AI and the Future of Higher Education

In 2016, I created the first Coursera course for our university. It was based on my book, The Bilingual Brain. A few years later, they asked me to come and speak to a group of faculty who were thinking about creating their own courses. Before I spoke, Jeff Morgan, the Associate Provost for Education Innovation and Technology, came to introduce the session on Coursera. The first thing he said was that Coursera was not going to replace universities. The idea that someone would learn the same thing on their own did not fit with history. Students already had that available to them. They could just pick up a book. The fact that a book had not replaced universities was evidence of their value. His view was that there was something about people gathering to learn together that was irreplaceable.

Today, people have begun to ask themselves whether AI will replace higher education. The question is most pressing in a recent article by James Walsh in New York Magazine entitled “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College: ChatGPT has unraveled the entire academic project.” And once again, I turn to the point that Jeff Morgan made more than 10 years ago. If higher education were just about learning on your own, then books would have done the job long ago.

AI has now introduced the ability to write articles entirely on its own. Students are using it, and faculty are using it too. I have experimented with it to generate texts that can offer opinions that are roughly in my voice after extended Q&A sessions. It is remarkable, and as a tool, it can open up new ways of exploring ideas that I would not have explored otherwise. But after extensive use, I am sure that it is not a replacement for what I can do on my own. In the end, the thinking still has to come from me. And as many have pointed out, writing is a form of thinking.

It is the loss of the writing process where people fear the shortcuts will short-circuit our ability to create on our own. As educators, we have the ability to enhance thinking and writing by controlling the amount of technology used in the classroom. Personally, I have moved to in-person written exams. I have asked students to present in class. In the fall, I will ask them to write in class and then assemble their own writings into some form of an in-person handwritten final. Will they write less? Most likely. Could they have written more with the help of MS Word? Definitely. But I am okay with that. Last semester, some of my students came to talk to me, worried about their final presentations. They felt they were not good enough. And I assured them that they were. One in particular did not like a video she made. I told her that if I wanted a cleaned-up version of a video, I would just watch Netflix or YouTube. What I wanted to do was understand the world from their perspective.

To paraphrase Jeff Morgan again, the point is that universities are here to bring people together to learn something new. Yes, AI might change that, but it will not replace it. It is up to us as instructors to control the classroom. That is why I think it is a matter of time before we go back to what has worked for at least 100 years, paper and pencil.

The world can be as developed and sophisticated as it is. But the classroom belongs to us as humans. We no longer need to teach people using technology in the classroom. We have it readily available every day. What sets higher education apart is being together in the service of learning something new. As educators, we should work to keep it that way.