How AI is Good for Education - DTNSB WEEKEND EDITION
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Picture this. You're in the garage, hands covered in grease, just finished up tuning your engine with a part you found on eBay. And you realize, you know what? I could also use new brakes. So where do you go next? Back to eBay. And you've got eBay Guaranteed Fit. You order a part, and if it doesn't fit, send it back.

Simple as that. So when you dive into your next car project, start with eBay. All the parts you need at prices you'll love. Guaranteed to fit every time. eBay. Things people love. Welcome to a Daily Tech News Show weekend edition. I'm Tom Merritt, and we have questions about how technology, and specifically AI, are affecting education from a lot of people. And in fact, we had someone who was like, you know what?

I kind of work in that area. I'd love to talk about my experiences with it. So please welcome to the show, Kevin Metcalf, associate vice chancellor in it at Foothill De Anza. Kevin, thanks for taking the time to talk with me, man. Hey, thanks so much for having me on the show. I've been a supporter of DTNS for a while now. And, uh,

figured, Hey, I have a way to contribute something. So yeah, no, this is great. Uh, and, and big thanks for all of your support of the show over the years as well. You're, you're one of the pillars in the community as far as I'm concerned. Well, thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Happy to help. Well, let's start with who you are for, for people who don't know, like, uh, where do you, where's your perspective in on this topic?

Yeah, so I'm currently, as you said, Associate Vice Chancellor at the Foothill De Anza Community College District. That's in Silicon Valley. I actually started my career in high tech in the Silicon Valley, did some startups, did some big name companies. But I landed in education when the company I was working for basically blew up during the dot bomb era when the bottom fell out of the

the dot-com boom. And so I worked for the college. I just built custom solutions to support education, usually online, you know, things like that.

And then I jumped over to IT when the state of California decided they were going to give everyone a free course management system. So I couldn't compete with free. So I have been a project manager and in management roles at the IT organization for the district ever since then. I've got about 20 years of experience as a Linux system administrator and a little over a decade of adjunct teaching experience, although that's less of my focus these days. Gotcha.

Let's start with you as someone in the educational arena. How do you use these generative models and these tools? What are a few things you've done in the last month, let's say?

Sure, yeah. So I would say, for starters, I'm not one of those people that says, I definitely want to use AI to do my job for me. I like to use the tools, but when using the tools, that generally involves a whole lot of editing on top of that. But

But, you know, I have ADHD. And so a tool like, you know, ChatGPT can really help solve that writer's block that, you know, you sometimes get when you've got a really huge task or something like that. And, you know, I'll ask for strategies around specific solutions. You know, if I have a faculty that comes in with a particular need, you know, it's nice to have something that you can just bounce ideas off of. Would this work? Would this work? You know, things like that. Just providing alternatives, right? Yeah, exactly. You know, sort of where should I start? You know, and, you know, I've

It's helpful when you have to wordsmith a delicate email. Obviously, from a data governance standpoint, that can get dicey if you put too many details into the prompt. But being vague and just asking for general advice, that can at least get you an outline that can help overcome, again, that writer's block there.

I've also used it when hiring new employees. And that's something that a lot of people are like, oh, you're evaluating resumes. No, no, that's not what we do. That's a really bad idea for a lot of reasons. But you can upload a job description into the system and say, hey, I'm going to be interviewing people. What are some good questions I could ask?

that'll make, let me know if someone can do the job. Again, like idea generating for you, not dictating what you do. That's interesting. Yeah, exactly. And it's also helpful for formatting. I have pretty bad carpal tunnel, so it's nice to be able to just throw an agenda at it and say, hey, you know what? Organize this, format it formally, and add some timestamps or whatever.

And, yeah, again, for huge projects, if I've got a really big project and I just don't know where to start, you know, you could just throw that into the LLM and say, hey, give me suggestions on how to break this down into smaller tasks. And you just repeat that until you know how to do all the smaller tasks. And there you know where to start. Yeah. I see some overlap with the way you use it and the way I hear most people using it, which is like a sounding board, an alternative generator, a point me in the right direction kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right. All right. So.

When we think students, I think a lot of people immediately jump to they are using it to write their papers. They're using it to cheat. But what are some of the beneficial uses of these tools for students?

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of things that we can, you know, a lot of ways that we can use these tools to sort of, you know, improve student outcomes. You know, one of the things I've noticed that students do is the instructor communications. So when I was faculty, my ESL students were sometimes, you know, shy about reaching out for extra help just because of the language. English as a second language, if anybody. Oh, yeah, sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Students for whom English is not their primary language. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Uh, and so, you know, that, that language barrier, you know, would, would be a problem. And the, the LLMs have actually allowed them to put together the communication in a way that they can send it with great English and get the help that they need. Uh, and so, you know, it, it, it helps reduce that friction. Um, and it was something I hadn't anticipated, uh, but it really did help my ESL students. I had, um,

A couple of years ago, a student that came in and I had interacted with them online a lot, you know, through text and then asked them to join a Zoom session. And when they were in the Zoom session, it was almost impossible to communicate. But, you know, we could just go back to those text-based communications and it worked perfect for them. So.

That's great. Yeah, another thing that I've seen are tools like TutorBots. So if you're familiar with Conmigo, this is Con Academy is the organization. It's so K-H-A-N-M-I-G-O. It's basically an AI that rather than giving you the answer, you give it a problem and it walks you through the steps of, you know, sort of giving you hints and teaches you to sort of think creatively.

you know, about things like that. So, so those kinds of tools can be really helpful and, you know, also just getting started, right? If a student's yoga, the writer's block issue, you know, just ask it for some writing prompts, you know, for creative writing class or something like that. So what's good for the prof is good. It's good for the student, right? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. All right. We got some specific questions here. Chris wanted to know if the curriculum,

is being changed or has been changed for students to account for the fact that they have AI tools available? Yeah. And it's sort of the idea, you know, you see the benefits to students and there's also, you know, benefits to the instructors, right? So you can use it to evaluate your assignments or your lectures. You know, are there places where my assignments are, you know, confusing or I could more effectively teach them a different way? You know, let's say I'm a kindergarten teacher that,

You know, needs to teach a lesson about number comparison. Well, you know, I might ask the LLM for some innovative ways to teach less than and greater than. And that may mean that instead of using, hey, the arrow points to the smaller number, you use the greedy alligator always eats the bigger number, you know, something that sticks out in students' minds, you know, things like that.

I also like to use it for something like if I'm evaluating a paper that a student's written or something like that, I can go through and do all of my edits, add all of my feedback, and then push that into the LLM and say, hey, is there something I missed? Or is there some way that I could more clearly communicate that?

You know, it's this idea that if you've been teaching for a while, then, you know, you likely have a bunch of templates that you've put together of your frequent responses for students. I used to teach the Perl programming language and I would I would often get these assignments from students where it was clear they didn't really understand the difference between an array and a hash. And so I had a few different ways that I could explain that depending on sort of what their code looked like.

Well, if I had that, if I had an LLM available, then, you know, you could just put the feedback templates into there and then you could just say, hey, you know what? Highlight line 26 and insert a comment from the hashes and array template, you know, kind of thing. And so really speed that process up. So not using the tool to do your job, but using the tool to streamline the work that you're already doing.

My father was a junior high teacher, and so he would frequently come home from an eight or nine hour day of teaching and then just spend hours every night grading papers. People like to joke about teachers getting the summer off, but looking back, I would say it's kind of ironic. My dad probably worked more hours while I was growing up than I did when I first started working in the tech sector in Silicon Valley. Yeah, that's saying something for sure. Yeah.

Um, you know, but in terms of actual, you know, changes to the syllabus or the curriculum, you know, that, that can be helpful, you know, sort of bounce some ideas off it again, like you were saying before, if I swap some topics, would it make learning easier? You know, sometimes it's clear that certain topics should come before others, you know, maybe you need to teach multiplication before you can teach exponents, but you know, are there topics that it's not intuitive that, that it makes students think differently. And maybe if I swap them around, it would put the students in the right head space to think about an upcoming concept, you know,

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Yeah. Again, a lot of these examples are second pair of eyes, source of ideas. That all makes sense to me. Yeah. And I think that's really, you know, sort of something that's going to be driving into the curriculum just about, you know, in every discipline is, you know, you're looking at that second pair of eyes there.

Another benefit that I think people often overlook is professional development. And this is true for basically any field, right? You know, try telling your favorite LLM what field you work in and then ask it, you know, what kind of skills should I focus on learning? What skills am I going to need in this field in the next two to three years? You know, maybe just feed it your resume and see where your blind spots are. You know, oh, here's my resume. What three skills should I focus on learning?

You might even discover, oh, I already knew how to do that. I should add that to my resume. Yeah, yeah. No, that's all good. And I think that's all positive stuff. Even so, I think a lot of people are just like, okay, sure. AI, AI, AI. That's all we hear about. KV wants to know, are there some other technological advances that are making their way into education to help students or instructors? Yeah.

Yeah, and it's kind of funny because if I say, you know, some technology that has absolutely no AI in it, that sort of really narrows it down because it's such a broad category, right? But yeah, there's lots of like translation tools, which are especially powerful, you know, again, for those non-native speakers.

You know, something a lot of folks take for granted these days is videos with real time captions. But for your non-native students, these are really, really helpful. I recorded the lectures for one of my classes back in the early 2000s and added captions to it. This was back in the real media days to sort of show how long ago this was.

Uh, but when I did that, the average grade for my non-native English speakers jumped an entire letter grade that quarter. Wow. And I ran into a student later on that said, you know, he had now the ability to slow me down by 50% and read the captions. And that was why he ended up not dropping the class. And, uh, that had the added benefit of teaching me that, oh, I talk really fast when I'm teaching. I need to slow down. Yeah. Uh, that is a, that is a good reminder for sure. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think another thing that's really been emerging as an interesting thing

Extra benefit to students are things like OER. That's open educational resources. So folks mostly know that textbooks are kind of notoriously expensive. And there's been a real push in the community college system for faculty to adopt either a free or a low cost textbook, something like that. You know, I'm not currently teaching, but the next time I do, I'll probably write my own free textbook so the students don't have to pay for one.

And that's an area where an LLM could be super helpful, right? As an example, I've broken my Intro to Linux class down into about 40 lessons, and each one has a reading assignment, a video lecture, lab assignments, test quiz, all that kind of stuff.

Well, for each one, I could upload the material and then ask the LLM to give me a draft of a chapter of a textbook for that lesson. You know, there's still a lot of work, obviously, you know, making sure things are clear, making sure it's not hallucinating, all that kind of stuff. But it would definitely save quite a bit of time. Speed it up. Yeah. And the more you do that, the better the tool can become at learning your voice and your tone and, you know, how to make it sound like you.

Yeah, no, agreed. And that's where on-device memory, those sorts of things become really, really important. So let's get to a couple of questions when we finish up here about data privacy and security.

Alan wants to know how his data protection and privacy management evolved as classrooms become more digitized. He says, where could there be improvements? What difficulties do you encounter to protect student data while still allowing students or staff to access these tools?

Yeah, I mean, that's definitely an issue, right? And that's an issue for every organization. But schools have to be really careful about what technology they adopt, especially when it comes to SaaS tools, software as a service, so online tools, things like that. If we contract with a vendor to use a system that's running in the cloud, who owns that data?

You better make sure that data governance is thoroughly outlined in the contract. Does the vendor have to help you get the data out of the system if you want to move to a different platform? Will the vendor use our student data for training purposes on their LLMs? Things like that. Do they have to completely delete it when the contract expires? And what happens if they don't?

And FERPA is also an issue. So FERPA is the federal regulations regarding how institutions have to treat student data. And so as custodians of our student data, we're required to vet every tool that we use. There's a lot of great tools out there, but every new vendor you partner with becomes a data exposure risk, a cybersecurity attack vector.

So, you know, you can ask the tools, you know, do other schools use them? You know, have they had any issues with them? You know, and this is actually an example where the California community college system does a pretty good job of collaborating. There's over 100 community colleges in the state. And I'm involved with an association of CTOs and CIOs from all those schools. And we communicate with each other. So, you know, a vendor that has a bad track record can very quickly find itself persona non grata in that system.

Yeah, that's something that I think a lot of people don't realize. And when we had that court case we talked about on DTNS recently, you may have noticed that enterprise and education were exempted from the judge's rule because they weren't keeping the data because a lot of these rules. Yeah, that's exactly right. And it's the same with parts of health care, et cetera, because they have HIPAA and other regulations like that.

Yeah. And so, you know, the questions come up from time to time about just not using these tools at all. But but a major issue right now, especially in the community college systems, but in higher ed in general, is this idea of fraudulent students. That's, you know, bad actors who register for a class in order to commit student aid fraud, you know, and so fraud.

At our district, we've been working with an AI company to help us find ways to identify those individuals and remove them from the class so that legitimate students can actually get into their classes that they need, even before the classes start. And I was talking with my CTO last night, and it turns out that the Department of Education at the U.S. federal level is now putting out new guidance around this.

And they've explicitly called out the community college system in California and our district specifically in how we're using some of these tools. So hopefully we're going to be able to take a lot of the stuff that we've learned and get that back into the community and start making sure that we can cut down on that fraud, cut down on the abuse and make sure that our students can get into the classes they need so that they can actually graduate on the schedule that they're looking for. Yeah. So real human students that are really taking the classes could get the benefit. Exactly.

Kevin, thank you so much for talking with me. I know people want to hear you talk about the cheating side of this that people talk about all the time. So I'm going to ask you to come back and we'll do another episode just on that. Okay. Yeah, be great. Sounds good. If in the meantime, folks want to learn more about you or anything that goes on, do you have any resources that you want to point people to?

I mean, realistically, the place you'd probably find me is LinkedIn. I don't, I don't tend to post a whole lot. Um, I was, I was pretty big on Twitter until it stopped being Twitter. And I sort of stopped using a lot of social media at that point. So I, frankly, I just got too busy when I'm in my new, uh,

administration role. So no worries, no worries. Well, uh, thanks again, Kevin. Uh, and, uh, we'll, you'll hear from Kevin again soon. Uh, when we talk about cheating and controversies with AI, thanks everybody for supporting the show, patrion.com slash D T N S. Hope you have a great weekend. We'll talk to you on Monday. The DTNS family of podcasts, helping each other understand. Diamond club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

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