This article, The College Essay Is Dead (December 6, 2022), circled around both my close instructional designer friends and our huge instructional designer Facebook group and it is garnering a lot of attention.

One overheard comment was that instructional designers will be out of job as AI can now write lesson plans aligned to learning objectives.

I’ll just sit over here eating popcorn if you think that instructional designers ONLY write lesson plans.

You can tell things get hot when I need to start writing my rebuttal before I’ve even finished reading the article! How very un-academic of me! Ha! That means that I’m writing from real life experience. Said another way, you will not find this in the manual.

One of my friends quipped that everything old is new again.

Said another way, here we go on an another design cycle.

Live long enough and the world will start to move in cycles, patterns. You see things new that you’ve seen before. It’s like the return of an old friend.

Some things you live long enough to see:

• The youth, with their energy, are going to do it right this time!
• The old, sit quietly with their eyes illuminated with the light of past glories won and lost.
• Children don’t have a clue.

The introduction of a new technology – in this case – AI writing papers for learners – and you see the same  reactions.

History of writing in online education

The History of Online Education

So the article’s title is about the college essay, but really this issue impacts nearly every form of online education because online education’s history draws directly from writing-based learning.

Current online education has plentiful examples from every possible degree and discipline where it is being offered, at least in part, online and the online parts have written assessments. (The few exceptions might be things like dance where video-taped dancers have to be evaluated or perhaps teaching and nursing certifications where a learner MUST touch or impact another person as part of the learning and assessment process.)  But in many, many, many, MAAANNNYYY other subjects, they can be taught online. Hence, the writing component.  It might be discussion posts, ‘essays’, papers, reports, analysis, etc.

So today’s schools and universities of 2022 are the children of  ‘parent’ online schools that were successful BEFORE the COVID-19 pandemic, like:

• University of Phoenix (100% online)
• Western Governors University (online except required license components for nursing and education)
• SNHU – a copy of WGU
• Small variants like Unity College which switched to all online DURING the pandemic but was already running their online course model large-scale previously.

Then the ‘grandparent’ generation is:

• Empire State College in New York (an entirely distance education school part of the SUNY system)
• Open University in Great Britain.

The ancestor generation is the exchange of written scrolls to disseminate and share knowledge and here we find monks with scrolls:

7th century Xuanzang, reported to have brought Buddhism to China (note his scrolls in the backpack and the little lantern to see by):

By Unknown author – https://colbase.nich.go.jp/collection_items/tnm/A-10600?locale=en, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=247641

Monks singing, obviously telling us with their upturned faces and raised hands that the written text is pretty high and mighty.

[Image from https://www.medievalists.net/2016/02/five-surprising-rules-for-medieval-monks/]

Patterns

So let me get back to the patterns and design cycles.

As each new technology is introduced (into education, but that clause is irrelevant) there is a hubbub of  negative comments about what it could me and what might happen. 

1. Initial expectations are high, even if those expectations are negative. (Amara’s Law in play: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”)
2. Proficiency is low because few people are experts and they have not had time or ability to teach what they know.
3. Results are high! Generally this is because results are contaminated with novelty effect or non-comparable methods.

 

Here is a great article on the transition from horses to cars for transportation.

There was the arrival of the Internet which was supposed to be the great equalizer. (snort!) Those quotes were said in 1996

 and they are still being said in 2022!!

And I’ve already copied, word for word, the brief and brilliant words of Richard Mayer from the 2005 edition of the Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning, a book I rank as *the most important book* to instructional design.

In summary, each new technological changes arrives with high promise and even with full incorporation, fails to change educational results.

So here we are, with learners that have at their fingertips AI that can write their school papers.

What do we do?

The Verbal Exam

One solution that I’d like to talk a little more about is the verbal exam (oral exam always sounded like what happened at a dentist).  Here’s the backstory.

At a university that I worked at, we ran on assessments. They were our bread-and-butter. There was no way to get course credit WITHOUT passing assessments. 

Think double-comprehensive final exam; 

• double for the content; it was usually 2 semester’s worth, 
• comprehensive because everything was on one test,
• final because the result of the one exam was the entire determination of course grade: Pass/Fail.

When students passed a ‘double comprehensive final exam’, they would get credit for passing the course. 

We had learners who would show up, not want to do the required studies, and would shortcut their studies with some flashcards on the Internet and fail their exam.  

And fail it again.

And fail it again.

For 4th and further attempts, learners had to earn the approval of a faculty member to retake the exam.

It was incumbent upon us faculty to ascertain the readiness of the learner to retake the exam.

So by looking at our learning metrics, it was pretty easy to tell that learner had NOT engaged with the learning content.  We’d explain the ‘study plan’ which was basically filling out a large workbook of questions that would help them get ready for the exam.

Now here’s where it would get interesting.

Learners would cheat on the workbook because cheating was working SO WELL for them up to this point. (sarcasm).

Very early on in the use of this workbook, I would do 2 behaviors:

You Know, Faculty Can Google Too

1. I myself, as faculty, would google the actual first 2 modules of study questions in the workbook on the topics of the scientific method, basic machines, and physics. It was a scary day when Google actually had received the exact same question so many times that it form-filled. No, I don’t think that Google was only learning me & my questions.

I looked up and read the first 20 hits of answers to each question.

Shockingly, I’d find some scientifically WRONG answers on the Internet! (I remember watching a video about the inverse square law that was just garbage. I’d say that line in front of my students and they’d be like “oh tell us which ones are the right ones to watch!” and I’d be like “Sure! Pass this course. Then you’ll know!”  Burn. 🔥)

Once I familiarized myself with what was on the Internet, I became very adept at picking up when my students were answering the questions truthfully (authentically) or had only copied and pasted.

Whenever I received a section filled out, I would read it through for accurate answers (of course) but also any answers that just seemed ‘to good to be true” or even better “weren’t at all covered in the course”.
I would simply (it is AMAZING how fast one could do this) cut and paste the answer into Google and huh-ho! (as Seinfeld would say) I’d find where they copied it from.

After that, there was a neat little rehearsed email.

“Dear Learner,

Thank you for sending this! Some of the answers to these study questions look like material available on the Internet. Of course, you didn’t copy these but the actual answers I’m looking for are in this linked video from 2:34 until 4:13.”

The usual response?

“I didn’t know there were course videos.”

Just picture me over here in a corner rocking as the course videos took HOURS of faculty time to produce. They were good. They were accurate. And they lead directly to passing the exam. And we plastered them everywhere. Students not knowing they existed? Good Grief! 🤦

Verbal Exam Coming Up!

Behavior 2: Scenario, learner has failed multiple times, had insisted that they completed the workbook, they cheated on the preassessment, and they feel as though their faculty member is being mean to them not letting them attempt the exam again. So this learner lands on my lap as I’m the department head. They are angry. They have a set phone appointment with me. They’ve be rehearsing how they are going to give me a piece of their mind and now I’m there.

They let it fly.

I’ve heard it all. I really have. My favorite, tho, was when one of my most kindest faculty was called a…get this…despot. Bravo for $5 word choice! You passed your SATs.   But I don’t buy it.

I would listen until they ran out of gas, taking notes, listening for patterns (I didn’t read the book because I don’t have time, I didn’t watch the videos because I don’t have time, didn’t study because my job keeps me really busy, I didn’t prepare for the exam because I had a sick baby…yada yada yada.)

Once they had calmed down, I would say,

“I can give you approval right now if you will take a verbal exam of 6 questions with me. The result will tell me if you are ready to attempt the exam.”

“OK,” they’d say, “yes, sure!”

So I’d start.

I won’t write those questions here because those are my trade secrets, but they were 6 questions: 4 conceptual and 2 detailed.

Most learners failed by the 3rd question. At that point, we’d have a “Come To Jesus” moment, which means, come to the truth. “We need to talk about the fact that you are not ready to attempt the exam.”

And really, that was what that little exercise was all about. Only a couple of my faculty clued into that method.

It wasn’t WHAT the answer was that they gave me, it was HOW they attacked the question; how they got there. Were they ready to face questions that do not have memorized answers?

If a learner was able to engage in reasoning for a question, then I could see that they were ready to face 70 more questions on the exam that were going to make them do the same thing.

It was all about being ready to dance with a thought, not regurgitating it.

And indeed, if you are a Star Trek fan, you will have notice the dance between humans trumping technology and technology trumping humans, as played out between the Kirk and Spock characters.

Spock could be stopped by “How do you feel?” and a computer could be stopped by “Calculate Pi”  I’m not suggesting that AI can be stopped by Pi. I’m suggesting that there are just concerns that humans need to handle more than AI does.

So I’m not having any large fits of problems with AI arriving so fast here in 2022.

It’s just another cycle beginning again.  We’ll adjust. It’s fine if AI writes a crappy paper anyway. People who think that good writing is the beginning and end of knowledge really have bigger problems.

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