucinations,” when chatbots guess at facts but present them to users as sure things.

When Bonni Stachowiak first tried the podcast feature on Google’s NotebookLM, for instance, she said she was blown away by how lifelike the robot voices sounded and how well they seemed to summarize the documents she fed it. Stachowiak is the host of the long-running podcast, Teaching in Higher Ed, and dean of teaching and learning at Vanguard University of Southern California, and she regularly experiments with new AI tools in her teaching.

But as she tried the tool more, and put in documents on complex subjects that she knew well, she noticed occasional errors or misunderstandings. “It just flattens it — it misses all of this nuance,” she says. “It sounds so intimate because it’s a voice and audio is such an intimate medium. But as soon as it was something that you knew a lot about it’s going to fall flat.”

Even so, she says she has found the podcasting feature of NotebookLM useful in helping her understand and communicate bureaucratic issues at her university — such as turning part of the faculty handbook into a podcast summary. When she checked it with colleagues who knew the policies well, she says they felt it did a “perfectly good job.” “It is very good at making two-dimensional bureaucracy more approachable,” she says.

Peirce Caudell, of Indiana University, says her students have raised ethical issues with using AI tools as well.

“Some say they’re really concerned about the environmental costs of generative AI and the usage,” she says, noting that ChatGPT and other AI models require large amounts of computing power and electricity.

Others, she adds, worry about how much data users end up giving AI companies, especially when students use free versions of the tools.

“We're not having that conversation,” she says. “We're not having conversations about what does it mean to actively resist the use of generative AI?”

Even so, the instructor is seeing positive impacts for students, such as when they use a tool to help make flashcards to study.

And she heard about a student with ADHD who had always found reading a large text “overwhelming,” but was using ChatGPT “to get over the hurdle of that initial engagement with the reading and then they were checking their understanding with the use of ChatGPT.”

And Stachowiak says she has heard of other AI tools that students with intellectual disabilities are using, such as one that helps users break down large tasks into smaller, more manageable sub-tasks.

“This is not cheating,” she stresses. “It’s breaking things down and estimating how long something is going to take. That is not something that comes naturally for a lot of people.”

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An expert shares insight and guidance into an area of growing concern. 

GUEST COLUMN | by Jordan Adair

Artificial intelligence (AI) in higher education continues to expand into more aspects of student learning. Initially, some administrators and faculty pointed to possible data privacy or ethical concerns with AI, but the larger focus now is how generative AI, such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini, makes it easier for students to submit work or assessments that lack original content. 

As AI adoption and academic concerns grow, educators may need to rethink how students learn, how student demonstrate understanding of a topic, and how assessments are designed and administered to measure learning and practical application. This may require institutions to throw out the “business-as-usual” approach, especially when it comes to anything involving writing, whether it’s essays or online exams. 

‘As AI adoption and academic concerns grow, educators may need to rethink how students learn, how student demonstrate understanding of a topic, and how assessments are designed and administered to measure learning and practical application.’

As higher education institutions look to maintain academic integrity, staying ahead of how students use AI is critical. Some tools exist to detect and monitor AI use, but are these tools fixing a problem or leaving a void? 

Getting Ahead of the Game

Institutions should familiarize themselves with the potential of large language models in education and open transparent communication channels to discuss AI with stakeholders, including researchers and IT support. This can help set a baseline for potential policies or actions.

Developing a dedicated committee may be beneficial as institutions create and implement new policies and guidelines for using AI tools, develop training and resources for students, faculty, and staff on academic integrity, and encourage the responsible use of AI in education.

Unlike contract cheating, using AI tools isn’t automatically unethical. On the contrary, as AI will permeate society and professions in the near future, there’s a need to discuss the right and wrong ways to leverage AI as part of the academic experience.

Some AI tools, especially chatbots like ChatGPT, present specific academic integrity challenges. While institutions strive to equip students for an AI-driven future, they also need to ensure that AI doesn’t compromise the integrity of the educational experience. 

Study Results Paint a Grim Picture

As AI evolves and is adopted more broadly, colleges and universities are exploring how to implement better detection methods effectively. While some existing detection tools show promise, they all struggle to identify AI-generated writing accurately.

AI and plagiarism detection are similar but different. Both aim to detect unoriginal content, but their focus is different. AI detection looks for writing patterns, like word choice and sentence structure, to identify AI-generated text. Plagiarism detection compares text against huge databases to identify copied or paraphrased content from other sources.

Looking at a growing level of research, there are strong concerns about these tools’ inabilities to detect AI. One study tested the largest commercial plagiarism and AI detection tool against ChatGPT-generated text. It was found that when text is unaltered, the detection tool effectively detects it as AI-generated. However, when Quillbot paraphrased it, the score dropped to 31% and 0% after two rephrases. Another 2024 experiment of the same AI detection software showed the same results: it can accurately detect unaltered AI content but struggles when tools like Quillbot make changes. Unfortunately, this experiment also highlighted how AI detection is completely unable—with 0% success—to detect AI content that has been altered by AI designed to humanize AI-generated text. 

In another instance, a recent International Journal for Educational Integrity study tested 14 AI detection tools—12 publicly available and two commercial—against ChatGPT:

• AI detection tools are inaccurate: they often mistakenly identify AI-generated text as human-written and struggle to detect AI content translated from other languages.

• Manually editing responses reduces the accuracy of detection tools: swapping words, reordering sentences, and paraphrasing decreased the accuracy of the detection tools.

 

Finally, a 2023 study titled “Will ChatGPT Get You Caught? Rethinking of Plagiarism Detection” fed 50 ChatGPT-generated essays into two text-matching software systems from the largest and most well-known plagiarism tool. The results of the submitted essays “demonstrated a remarkable level of originality stirring up alarms of the reliability of plagiarism check software used by academia.”

AI chatbots are improving at writing, and more effective prompts help them generate more human-like content. In the examples above, AI detection tools from the biggest companies to the free options were tested against various content types, including long-form essays and short-form assignments across different subjects and domains. No matter the size or content type, they all struggled to detect AI. While AI detection tools can help as a high-level gut check, they’re still mostly ineffective, as shown by the many studies.

Up the Ante Against Cheating

Given the ineffectiveness of AI detection tools, academic institutions must consider alternative methods to curb AI usage and protect integrity.

One option is to consider a modified approach to written assignments and essays. Instead of traditional written assessments, try scaffolded assignments that require input on one subject over a series of tests. You can also ask students to share their opinions on specific class discussions or request that they cite examples from class. 

Another option is instructing students to review an article or a case study. Then, ask them to reply to specific questions that require them to think critically and integrate their opinions and reasoning. Doing this makes it challenging to use AI content tools because they do not have enough context to formulate a usable response.

Institutions can also proctor written assignments like an online exam. This helps to block
AI usage and removes access or help from phones. Proctoring can be very flexible, allowing access to specific approved sites, such as case studies, research articles, etc., while blocking everything else.

Protecting Academic Integrity

If proctoring is being used, consider a hybrid proctoring solution that combines AI, human review, and a secure browser rather than just one of those methods. Hybrid proctoring uses
AI to monitor each test taker and alert a live proctor if potential misconduct is detected. Once alerted, the proctor reviews the situation and only intervenes if misconduct is suspected. Otherwise, the test taker isn’t interrupted. This smarter proctoring approach delivers a much less intimidating and noninvasive testing experience than human-only platforms.

Preserving the integrity of exams and protecting the reputation of faculty and institutions is incredibly important to continue attracting high-potential students. AI tools are here to stay; schools don’t need to stay ahead of them. Instead, understand how students use AI, modify how learning is delivered, use AI to your benefit when possible, and create clear and consistent policies so students understand how and where they can ethically leverage the latest in AI.  

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Jordan Adair is VP of Product at Honorlock. Jordan began his career in education as an elementary and middle school teacher. After transitioning into educational technology, he became focused on delivering products designed to empower instructors and improve the student experience. Connect with Jordan on LinkedIn. 

The post Beyond AI Detection: Rethinking Our Approach to Preserving Academic Integrity appeared first on EdTech Digest.

Do new AI tools like ChatGPT actually understand language the same way that humans do?

It turns out that even the inventors of these new large language models are debating that very question — and the answer will have huge implications for education and for all aspects of society if this technology can get to a point where it achieves what is known as Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI.

A new book by one of those AI pioneers digs into the origins of ChatGPT and the intersection of research on how the brain works and building new large language models for AI. It’s called “ChatGPT and the Future of AI,” and the author is Terrence Sejnowski, a professor of biology at the University of California, San Diego, where he co-directs the Institute for Neural Computation and the NSF Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center. He is also the Francis Crick Chair at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.

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Sejnowski started out as a physicist working on the origins of black holes, but early in his career he says he realized that it would be decades before new instruments could be built that could adequately measure the kinds of gravitational waves he was studying. So he switched to neuroscience, hoping to “pop the hood” on the human brain to better understand how it works.

“It seemed to me that the brain was just as mysterious as the cosmos,” he tells EdSurge. “And the advantage is you can do experiments in your own lab, and you don’t have to have a satellite.”

“What has really been revealed is that we don't understand what ‘understanding’ is,”

— Terrence Sejnowski

For decades, Sejnowski has focused on applying findings from brain science to building computer models, working closely at times with the two researchers who just won the Nobel Prize this year for their work on AI, John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton.

These days, computing power and algorithms have advanced to the level where neuroscience and AI are helping to inform each other, and even challenge our traditional understanding of what thinking is all about, he says.

“What has really been revealed is that we don't understand what ‘understanding’ is,” says Sejnowski. “We use the word, and we think we understand what it means, but we don't know how the brain understands something. We can record from neurons, but that doesn't really tell you how it functions and what’s really going on when you’re thinking.”

He says that new chatbots have the potential to revolutionize learning if they can deliver on the promise of being personal tutors to students. One drawback of the current approach, he says, is that LLMs focus on only one aspect of how the human brain organizes information, whereas “there are a hundred brain parts that are left out that are important for survival, autonomy for being able to maintain activity and awareness.” And it’s possible that those other parts of what makes us human may need to be simulated as well for something like tutoring to be most effective, he suggests.

The researcher warns that there are likely to be negative unintended consequences to ChatGPT and other technologies, just as social media led to the rise of misinformation and other challenges. He says there will need to be regulation, but that “we won't really know what to regulate until it really is out there and it's being used and we see what the impact is, how it's used.”

But he predicts that soon most of us will no longer use keyboards to interact with computers, instead using voice commands to have dialogues with all kinds of devices in our lives. “You’ll be able to go into your car and talk to the car and say, ‘How are you feeling today?’ [and it might say,] ‘Well, we're running low on gas.’ Oh, OK, where's the nearest gas station? Here, let me take you there.”

Listen to our conversation with Sejnowski on this week’s EdSurge Podcast, where he describes research to more fully simulate human brains. He also talks about his previous project in education, a free online course he co-teaches called “Learning How to Learn,” which is one of the most popular courses ever made, with more than 4 million students signed up over the past 10 years.

© K illustrator Photo / Shutterstock

In recent years, a growing body of research has looked at the impact of college ‘deserts’ — sometimes defined as an area where people live more than a 30-minute drive to a campus — and found that those residing close to a college are more likely to attend. But a new study shows that these higher education deserts affect some groups of students much differently than others.

The study, which looked at a rich set of high school and college data in Texas, found that Black and Hispanic students and those in low-income families who lived more than 30 miles from a public two-year college were significantly less likely to attend college. But white and Asian students in those same communities were slightly more likely than other students in the state to complete four-year degrees, meaning that the lack of a nearby two-year option seemed to increase the likelihood of moving away to attend college.

“While all students who live in a community college desert are less likely to complete an associate’s degree, their alternative enrollment and degree completion outcomes vary sharply by race-ethnicity and [socioeconomic status],” the study finds. In other words, for low-income and underrepresented minority groups, living near a community college can be a crucial way to gain access to any higher education. Meanwhile, such proximity might lead students in other groups to attend two-year college rather than pursue a four-year degree.

The results are particularly important at a time when more colleges are struggling to remain open, says Riley Acton, an assistant professor of economics at Miami University in Ohio and one of the researchers who worked on the new study.

“If you don't have a car in rural Texas, that's going to be a very hard barrier to overcome” without some sort of help.

— Riley Acton, an assistant professor of economics at Miami University in Ohio

“If a public institution in particular, let's say a public community college, is thinking about closing, or is thinking about merging, or is thinking about opening a new campus or consolidating campuses,” she says, “they should be mindful about who the students are that live near those different campuses.”

The researchers also suggest that colleges should consider providing transportation options or credits to students living in college deserts. “If you don't have a car in rural Texas, that's going to be a very hard barrier to overcome” without some sort of help, Acton notes.

Novel Finding

Meanwhile, Black and Hispanic students are more likely than those in other groups to live in a college desert, according to research by Nicholas Hillman, a professor of educational policy at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who was one of the first researchers to draw attention to the effects of college location on educational attainment, back in 2016.

In an interview with EdSurge, Hillman says that the implications of Acton’s new study are “really interesting,” adding that it is probably the largest quantitative study to take on the question of how college deserts affect different groups differently.

“It makes clear that, ‘Wait a minute, distance is different for different groups of students,’” Hillman says.

One takeaway for Hillman is the importance of making the transfer process from two-year colleges to four-year institutions more frictionless, so that students who live near two-year colleges who are more likely to start there have ample opportunity to go on to get a four-year degree.

Hillman says that he began looking at geography out of frustration with an emphasis during the Obama administration on providing consumer information about higher education as a solution to college access. For instance, one major initiative started during that time was the College Scorecard, which provides information on college options based on various government datasets.

“The dominant narrative was, ‘If students just have better info about where to go to college, more would go,’” he says. “I said, ‘This is bananas. This is not how it works.’”

He grew up in northern Indiana, where the nearest college is 40 miles away. For people he knew there, information about college was not what was keeping them from enrolling. “If you don’t have a job, you’re not going to be spending all this money on gas to go to college,” he says.

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When Gina Petersen graduated with her associate degree from Kirkwood Community College two years ago, she described it as “the biggest accomplishment I have ever done.”

As a returning adult college student, she had struggled to fit her studies in part time, online, while working as a trainer for a tech company. She had gotten that job through connections, and she hoped that a college degree would be a big help if she ever needed to find a new job in the future.

We told the story of Petersen’s college journey — which took her more than seven years and a couple of false starts to complete — as part of a three-part podcast series we did in 2022 called Second Acts.

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For this week’s episode of the EdSurge Podcast, we checked back in with Petersen to see what the degree has meant for her professional and personal life.

And we found that the credential has not opened as many doors as she had hoped.

A few months after we last talked to Gina, she got laid off from her training job after 10 years at the company. And at first she quickly found a project manager position through her networks. But she felt the job wasn’t a good fit, so she quit after a little more than a year, hoping she’d quickly find another position.

What she encountered, however, was a job market that suddenly felt much more daunting.

“I’ve sent my resume to, I’d say, 150 different places for 150 different roles, and yet, nothing,” she says, even after getting professional help crafting her resume.

What’s worse, she says, she has been ghosted by employers when she does get initial interest. “I’ve had two people reach out for phone interviews and say, ‘Yes’ and confirm, and then I literally don’t get called,” she says.

Petersen is not alone, according to labor market experts.

Guy Berger, director of economic research at the Burning Glass Institute, notes that because it has become easier to apply for jobs, thanks to one-click applications on company websites and the growth of platforms like Linkedin, job seekers have more opportunities than ever. But they also have to work harder to find the right fit as a result. Whereas once it might be common to apply to 15 jobs, now it’s not unusual to have to apply to more than 150, he says.

“Now, you’re applying to a lot more things – you’re getting more cracks at the bat — but you’re just getting a lot more rejections,” Berger says.

That can feel demoralizing to job candidates, he adds, while also hard for employers as they struggle to sift through a flood of applicants.

Meanwhile, Berger says that the number of jobs for recent graduates has fallen in recent years, and just having a degree is not as guaranteed a “meal ticket” as in the past.

“College graduates still get generally better-paying jobs than people who don’t have a college degree, and there’s a wider range of opportunities available to them when they’re looking for a job,” he says. “But if you’re looking at how much of a boost it provides, probably it’s smaller than it was in the past.”

Even so, Petersen says she is glad she got her degree, as she learned valuable skills in college that she put to use in her job. But she isn’t looking to go back for more higher education at this point.

Hear more about Petersen’s search, trends in hiring and what colleges can do to respond to this changing landscape on this week’s EdSurge Podcast.

Check out the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or on the player below.

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When Robert Ubell first applied for a job at a university's online program back in the late ’90s, he had no experience with online education. But then again, hardly anyone else did either.

First of all, the web was still relatively new back then (something like the way AI chatbots are new today), and only a few colleges and universities were even trying to deliver courses on it. Ubell’s experience was in academic publishing, and he had recently finished a stint as the American publisher of Nature magazine and was looking for something different. He happened to have some friends at Stanford University who had shown him what the university was doing using the web to train workers at local factories and high-tech businesses, and he was intrigued by the potential.

So when he saw that Stevens Institute of Technology had an opening to build online programs, he applied, citing the weekend he spent observing Stanford’s program.

“That was my only background, my only experience,” he says, “and I got the job.”

And as at many college campuses at the time, Ubell faced resistance from the faculty.

“Professors were totally opposed,” he says, fearing that the quality would never be as good as in-person teaching.

The story of how higher ed went from a reluctant innovator to today — when more than half of American college students take at least one online course — offers plenty of lessons for how to try to bring new teaching practices to colleges.

One big challenge that has long faced online learning is who will pay the costs of building something new, like a virtual campus.

Ubell points to philanthropic foundations as key to helping many colleges, including Stevens, take their first steps into online offerings.

And it turns out that the most successful teachers in the new online format weren’t ones who were the best with computers or the most techy, says Frank Mayadas, who spent 17 years at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation giving out grants hoping to spark adoptions of online learning.

“It was the faculty who had a great conviction to be good teachers who were going to be good no matter how they did it,” says Mayadas. “If they were good in the classroom, they were usually good online.”

We dig into the bumpy history of online higher education on this week’s EdSurge Podcast. And we hear what advice online pioneers have for those trying the latest classroom innovations.

Check out the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or on the player below.

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Encouraging students to complete work outside of class has always been a struggle.

But many college professors say it has gotten even harder in recent years as students prioritize their mental health, have trouble adhering to deadlines and are more skeptical of the purpose of homework.

One cause is the pandemic, and how it disrupted middle and high school for today’s traditional-aged college students. Students who spent formative years learning online may be too nervous to raise a hand in class or have trouble paying attention. With the flexibility that came with pandemic-era school, they’re not used to firm deadlines or strict grading.

Today’s students also report greater mental health struggles, which some experts attribute to excessive social media use.

Then there’s the sudden temptation of ChatGPT and other new AI tools, which can make cheating on assignments easy and often undetectable.

Together, these factors have brewed a “perfect storm” of challenges keeping students from doing homework, says Jenae Cohn, the executive director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of California at Berkeley.

“Maybe 20 years ago or 15 years ago, students were kind of like, ‘Oh, yeah, I'm doing a thing because she told me to do it. I think there's less willingness to just do the thing because somebody told you to do it.”

— Sarah Z. Johnson, a writing instructor and chair of the writing center at Madison Colleg

“It all sort of feels bundled together,” Cohn says. “This is a sequence of events where learning and environments for learning just feel harder and harder to cultivate.”

But complaining about students isn’t the answer, Cohn and other teaching experts say.

Instead, college instructors need to change how they assign and communicate their homework assignments. And they argue that teachers at the college level should now essentially teach the study skills that students might not have learned in school before arriving on campuses.

Teaching The Why

Sarah Z. Johnson, a writing instructor and chair of the writing center at Madison College, has noticed that many of her students have a much lower tolerance for routine assignments, some of which they see as busy work.

She often has to explain to students that her assignments will build the skills for the work they’ll do later in the year. She says that helps convince students that doing the work now will help them later. And if a student doesn’t think an assignment is worth doing, they’re much less likely to do it at all, she says.

“Maybe 20 years ago or 15 years ago, students were kind of like, ‘Oh, yeah, I'm doing a thing because she told me to do it,’” Johnson says. “I think there's less willingness to just do the thing because somebody told you to do it.”

As more students focus on prioritizing their mental health, they’re intentionally choosing not to complete work if it keeps them from taking care of themselves, says Jessie Beckett, the director of Radford University’s learning center, otherwise they won’t feel motivated to get it done. A student may think an assignment isn’t as important, and choose to get more sleep or spend time with friends instead, she says.

While Beckett is glad students are making their health a priority, she adds that they still need to learn to find a balance. Some students don’t understand how important assignments are, Beckett says. If an instructor doesn’t explain the outcomes of a homework task, many students will assume that it’s not as important, she argues, and miss out on learning a skill they’ll need later on.

“They don't necessarily understand what the value of something is, how it translates to a grade, how it translates to their success in that class, how it translates to a skill that will impact their success in future classes or in their major,” Beckett says.

Lily Martens, an undergraduate at Madison College, recalls an assignment in her environmental science class when students were asked to go to a park and take notes about the nature in the area. A few weeks later, the students went back to the same park and noted the difference in the animals and plant life.

That kind of assignment feels more purposeful than completing a worksheet or answering questions from a textbook, she says. “Not only was I learning about what species might be in the local area,” she adds, “but it was also teaching me how to record that and that was really awesome.”

Instructors need to show their students how an assignment will help them grow, says Darren Minarik, an associate professor at Radford University focused on special education and social studies education.

In his classes, Minarik often teaches his students, who are studying to become K-12 educators, to model the purpose of an assignment in class. For instance, they could assign a quiz that allows students to use their homework to see how the skills they’re learning will translate into class objectives.

This will “show that there's a direct connection between the assignment that you're asking to do outside of class and then how they're going to be graded in class,” Minarik says. “So being open about ‘this is why I'm asking you to do it.’”

Many professors don’t go through the same training in how to teach that K-12 classroom teachers get, Minarik says, so they don’t realize how important it is to explain to students the purpose of doing their work. In some cases college instructors assign multiple readings about the same idea, which can feel redundant to students. From the perspective of the faculty expert, it might all be fascinating, Cohn says, but to students it can feel gratuitous.

Cohn encourages instructors to determine what skills they want their students to gain from a class and then review their assignments to consider how each one will help reach those goals. Often, instructors will realize that instead of assigning three long texts, they may only need to give students one key reading, she says.

“I've tried to help faculty think about, ‘What are you gonna have students do with this? Are they gonna need this assignment to be able to solve a problem down the road? Is it essential by the end of the term? Are they going to need to do this reading in order to write something later or conduct research later?’” Cohn says. Faculty need to clearly answer these questions in their syllabi so students will know, “here's what you do with this information and here's why it'll matter to you in your class,” she adds.

Bad Habits

Aside from questioning the purpose of homework, many students also have more difficulty keeping up with deadlines.

In the past, Amanda Flint, a math instructor at Madison College, assigned her students homework that would be due at the end of each week. But many students began waiting until the day it was due, and then they couldn’t get everything done on time, she says.

Students picked up those habits during the pandemic, when teachers tended to be more relaxed about deadlines, allowing students to have extensions or not enforcing them at all, says Beckett. When those students got to college, they assumed they’d be able to finish all of their work late without any consequences.

In many K-12 schools, “students have regular check-ins around how they're doing and opportunities to quickly submit all of the work before that grading period ends, even if that work was assigned or was considered due weeks prior,” Beckett says. While the effort to be more flexible has good intentions, making the switch to stricter rules is challenging for students when they get to college, she adds.

Martens, the Madison student, says the flexibility also makes assignments seem less important, leading students to feel less inclined to do them. Often routine textbook readings aren’t graded, she says, so a student likely won’t prioritize it. Even though she feels like this can put her behind in class, it’s difficult to be motivated to complete an assignment that feels like busy work and won’t impact her grade.

In high school, her teachers often graded students’ notes from the textbook to ensure they were doing the reading, Martens says. Now, her instructors “just give it to you and they're like you should be reading, but they're not checking,” she says. “I miss things I’ve noticed in some classes, especially where it’s hard to cover everything in class.”

The issue seems especially pronounced at community colleges, where instructors may be teaching students who have to work multiple jobs and need to take up an extra shift instead of completing an assignment. Or, as the number of students in dual enrollment programs skyrockets, some instructors, like Flint, find themselves teaching mainly high school students who haven’t experienced a college workload yet.

To encourage better time management, Flint has begun adding multiple deadlines throughout the week. Instead of expecting students to complete all of their work by Friday, she assigns two or three sub-deadlines on smaller pieces of the work to help them get everything done in time.

She also gives each student 100 “late passes” per semester, which averages out to about two per assignment. Each late pass extends the deadline by 24 hours, so a student could hand in an assignment up to two days after the due date, she says. Or, if students save their late passes they could get even longer extensions on certain assignments. Students are then able to choose when during the semester they may need more time without falling too far behind, she says.

“Instead of assuming that the student's gonna do that scheduling on their own,” Flint says, “I turned it into the other direction, which is ‘You've got due dates, but you've got the wiggle room to move it if you need to.’”

Johnson has also noticed that students are more likely these days to simply give up on assignments they find difficult.

In the past, she would assign works by Geoffrey Chaucer in her British literature classes. Now students would likely find his writing too difficult to understand on their own. “I think they figure if they're struggling this much, they must be doing it wrong,” Johnson adds. “So they quit.”

Since K-12 schools are required to follow standardized curriculums, Beckett says students start to think there is only one way to learn something, and if they aren’t good at it, they must not be good at that subject.

As a writing instructor, “I saw a lot of students who would dread coming to a writing class and would put off their work for a writing class readily because they had so much fear or anxiety around being able to do it well,” she says. Those issues aren’t unique to the pandemic or this generation of students, though, Beckett says. “Any student who has had a negative experience around their abilities or confidence in a particular subject is going to be less likely to prioritize that subject,” she adds.

College professors often don’t realize how complicated their assignments can be, Cohn says, or they don’t remember what it was like to first learn the material. Textbooks may use jargon that an expert in the field will understand, but a student new to the topic wouldn’t, she says. She encourages instructors to guide students through a reading by having them answer questions about specific concepts they most need to understand.

Minarik also teaches his students to craft lessons that will demonstrate how to be a good learner.

If a teacher expects students to take copious notes in class, they need to teach their students optimal note-taking practices, he says. They also need to teach how to study, and how to complete homework assignments, he says. They can’t expect students to know any of that right away, he adds.

“If you want an outcome, you need to model how to get to that outcome for your students,” he says.

From the student perspective, Martens says she has a tough time completing assignments when she starts them at home and realizes she didn’t understand what she learned in class as well as she thought. Offering multiple deadlines is helpful, she says — especially with essays — since she can get help on her rough draft and feel more confident about the final one. She also appreciates when a professor leaves time near the end of class for students to start their homework and ask questions if they need help.

The classes Martens is often most engaged in, though, are the ones where she can tell the professor cares deeply about a subject and is engaged with the class, she says. Despite not enjoying English much, when Martens took one of Johnson’s classes, she could tell how excited the professor was to teach the subject, something she says she saw less of in her high school classes after the pandemic.

“All of a sudden I was excited to write essays because Sarah was just like, so excited to talk about writing essays,” Martens says. “That was one of my favorite classes.”

© Tim Gouw, Unsplash

ST. PAUL, Minn. — At the end of each school year at Central High School, seniors grab a paint pen and write their post-graduation plans on a glass wall outside the counseling office.

For many, that means announcing what college they’ve enrolled in. But the goal is to celebrate whatever path students are choosing, whether at a college or not.

“We have a few people that are going to trade school, we have a few people that are going to the military, a few people who wrote ‘still deciding,’” said Lisa Beckham, a staffer for the counseling center, as she helped hand out markers in May as the school year was winding down. Others, she said, are heading straight to a job.

Talking to the students as they signed, it was clear that one factor played an outsized role in the choice: the high cost of college.

“I’m thinking about going to college in California, and my grandparents all went there for a hundred dollars a semester and went into pretty low-paying jobs, but didn't spend years in debt because it was easy to go to college,” said Maya Shapiro, a junior who was there watching the seniors write up their plans. “So now I think it is only worth going to college if you're going to get a job that's going to pay for your college tuition eventually, so if you’re going to a job in English or history you might not find a job that’s going to pay that off.”

When I told her I was an English major back in my own college years, she quickly said, “I’m sorry.”

Even students going to some of the most well-known colleges are mindful of cost.

Harlow Tong, who was recruited by Harvard University to run track, said he had planned to go to the University of Minnesota and is still processing his decision to join the Ivy League.

“After the decision it really hit me that it's really an investment, and every year it feels like it's getting less and less worth the cost,” he said.

A new book lays out the changing forces shaping what students are choosing after high school, and argues for a change in the popular narrative around higher education.

The book is called “Rethinking College,” by longtime journalist and Los Angeles Times opinion writer Karin Klein. She calls for an end to “degree inflation,” where jobs require a college degree even if someone without a degree could do the job just as well. And she advocates for more high school graduates to take gap years to find out what they want to do before enrolling in college, or to seek out apprenticeships in fields that may not need college.

But she admits the issue is complicated. She said one of her own daughters, who is now 26, would have benefitted from a gap year. “The problem was the cost was a major factor,” Klein told me. “She was offered huge financial aid by a very good school, and I said, ‘We don’t know if you take a gap year if that offer is going to be on the table. And I can’t afford this school without that offer.’”

Hear more from Klein, including about programs she sees as models for new post-grad options, as well as from students at Central High School, on this week’s EdSurge Podcast. Check it out on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or on the player below. It’s the latest episode of our Doubting College podcast series.

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© Photo by Jeffrey R. Young for EdSurge

One of the country’s richest nonprofits focused on online education has been giving out grants for more than a year. But so far, the group, known as Axim Collaborative, has done so slowly — and pretty quietly.

“There has been little buzz about them in digital learning circles,” says Russ Poulin, executive director of WCET, a nonprofit focused on digital learning in higher education. “They are not absent from the conversation, but their name is not raised very often.”

Late last month, an article in the online course review site Class Central put it more starkly, calling the promise of the nonprofit “hollow.” The op-ed, by longtime online education watcher Dhawal Shah, noted that according to the group’s most recent tax return, Axim is sitting on $735 million and had expenses of just $9 million in tax year 2023, with $15 million in revenue from investment income. “Instead of being an innovator, Axim Collaborative seems to be a non-entity in the edtech space, its promises of innovation and equity advancement largely unfulfilled,” Shah wrote.

The group was formed with the money made when Harvard University and MIT sold their edX online platform to for-profit company 2U in 2021 for about $800 million. At the time many online learning leaders criticized the move, since edX had long touted its nonprofit status as differentiating it from competitors like Coursera. The purchase did not end up working out as planned for 2U, which this summer filed for bankruptcy.

So what is Axim investing in? And what are its future plans?

EdSurge reached out to Axim’s CEO, Stephanie Khurana, to get an update.

Not surprisingly, she pushed back on the idea that the group is not doing much.

“We’ve launched 18 partnerships over the past year,” she says, noting that many grants Axim has awarded were issued since its most recent tax return was filed. “It’s a start, and it’s seeding a lot of innovations. And that to me is very powerful.”

One of the projects she says she is most proud of is Axim’s work with HBCUv, a collaboration by several historically Black colleges to create a shared technology platform and framework to share online courses across their campuses. While money was part of that, Khurana says she is also proud of the work her group did helping set up a course-sharing framework. Axim also plans to help with “incorporating student success metrics in the platform itself,” she says, “so people can see where they might be able to support students with different kinds of advising and different kinds of student supports.”

The example embodies the group’s philosophy of trying to provide expertise and convening power, rather than just cash, to help promising ideas scale to support underserved learners in higher education.

Listening Tour

When EdSurge talked with Khurana last year, she stressed that her first step would be to listen and learn across the online learning community to see where the group could best make a difference.

One thing that struck her as she did that, she says, is “hearing what barriers students are facing, and what's keeping them from persisting through their programs and finding jobs that match with their skills and being able to actually realize better outcomes.”

Grant amounts the group has given out so far range from around $500,000 for what she called “demonstration projects” to as much as $3 million.

Artificial intelligence has emerged as a key focus of Axim’s work, though Khurana says the group is treading gingerly.

“We are looking very carefully at how and where AI is beneficial, and where it might be problematic, especially for these underserved learners,” she says. “And so trying to be clear-eyed about what those possibilities are, and then bring to bear the most promising opportunities for the students and institutions that we're supporting.”

One specific AI project the group has supported is a collaboration between Axim, Campus Evolve, University of Central Florida and Indiana Tech to explore research-based approaches to using AI to improve student advising. “They're developing an AI tool to have a student-facing approach to understanding, ‘What are my academic resources? What are career-based resources?,’” she says. “A lot of times those are hard to discern.”

Another key work of Axim involves keeping up an old system rather than starting new ones. The Axim Collaborative manages the Open edX platform, the open-source system that hosts edX courses and can also be used by any institution with the tech know-how and the computer servers to run it. The platform is used by thousands of colleges and organizations around the world, including a growing number of governments, who use it to offer online courses.

Anant Agarwal, who helped found edX and now works at 2U to coordinate its use, is also on a technical committee for Open edX.

He says the structure of supporting Open edX through Axim is modeled on the way the Linux open-source operating system is managed.

While edX continues to rely on the platform, the software is community-run. “There has to be somebody that maintains the repositories, maintains the release schedule and provides funding for certain projects,” Agarwal says. And that group is now Axim.

When the war in Ukraine broke out, Agarwal says, the country “turned on a dime and the universities and schools started offering courses on Open edX.”

Poulin, of WCET, says that it’s too early to say whether Axim’s model is working.

“While their profile and impact may not be great to this point, I am willing to give startups some runway time to determine if they will take off,” he says, noting that “Axim is, essentially, still a startup.”

His advice: “A creative, philanthropic organization should take some risks if they are working in the ‘innovation’ sphere. We learn as much from failures as successes.”

For Khurana, Axim’s CEO, the goal is not to find a magic answer to deep-seated problems facing higher education.

“I know some people want something that will be a silver bullet,” she says. “And I think it's just hard to come by in a space where there's a lot of different ways to solve problems. Starting with people on the ground who are doing the work — [with] humility — is probably one of the best ways to seed innovations and to start.”

© Mojahid Mottakin / Shutterstock

Two instructors at Vilnius University in Lithuania brought in some unusual teaching assistants earlier this year: AI chatbot versions of themselves.

The instructors — Paul Jurcys and Goda Strikaitė-Latušinskaja — created AI chatbots trained only on academic publications, PowerPoint slides and other teaching materials that they had created over the years. And they called these chatbots “AI Knowledge Twins,” dubbing one Paul AI and the other Goda AI.

They told their students to take any questions they had during class or while doing their homework to the bots first before approaching the human instructors. The idea wasn’t to discourage asking questions, but rather to nudge students to try out the chatbot doubles.

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Would you use an AI teaching assistant? Share your thoughts.

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“We introduced them as our assistants — as our research assistants that help people interact with our knowledge in a new and unique way,” says Jurcys.

Experts in artificial intelligence have for years experimented with the idea of creating chatbots that can fill this support role in classrooms. With the rise of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools, there’s a new push to try robot TAs.

“From a faculty perspective, especially someone who is overwhelmed with teaching and needs a teaching assistant, that's very attractive to them — then they can focus on research and not focus on teaching,” says Marc Watkins, a lecturer of writing and rhetoric at the University of Mississippi and director of the university’s AI Summer Institute for Teachers of Writing.

But just because Watkins thought some faculty would like it doesn’t mean he thinks it’s a good idea.

“That's exactly why it's so dangerous too, because it basically offloads this sort of human relationships that we're trying to develop with our students and between teachers and students to an algorithm,” he says.

On this week’s EdSurge Podcast, we hear from these professors about how the experiment went — how it changed classroom discussion but sometimes caused distraction. A student in the class, Maria Ignacia, also shares her view on what it was like to have chatbot TAs.

And we listen in as Jurcys asks his chatbot questions — and admits the bot puts things a bit differently than he would.

Listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or on the player on this page.

Of the nearly 10,000 students enrolled at Brookdale Community College in central New Jersey, about 17 percent are still in high school.

Some of them travel to the campus during the school day to take courses in introductory English, history, psychology and sociology. Others stay right at their own secondary schools and learn from high school teachers who deliver college-course lessons.

They’re part of a practice, increasingly popular nationwide, that sees teenagers complete advanced classes — mostly offered through community colleges — while juggling typical high school activities like sports practices, part-time jobs and dances.

“One of the reasons why we put a lot of time and effort into the high school programs, to get students started on the college pathway in high school, is it’s going to save them a lot of money, save them a lot of time and hopefully get them to their career goals sooner,” says Sarah McElroy, dean of pathways and partnerships at Brookdale Community College.

Called dual enrollment, the phenomenon grew for the third year in a row this year. And the growth is steep — up 10 percent compared to last year, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. That’s significant in an era when college leaders are concerned about attracting and retaining students who may be skeptical about the value of a degree and also worried about the impending “enrollment cliff” resulting from fewer Americans of traditional college age coming up in the next few years.

It’s going to save them a lot of money, save them a lot of time and hopefully get them to their career goals sooner.

— Sarah McElroy

Nationally, about a fifth of students who take community college courses these days are still in high school, according to John Fink, a senior research associate and program lead at the Community College Research Center. In some parts of the country, the share is even higher — it’s almost 40 percent in Iowa and Indiana, for example.

Among people who started ninth grade in 2009, about a third took some type of dual enrollment course, Fink says, adding, “That’s a big penetration into the high school market.”

The trend is catching on with policymakers and educators as they look for ways to spur college-going while also ameliorating high tuition prices.

“People are concerned about the costs of higher education: state legislators and governors, families and students,” says Josh Wyner, founder and executive director of the College Excellence Program at the Aspen Institute. “The idea of getting college credit while you’re in high school is appealing as a way of holding the cost of college down.”

Brookdale Community College is in a state that has named dual enrollment as a priority. By 2028, New Jersey aims to double the number of high school students enrolled in at least one dual enrollment course, ensure all high schools provide dual enrollment options, and close access gaps to these programs for different groups of students.

That push is evident at Brookdale. From 2018 to 2023, the college recorded a 39 percent increase in Monmouth County high school students enrolling in its college-level courses. The institution hopes to increase enrollment among high school students by 50 percent more by 2028.

“We are trying to reach every high schooler in some way,” McElroy says.

Yet Brookdale, other community colleges, and their K-12 school partners face a few challenges in order for dual enrollment to “live up to its potential as a lever of access and equity to college and careers,” Fink says.

Good for Everyone?

Dual enrollment takes many forms and goes by many names. Some programs are run through well-organized early-college high schools that help students earn a full associate degree by the time they graduate. Others are more free-form, allowing students to take one or two courses as they please — a style some observers have critiqued as “random acts of dual enrollment.” Brookdale offers several different models through its high school partnerships.

Across these varied formats, dual enrollment seems to have become popular because it’s beneficial for all parties involved, according to education experts.

It’s good for students, Fink says, citing two decades of research that shows it leads to better high school and college completion rates. It’s good for community colleges, which advance their missions to serve their surrounding area — and also possibly create “a larger pool of students coming back to you” for additional classes after high school, too, he adds.

In fact, dual enrollment is “the most consistent source of enrollment growth for community colleges over the past decade,” says Nick Mathern, director of K-12 partnerships for Achieving the Dream, a nonprofit that supports a network of community colleges. “Depending on how you break down the age cohort, there is a way in which you see it’s the only source of enrollment growth for community colleges over the last decade.”

Especially in states that provide extra public funds to support dual enrollment, it’s good for school districts and public schools, proponents argue, since they can use those programs as a selling point for attracting families and students who might otherwise look to private schools, or public schools elsewhere.

These dual-enrollment programs are not replacing Advanced Placement courses, which have been a mainstay at high schools for decades and remain popular, Wyner says. Among the three-quarters of high schools that offer advanced coursework, about 78 percent offer dual enrollment compared to 76 percent that offer AP classes. But one advantage dual enrollment may have over the AP program is that it offers a much wider catalog of options, including some career and technical courses, which may appeal to a broader set of students.

“For a lot of students who are not eager to take more purely academic courses — or about test-taking and writing papers — this is an enormous opportunity to get excited about higher education through fields of study not offered in high schools,” Wyner says.

Some of the high schools that feed into Brookdale offer dual enrollment, AP courses and the advanced International Baccalaureate curriculum all at once, McElroy says: “We are finding students are taking a menu of options.”

One bonus she sees regarding the dual enrollment courses: Students know they’ll earn college credit for taking them, whereas they’ll only get college credit for AP classes if they score high enough on standardized exams.

“It transfers so widely. Four-year colleges are taking those credits,” McElroy says. “That’s helped to elevate dual enrollment across the state.”

Addressing Inequality

Yet data on dual enrollment reveals that not all student groups participate at the same rate.

Racial minorities, men and students who would be the first in their families to go to college are underrepresented in these programs. In the county that feeds into Brookdale Community College, for example, “our Black and Hispanic students are not finishing at the same rate white students are,” McElroy says.

Comparing the percent of high school dual enrollment students by race and ethnicity statewide (orange) and at Brookdale (blue.) Data courtesy of Brookdale Community College.

There are a few factors that contribute to this inequality, Fink says. For instance, some schools use standardized test scores to determine which students are eligible to participate, creating barriers since some groups of students consistently score lower than others. Many dual enrollment courses are taught by high school teachers who have the credentials needed to instruct at the community college level — typically a master’s degree in a relevant discipline — and at some high schools, there is a shortage of qualified teachers. And while some states have arrangements that make dual enrollment courses free for students, in other regions, families have to pay.

“If you have to pay extra to take college courses in high school, you’re going to get wealthier, whiter families taking advantage,” Fink says.

Then there is an older mindset to contend with, one that views dual enrollment primarily as an option for academically advanced students who are looking for enrichment.

It is true that some students choose dual enrollment through Brookdale to improve their chances of being accepted into a selective four-year university, McElroy says.

“We know from the research that dual enrollment courses are more rigorous than the standard- issue high school course,” Wyner says. “And so for a lot of parents and students who are eager to be challenged, they see dual enrollment as an opportunity to get exposure to college-level work and get challenged in their coursework.”

But some educators and researchers hope dual enrollment can serve as an opportunity to broaden access to higher education for “students on the margins of going to college,” Fink says, by boosting their confidence, by introducing them to topics they won’t learn about in high school that might inspire them to consider going to college, and by creating momentum for possible postsecondary studies.

“I don’t begrudge middle-class students and college-bound students the opportunity to take classes in high school,” Mathern says. “But if we are not intentional about how we deploy these programs, we are not actually changing how many students in any given community earn a college credential.”

To that end, Brookdale offers college readiness courses to its high school students who participate in dual enrollment programs, designed to teach them skills they need to succeed in advanced classes.

It’s unethical to really not provide the supports and advising. ... Unless you’re doing all of those things, it can be harmful and have the opposite of the intended effect.

— John Fink

“It shows students they can do it,” McElroy says. “College could be for them.”

For more high school students to succeed in dual enrollment, experts stress that schools and colleges have to specifically look out for them and guide them through the process.

“We think colleges should be establishing a shared vision with their local school districts about what they want to achieve for dual enrollment,” Mathern says. “As we open the door wider, we can’t just give more students access to college classes and call it good.”

After all, if a student tries a dual enrollment class and doesn’t succeed in it, the experience can leave them worse off than if they hadn’t attempted it all, either by wasting their tuition dollars, leaving them with a low grade that will follow them on a transcript or by discouraging them from pursuing more higher education.

“It’s unethical to really not provide the supports and advising,” Fink says. “Unless you’re doing all of those things, it can be harmful and have the opposite of the intended effect.”

To that end, Brookdale has a dedicated team of support staff for its dual enrollment programs, McElroy says, explaining, “We want to serve the students as much as possible.”

Despite the flaws that remain in many dual enrollment programs, Fink is optimistic that, with fine-tuning, they can serve as a promising pathway to better college and career-training options for more young people.

“There are a lot of reasons we would want to do things differently in the college-to-career transition. It’s largely producing poor and inequitable outcomes,” he says. “What do we do with senior year of high school? Students are checked out. By bringing more career and postsecondary training into high school, you’re blurring the line, and that’s a positive thing for students.”

© Photo courtesy of Brookdale Community College.

The premise of “free college” programs popping up around the country in recent years is that bringing the price of higher education down to nearly nothing will spur more students to enroll and earn degrees.

But is that what actually happens?

David Monaghan, an associate professor of sociology at Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania, has been digging into that question in a series of recent research studies. And the results indicate that not all of these free college programs have the intended effect — and that how a program is set up can make a big difference.

In a working paper the professor co-authored that was released last month, for instance, Monaghan compared two free college programs in Pennsylvania to dig into their outcomes.

One of the programs is the Morgan Success Scholarship at Lehigh Carbon Community College, which is available to students at Tamaqua Area High School who enroll right after completing their high school degree. Qualifying students are guaranteed fully paid tuition, with the program paying any gap left after the student applies for other financial aid and scholarships (a model known as a “last dollar, tuition-only guarantee.”)

The other is the Community College of Philadelphia’s 50th Anniversary Scholars Program, which is available to students who graduate from a high school in Philadelphia and meet other merit criteria. It is also a “last dollar” program that covers any tuition and fees not paid from other sources. The students must enroll immediately after high school graduation, have a low enough income to qualify for a federal Pell scholarship, file their application for federal financial aid by a set date and enroll in at least six credits at the college.

The Morgan Success Scholarship seemed to work largely as its designers hoped. The year after the program started, the rate of college-going at Tamaqua Area High School jumped from 86 percent to 94 percent, and college-going increased another percentage point the following year. And the number of students graduating from Lehigh Carbon Community College with a two-year degree increased after the program was created.

But something else happened that wasn’t by design. The free-college program appears to have led some students who would have enrolled in a four-year college to instead start at the two-year college — where they may or may not end up going on to a four-year institution. There is a chance, then, that the program may end up keeping some students from finishing a four-year degree. “On balance, the program expands access to postsecondary education more than it diverts students away from four-year degrees, though it does appear to do this as well,” the paper asserts.

The free-college program at Community College of Philadelphia, meanwhile, didn’t seem to move the needle much at all.

“I expected to see an enrollment boost, and I didn’t even see that,” says Monaghan.

In other words, it isn’t even clear from the data that the free college effort sparked any increase in enrollment at the college.

The reason, he says, may be that the leaders of the program did not do enough to spread awareness about the option, and about what it takes to apply. Since the program was open to all high schools in the city, doing that communication was more difficult than in the case of the other program they studied.

“Our analyses suggest that a tuition guarantee, by itself, will not necessarily have any impact,” he and his co-author wrote in their paper. “If a program falls in the forest and no one hears it, it will not shift enrollment patterns.”

Monaghan says that the findings show that more attention should be paid to the details of how free college programs work — especially since many of them are full of restrictions and require students to jump through a series of hoops to take advantage of them. That can be a lot to ask a 17- or 18-year-old finishing high school to navigate.

“We really overestimate what people are like at the end of high school,” and how savvy they’ll be about weighing the costs and benefits of higher education, he argues. “There hasn’t been enough research on free college programs in terms of how they are implemented and communicated,” he adds.

It’s worth noting, of course, that some free college programs do significantly increase enrollment. And that can create another unintended side effect: straining resources at two-year colleges.

That was the case in Massachusetts, where the MassReconnect program that launched in 2023 led more than 5,000 new students to enroll the first semester it was available, according to a report from the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education.

As a result, the state’s 15 community colleges have struggled to hire enough staff — including adjunct instructors — to keep up with the new demand.

What did that program do to spark so much interest? Unlike the programs studied in Pennsylvania, MassReconnect is available to not just people freshly graduating high school, but to anyone over 25 years old — a much larger pool of possible takers.

Another working paper by Monaghan, which looked at as much available research as he could find on free college programs, found a large variety of impact.

And that may be the biggest lesson: For free college programs, the devil really is in the details of how they are set up and communicated.

© Robert Reppert / Shutterstock

Recognizing that online courses are cheaper to deliver than face-to-face courses, StraighterLine was founded in 2008 as a solution to the rising costs of a college education. It was the first non-college to offer ultra-affordable, high-quality online courses that were recognized for real college credit.

Still a solution to the rising costs of college, StraighterLine has grown its course catalog to 250+ online courses and helps tens of thousands of students hack their education. It works with individuals, colleges, and employers to create low-cost, low-risk pathways to help students succeed. Today, the company aims to empower learners with a flexible and affordable path to reach their college and career goals. Now serving over 150,000 learners per year, StraighterLine is evolving to meet the needs of today’s learners through online courses, credentials, and student support.

Every course goes through a thorough review process by the American Council on Education. In addition, their partner institutions review the course curriculum, learning outcomes and assessments to ensure that they meet the quality standards for their school.

Helping students succeed is top of mind; they value their partnerships with degree-granting institutions and believe they can do more for students together than as competitors. StraighterLine has the most partner institutions with articulation agreements than any other course provider. More than 160+ partners guarantee transfer of StraighterLine courses. To date, more than 2,000 accredited institutions of higher education and the majority of institutions in every state have accepted StraighterLine courses for credit.

For these reasons and more, Straighter is The EdTech Trendsetter Award Winner for “EdTech Company Setting a Trend” in Higher Education as part of The EdTech Awards 2024 from EdTech Digest. Learn more.

The post StraighterLine: Hacking Education appeared first on EdTech Digest.

Colleges are adjusting to a lingering impact of COVID-19 shutdowns that kept kids out of physical schools at key points in their social development: It’s harder than it used to be to teach students to adjust to college life when so many are coming to campuses nervous about making social connections.

As a result, many colleges and universities are rethinking their freshman orientation programs, adding new options and doing more to help students forge relationships.

At the University of Colorado at Boulder this summer, for instance, administrators are offering incoming students three orientation options to choose from. One effort lets new students meet classmates in breakout Zoom calls. Another program brings students and families to campus for a day to learn about university traditions and how to get involved on campus. And those looking for an immersive experience can attend ‘Camp Chip’ — they’ll spend two nights on campus connecting with other students, getting to know the campus and seeing what life will be like in college.

Before the pandemic, the university’s summer orientation had been mostly online, with an in person “welcome week” before classes began. But these days there’s a greater interest (and expectation) from students and families in the need to help students feel like they belong on campus, says Joe Thomas, president of Association for Orientation, Transition and Retention in Higher Education, known as NODA.

“In 2019, I probably would have heard from parents and students, ‘It's annoying,’ ‘It's hard to get here,’ ‘How could you possibly require this in-person orientation?” he says. “Now they're like, ‘Oh we get it, we would really love to be there and watch our student get to know other folks.’ There's just more buy-in now.”

Colleges have another reason to try to get orientation right: It’s the first step to building belonging and, hopefully, convincing students to stay. That’s especially important for first-generation students and those transferring from other colleges.

“It is truly the kickoff to retention,” says Katie Murray, director of new student and family programs at Towson University. “If a student has a bad experience that starts at orientation and it continues through their first semester, we are less likely to retain that student.”

Flexibility Is Key

Many institutions are still in the process of “throwing darts at a dartboard” to see what sticks best for orientation, says Thomas, of NODA. This means they need to be adaptable, and offer a range of ways students can prepare to enter college.

Most colleges now have some online component to their orientation process that’s left over from the pandemic, Thomas says. Often the online portions are more “transactional,” he notes. Students learn about registering for classes, connect with their academic advisor and go through required trainings. The number of topics these trainings cover has increased as colleges feel pressure to better regulate artificial intelligence, create stricter free speech regulations or enforce hazing regulations, among other changes.

"It is truly the kickoff to retention. ... If a student has a bad experience that starts at orientation and it continues through their first semester, we are less likely to retain that student.”

—Katie Murray, director of new student and family programs at Towson University.

As a result, orientations are required to cover much more information now than even a few years ago, says Jenny Osborn, associate director of the first year experience at The Ohio State University. In Ohio, for example, state lawmakers passed anti-hazing legislation in 2021 that requires colleges to create an educational program on hazing that students can complete during orientation.

Once students have finished the online portion, colleges bring them into in-person or virtual sessions either during the summer or right before classes start to help students connect with one another.

At Towson University, for instance, students must complete a series of online modules, which typically take a total of about 35 minutes, before they come to orientation, Murray says. Then, they attend a one-day session in the summer, which can be in person or virtual, followed by a four-day program before the first day of classes.

The goal, Murray adds, is to spread information out over time, while also encouraging students to connect with one another.

“We know that sense of belonging ebbs and flows throughout a student's experience,” Murray says. “But if we can start off on the right note, that information piece can happen in a bunch of different ways.”

Creating a range of orientation options also helps colleges assess what students need, says Thomas, who is also the associate vice chancellor for student affairs at Boulder. Much of Boulder’s student population comes from out of state, he says, which makes it difficult to visit the city, where summer is one of the peak tourist times. If students can’t come to Colorado but still want to connect with future classmates, they can attend a virtual session, where they’ll be split into breakout rooms led by orientation leaders.

“We're hyper aware of making sure that our orientation programs are accessible to students, whether you have the financial means or not,” Thomas says. “We're gonna use that information to then say, ‘Ok, [for] future summers, here's what we need to be the balance to meet our first generation students with what they need, what any of our marginalized populations may need that may be different, and the population en masse for our 7,000 plus students at CU Boulder.’”

Changing Social Skills

Colleges have also begun adapting their orientation programs to the ways students’ social skills have changed coming out of the pandemic.

Many students now have a harder time saying goodbye to their families, Osborn says. Before the pandemic, about 70 to 80 percent of students would stay in residence halls during the university’s overnight summer orientation. Now more than half of the students opt to stay with their parents in a hotel. Students also usually turn to their siblings or parents for information about college rather than relying on orientation, she adds.

When it comes to choosing a date for orientation, students used to go for the earliest possible dates. Now, they want to try to coordinate with a future roommate or classmate they met online, Osborn says.

“What we're seeing student-behavior-wise at orientation is a real sense of clinging to safety,” she says.

To help students feel more comfortable meeting other students, Ohio State has begun offering more small-group and “low- risk” activities, Osborn says. Rather than hosting a large scavenger hunt, for example, Osborn says students can do jewelry making, coloring, board games and pick-up volleyball or basketball games. That way, students can connect with one or two people rather than be overwhelmed by a large group.

Other colleges have created small group atmospheres that bring students together based on similar interests or identities. This gives them a leg up when they meet each other because they already have something in common, says Gregory Wolcott, the associate vice president for student success at San Jose State University.

During San Jose State’s two-night orientation, students are split into groups of about 20 based on what they’re studying, Wolcott says. Orientation leaders host interactive activities with their groups.

CU Boulder also splits students up based on commonalities. During the university’s fall welcome program, orientation leaders host about 40 “Buff Meet Ups” for students who all have shared interests, such as gaming or music. The “meet-ups” could also be taking a tour of local restaurants or going on a hike together, which helps them connect in a smaller setting, says Lizzie Brister, director of new student and family programs at Boulder. Some of the events are also identity based, such as one for Latinx students.

Coming out of the pandemic, “there was an indication that [students] wanted to be together, they wanted to do stuff in community, but didn't know how to engage or interact with each other,” Thomas says. “Orientation programs are shifting more toward that — getting to know each other again, which is the classic thing that we try to do, but it can't just be in solely one program type.”

Orientation offices have also changed the way they train their student leaders, often to account for the same issues the pandemic has caused for incoming students.

These days many students are reluctant to sign up as orientation leaders, Osborn says. In the same way that new students don’t want to stay in the dorms, families would rather have their older students spend time at home than stay on campus during the summer, she says.

They’re also coming in with less background knowledge, Brister says. Before the pandemic, orientation leaders typically held leadership positions in high school, as a club president, for example, Brister says. Now students are coming in with less experience public speaking or facilitating a small group. Some also haven’t ever experienced an in-person orientation, but now need to lead most of the activities for the incoming class (though that has become less of an issue as students who experienced the pandemic in college graduate).

Journey leaders, as CU’s orientation leaders are called, now attend an eight-week leadership course to prepare them for orientation. They learn how to run orientation events, leadership skills and ways to engage students who may be more socially anxious, among other things, Brister says. Before the pandemic, that information was all squeezed into just four days of training.

“That's pivotal to build our culture for those student leaders of how we want to share what it means to be a Buff, how we want to present the university and be ambassadors for the university to these new students and why we’re doing what we’re doing,” Brister says. “That's been huge in building that culture for our student leaders and then hopefully communicating that to our whole incoming student population.”

And with high college costs, it’s more important than ever for colleges to offer supports and to make sure students and families know where to find that help, says Wolcott, of San Jose State.

If colleges don’t provide all the support orientation programs need, students may end up transferring to somewhere that does.

“College campuses need to understand that it's a competitive market,” Wolcott says. “If you're not rolling out the red carpet, if everyone's not on board with ‘this is orientation season and it's everybody's job,’ then campuses are really gonna struggle.”

© Photo courtesy of University of Colorado at Boulder

When ChatGPT and other new generative AI tools emerged in late 2022, the major concern for educators was cheating. After all, students quickly spread the word on TikTok and other social media platforms that with a few simple prompts, a chatbot could write an essay or answer a homework assignment in ways that would be hard for teachers to detect.

But these days, when it comes to AI, another concern has come into the spotlight: That the technology could lead to less human interaction in schools and colleges — and that school administrators could one day try to use it to replace teachers.

And it's not just educators who are worried, this is becoming an education policy issue.

Just last week, for instance, a bill sailed through both houses of the California state legislature that aims to make sure that courses at the state’s community colleges are taught by qualified humans, not AI bots.

Sabrina Cervantes, a Democratic member of the California State Assembly, who introduced the legislation, said in a statement that the goal of the bill is to “provide guardrails on the integration of AI in classrooms while ensuring that community college students are taught by human faculty.”

To be clear, no one appears to have actually proposed replacing professors at the state’s community colleges with ChatGPT or other generative AI tools. And even the bill’s leaders say they can imagine positive uses for AI in teaching, and the bill wouldn’t stop colleges from using generative AI to help with tasks like grading or creating educational materials.

But champions of the bill also say they have reason to worry about the possibility of AI replacing professors in the future. Earlier this year, for example, a dean at Boston University sparked concern among graduate workers who were on strike seeking higher wages when he listed AI as one possible strategy for handling course discussions and other classroom activities that were impacted by the strike. Officials at the university later clarified that they had no intention of replacing any graduate workers with AI software, though.

“Our intent was not to put a giant brick wall in front of AI,” Brill-Wynkoop says. “That’s nuts. It’s a fast-moving train. We’re not against tech, but the question is ‘How do we use it thoughtfully?’”

— Wendy Brill-Wynkoop, president of the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges

While California is the furthest along, it’s not the only state where such measures are being considered. In Minnesota, Rep. Dan Wolgamott, of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, proposed a bill that would forbid campuses in the Minnestate State College and University System from using AI “as the primary instructor for a credit-bearing course.” The measure has stalled for now.

Teachers in K-12 schools are also beginning to push for similar protections against AI replacing educators. The National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union, recently put out a policy statement on the use of AI in education that stressed that human educators should “remain at the center of education.”

It’s a sign of the mixed but highly charged mood among many educators — who see both promise and potential threat in generative AI tech.

Careful Language

Even the education leaders pushing for measures to keep AI from displacing educators have gone out of their way to note that the technology could have beneficial applications in education. They're being cautious about the language they use to ensure they're not prohibiting the use of AI altogether.

The bill in California, for instance, faced initial pushback even from some supporters of the concept, out of worry about moving too soon to legislate the fast-changing technology of generative AI, says Wendy Brill-Wynkoop, president of the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges, whose group led the effort to draft the bill.

An early version of the bill explicitly stated that AI “may not be used to replace faculty for purposes of providing instruction to, and regular interaction with students in a course of instruction, and may only be used as a peripheral tool.”

Internal debate almost led leaders to spike the effort, she says. Then Brill-Wynkoop suggested a compromise: remove all explicit references to artificial intelligence from the bill’s language.

“We don’t even need the words AI in the bill, we just need to make sure humans are at the center,” she says. So the final language of the very brief proposed legislation reads: “This bill would explicitly require the instructor of record for a course of instruction to be a person who meets the above-described minimum qualifications to serve as a faculty member teaching credit instruction.”

“Our intent was not to put a giant brick wall in front of AI,” Brill-Wynkoop says. “That’s nuts. It’s a fast-moving train. We’re not against tech, but the question is ‘How do we use it thoughtfully?’”

And she admits that she doesn’t think there’s some “evil mastermind in Sacramento saying, ‘I want to get rid of these nasty faculty members.’” But, she adds, in California “education has been grossly underfunded for years, and with limited budgets, there are several tech companies right there that say, ‘How can we help you with your limited budgets by spurring efficiency.’”

Ethan Mollick, a University of Pennsylvania professor who has become a prominent voice on AI in education, wrote in his newsletter last month that he worries that many businesses and organizations are too focused on efficiency and downsizing as they rush to adopt AI technologies. Instead, he argues that leaders should be focused on finding ways to rethink how they do things to take advantage of tasks AI can do well.

He noted in his newsletter that even the companies building these new large language models haven’t yet figured out what real-world tasks they are best suited to do.

“I worry that the lesson of the Industrial Revolution is being lost in AI implementations at companies,” he wrote. “Any efficiency gains must be turned into cost savings, even before anyone in the organization figures out what AI is good for. It is as if, after getting access to the steam engine in the 1700s, every manufacturer decided to keep production and quality the same, and just fire staff in response to new-found efficiency, rather than building world-spanning companies by expanding their outputs.”

The professor wrote that his university’s new Generative AI Lab is trying to model the approach he’d like to see, where researchers work to explore evidence-based uses of AI and work to avoid what he called “downside risks,” meaning the concern that organizations might make ineffective use of AI while pushing out expert employees in the name of cutting costs. And he says the lab is committed to sharing what it learns.

Keeping Humans at the Center

AI Education Project, a nonprofit focused on AI literacy, surveyed more than 1,000 U.S. educators in 2023 about how educators feel about how AI is influencing the world, and education more specifically. In the survey, participants were asked to pick among a list of top concerns about AI and the one that bubbled to the top was that AI could lead to “a lack of human interaction.”

That could be in response to recent announcements by major AI developers — including ChatGPT creator OpenAI — about new versions of their tools that can respond to voice commands and see and respond to what students are inputting on their screens. Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, recently posted a video demo of him using a prototype of his organization’s chatbot Khanmigo, which has these features, to tutor his teenage son. The technology shown in the demo is not yet available, and is at least six months to a year away, according to Khan. Even so, the video went viral and sparked debate about whether any machine can fill in for a human in something as deeply personal as one-on-one tutoring.

In the meantime, many new features and products released in recent weeks focus on helping educators with administrative tasks or responsibilities like creating lesson plans and other classroom materials. And those are the kinds of behind-the-scenes uses of AI that students may never even know are happening.

That was clear in the exhibit hall of last week’s ISTE Live conference in Denver, which drew more than 15,000 educators and edtech leaders. (EdSurge is an independent newsroom that shares a parent organization with ISTE. Learn more about EdSurge ethics and policies here and supporters here.)

Tiny startups, tech giants and everything in between touted new features that use generative AI to support educators with a range of responsibilities, and some companies had tools to serve as a virtual classroom assistant.

Many teachers at the event weren’t actively worried about being replaced by bots.

“It’s not even on my radar, because what I bring to the classroom is something that AI cannot replicate,” said Lauren Reynolds, a third grade teacher at Riverwood Elementary School in Oklahoma City. “I have that human connection. I’m getting to know my kids on an individual basis. I’m reading more than just what they’re telling me.”

Christina Matasavage, a STEM teacher at Belton Preparatory Academy in South Carolina, said she thinks the COVID shutdowns and emergency pivots to distance learning proved that gadgets can’t step in and replace human instructors. “I think we figured out that teachers are very much needed when COVID happened and we went virtual. People figured out very [quickly] that we cannot be replaced” with tech.

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