Conference for Advancing Evidence-Based Learning
Chris Dede
Reimagining Higher Education with Artificial Intelligence
While many forecasts chart an evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) in taking human jobs, more likely is a future where AI changes the division of labor in most work-roles, driving a need for workforce development to shift towards uniquely human skills. The global economy is moving into an era of Intelligence Augmentation, where the judgment and decision-making skills of human are enhanced by the reckoning skills (e.g. calculations, analysis of multidimensional information, predictions) of computers or machine intelligence. The human and machine work synergistically together to be better than their individual abilities. This framework implies that learning knowledge, skills, and dispositions for work should increasingly prioritize capability building of human judgment, applied wisdom, and decision making—at the expense of developing some reckoning skills that AI will assume. Moreover, machine learning (ML) could be used to help “engineer” learning, by applying evidence-based strategies to the continual re-design of performance-based simulation experiences to optimize their effectiveness and efficiency. This will enable developing diagnostic/formative longitudinal assessments of judgment that complement our current high-stakes tests centered on reckoning.
Chris Dede is a Senior Research Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and was for 22 years its Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies. His fields of scholarship include emerging technologies, policy, and leadership. From 2001-2004, he was Chair of the HGSE department of Teaching and Learning. In 2007, he was honored by Harvard University as an outstanding teacher, and in 2011 he was named a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association. In 2023 he was named a Fellow of the Online Learning Consortium.
In 2020 Chris co-founded the Silver Lining for Learning initiative (https://silverliningforlearning.org). He is currently an Advisor to the Alliance for the Future of Digital Learning, sponsored by the Mohammed bin Rashid Global Initiative (MBRGI). Also, Chris is a Co-Principal Investigator and Associate Director for Research of the NSF-funded National Artificial Intelligence Institute in Adult Learning and Online Education.
His most recent co-edited books include: Teacher Learning in the Digital Age: Online Professional Development in STEM Education; Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Realities in Education; Learning engineering for online education: Theoretical contexts and design-based examples; and The 60-Year Curriculum: New Models for Lifelong Learning in the Digital Economy.
C. Edward Watson
AI’s Implications for the Higher Education Classroom: Preparing Students for Success During and Beyond College
Generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and others, have had an astonishingly quick impact on the ways we learn, work, think, and create, and this evolution is clearly apparent on college campuses. AI is present in our college classrooms, and there is also growing demand for graduates who possess AI competencies and literacies. Further, such skills will be increasingly important for all of us as the landscape for participating in our democracy evolves. A core question for higher education is how will we respond to these new realities. Drawing from the presenter’s new book, Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024), this keynote will begin by exploring the key challenges facing higher education in regard to AI, including emerging workforce demands and evolving academic integrity challenges. The presentation will then turn to concrete approaches to assignments, feedback, and grading that faculty can adopt to better prepare students for the life that awaits them after graduation.
Edward Watson, Ph.D. is the Associate Vice President for Curricular and Pedagogical Innovation and Executive Director of Open Educational Resources and Digital Innovation at the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). Prior to joining AAC&U, Dr. Watson was the Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Georgia (UGA) where he led university efforts associated with faculty development, TA development, learning technologies, and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. He continues to serve as a Fellow in the Louise McBee Institute of Higher Education at UGA and recently stepped down after more than a decade as the Executive Editor of the International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. His most recent book is Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning. Dr. Watson been quoted in the New York Times, Chronicle of Higher Education, Campus Technology, EdSurge, EdTech, Consumer Reports, UK Financial Times, and University Business Magazine and by the AP, CNN and NPR regarding current teaching and learning issues and trends in higher education.