George Veletsianos, PhD

Professor, researcher, consultant, speaker, educational technology, learning design, online education, emerging technologies

Category: futures Page 1 of 5

New Course | Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Education

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On November 19, 2024

In courses, emerging technologies, futures, generative artificial intelligence, online learning, teacherbots

The Learning Technologies program at the University of Minnesota will be offering a new course this Spring.

CI 5330 (Spring 2025)
Special Topics in Learning Technologies: AI in Education
Instructor Dr. George Veletsianos (georgev |at| umn.edu)
Fully Online
Jan 21, 2025 – May 05, 2025

Short description: This graduate-level course offers an introductory and expansive investigation of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in education. It will enable learners to (1) investigate the foundations, possibilities, realities, and challenges of AI in education, and (2) gain practical experiences with using AI in education. Through practical and conceptual activities learners will grow their knowledge, skills, and experiences with GenAI in education, and become able to speak fluently about this technology’s proposed benefits (e.g., personalization) and challenges (e.g., biases) in education. The course will balance conceptual and practical experiences, and enable students to use AI tools more effectively and creatively. This course is relevant to numerous learning and teaching contexts, including K-12, higher education, adult education, professional settings, and informal settings.

Long description: This graduate-level course offers an introductory and expansive investigation of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in education. The course focuses on the foundations, possibilities, realities, limitations/challenges, and practical implementation of GenAI in education. Learners will critically examine literature and practice surrounding GenAI and consider both the benefits of this emerging technology (e.g., personalization) as well as its challenges (e.g., biases and environmental concerns). The course will balance conceptual, theoretical, and practical experiences and will emphasize both theory-to-practice and practice-to-theory through active engagement with AI tools. The course is relevant to multiple learning and teaching contexts and will encourage learners to apply concepts to their unique educational contexts, including K-12, higher education, adult education, professional training, and others.

All learners are expected to be active and ongoing participants in the learning process and foster a community of learning. Course activities will use various technologies to seek and share content; and class interactions will incorporate a variety of text-, audio-, and video-based tools. This is a completely online and asynchronous course and will require regular and active participation in class discussions as well as reflective, practical, and analytic work. The course will follow an engaging and flexible online format to include asynchronous activities that are convenient for working professionals and conducive to online learning for students who may be joining the course from across the country and abroad. This is not an independent study course, nor is it self-paced. Rather, the modules and learning activities are designed to promote and encourage social interactions and the development of a learning community as we learn together.

Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to:

  • Define a variety of terms relating to GenAI (e.g., machine learning, large language models, etc)
  • Identify conceptual, theoretical and practical issues relating to GenAI
  • Expand your GenAI literacies
  • Apply GenAI tools, processes, and technologies to education topics of interest
  • Explain benefits and drawbacks of GenAI
  • Formulate and articulate informed perspectives on key theories and issues relating to GenAI in education
  • Discuss the role and practice of GenAI in different contexts
  • Discuss contemporary research being conducted in GenAI and the major issues being studied
  • Identify, synthesize, and critically evaluate major issues affecting GenAI in education
  • Practice and develop prompt engineering techniques
  • Use GenAI to develop an education micro application

 

Edtech deja vu

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On October 15, 2024

In futures, generative artificial intelligence

I enjoyed reading Marc Watkins recap of OpenAI’s education forum. Marc correctly points out that “There is excitement about what AI can do in the future, but not much time spent addressing what AI is actually doing to students now.” For those of us who have been in edtech for a while, this is deja vu… deja vu to radio, TVs, correspondence education, authorware, virtual worlds, MOOCs, and on an on. Much of edtech focuses on the possibilities rather than the realities. And it’s not that those innovations haven’t been impactful in particular contexts. They have. It’s that they haven’t had the systemwide transformational impacts that their proponents promised. Will it be different this time?

On second thought, deja vu might not be fully appropriate. Modus operandi might be a more apt way of describing this, as that’s how the edtech industry operates regardless of evidence and history.

2033 – Future education scenario 3 of 3

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On August 28, 2024

In future education, futures, my research, speculative fiction, speculative futures

In a recent paper* we describe three education scenarios and ask youth to respond to them. Positioned in 2033, these futures represent three distinct possibilities for what education could look like in a decade. I’m curious what others think about them, and I’ll post one per day here, as my “back to school return to reviving this blog.” What are your reactions, thoughts, and feelings to this one? I’d love to know!

Future 3: The year is 2033. Public universities and colleges around the world struggle to stay open due to sharp declines in enrolments and continuing social and economic instability. Many schools close, and those that remain become increasingly unaffordable. Students that pursue higher education usually come from wealthy families. However, a variety of companies emerge to fill gaps. These companies offer short courses that help people develop work skills, such as how to use different kinds of software and how to analyze data. Some of the teachers in these companies are individuals who found success in their industries and are well-known chefs, international authors, famous engineers, and business executives of all kinds, for example. They have huge social media followings and are celebrity instructors. These companies do not provide any kind of financial aid, and access to their courses usually comes with strings attached, such as contracts to do temp work for the company.

This scenario describes a situation in which traditional universities are rare and inaccessible for most and the “social media university” emerges to fill the gap. It anticipates a future in which technology companies, particularly social media companies, further commodify education according to neoliberal logics. This style of university is a platform-based form of digital higher education in which celebrity experts and influencers occupy the role of educator as a function of their social media followings and professional prestige. Without financial support, learners/users exchange labor for skills development, while wealthy students continue to attend more conventional institutions to pursue their interests. The notion of a social media university reflects the interest of education technology startups which feature online education experiences offered by celebrities and influencers, as we examined in this paper.

* published in the the inaugural issue of the Journal of Open, Distance, and Digital education (see a review by Tony Bates).

 

2033 – Future education scenario 2 of 3

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On August 27, 2024

In future education, futures, my research, speculative fiction, speculative futures

In a recent paper* we describe three education scenarios and ask youth to respond to them. Positioned in 2033, these futures represent three distinct possibilities for what education could look like in a decade. I’m curious what others think about them, and I’ll post one per day here, as my “back to school return to reviving this blog.” What are your reactions, thoughts, and feelings to this one? I’d love to know!

Future 2: The year is 2033. After a period of instability brought about by the disastrous effects of climate change, biodiversity loss, and global conflict, higher education has become totally focused on addressing these crises. Earlier efforts have been vastly scaled up to focus education resources on supporting climate justice for the most vulnerable people and places in the world. Universities have become hubs of local knowledge and places for community cultural and scientific development. In these spaces students develop climate and peoplefriendly trades and skills. They also develop their critical and creative thinking focused on decolonization and anti-racism. Learning happens through projects and through solving local problems, and learners of all ages join programs based on interest, curiosity, and community need.

The second future – the university for local community and local knowledge – pivots towards more regenerative forms of education, with a focus on systems-level solutions to imagined disasters of the next decade. With respect to anticipatory regimes, this future departs from the strict techno-utilitarian approach to embrace more relational modes of teaching and learning. Universities in this scenario have a mission grounded in justice and supporting knowledge for communities, with an emphasis on inter-generational learning relevant to specific places. This scenario is more utopian in its vision, even as it contends with a proposed future history of increasing climate and ecological catastrophe.

* published in the the inaugural issue of the Journal of Open, Distance, and Digital education (see a review by Tony Bates).

 

2033 – Future education scenario 1 of 3

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On August 26, 2024

In future education, futures, my research, speculative fiction, speculative futures

In a recent paper* we describe three education scenarios and ask youth to respond to them. Positioned in 2033, these futures represent three distinct possibilities for what education could look like in a decade. I’m curious what others think about them, and I’ll post one per day here, as my “back to school return to reviving this blog.” What are your reactions, thoughts, and feelings to this one? I’d love to know!

Future 1: The year is 2033. In the decade following the COVID-19 pandemic, higher education has increasingly become driven by collecting and analyzing vast amounts of student data, such as tracking student time online, physiological data, employment rates, etc. Learners attending public colleges and universities primarily pursue technical skills associated with a few streams of programs, including computer programming (such as the development of Artificial Intelligence and green technology), health, economics, finance, and business. The arts, social sciences, and humanities are no longer publicly funded. Learners can pursue such programs in expensive private universities, but only a few can afford them.

This is a future in which technical and business education dominates. This is the scenario in which higher education is almost totally oriented towards economic demands and expectations. We modeled this scenario after work in the literature which emphasizes futures in which the arts and humanities decline due to their lack of economic practicality. In such examples, the survival and growth of higher education heavily features future labor as a key indicator of institutional success, including meeting demands for skilled technologists and finance workers. Additionally, surveillance technologies are further integrated into institutional apparatuses, with data being a key management tool of student learning and outcomes. Already a concern in education at all levels, a number of education scholars have speculated about the risks of increasing use of these types of education technologies, many suggesting negative outcomes resulting from it.

* published in the the inaugural issue of the Journal of Open, Distance, and Digital education (see a review by Tony Bates).

 

New publication: How do Canadian Faculty Members Imagine Future Teaching and Learning Modalities?

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On May 8, 2024

In future education, futures, papers, scholarship, speculative fiction, speculative futures

What do future learning environments look like? Is online learning “the new normal?” Or, are we back to the “old normal?” What does the “new normal” look like? Never mind concepts of “normal,”… what do learners and faculty imagine future learning environments, technologies, and modalities looking like? Colleagues and I completed and are planning a series of studies around these ideas, bringing together threads in our research that examines online learning, emerging technologies, challenges facing higher education, and speculative methods. We recently published one of these and I am sharing the pre-print below.

When I prompted ChatGPT to generate an image depicting this paper it generated the image below. This image provides an interesting juxtaposition to our findings, because our findings highlight the relative persistence of the status quo and reveal a lack of more radical futures.

Here’s the paper: Veletsianos, G., Johnson, N., & Houlden, S. (2024). How do Canadian Faculty Members Imagine Future Teaching and Learning Modalities? Educational Technology Research & Development, 72(3), 1851 – 1868.. The final version is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-024-10350-4 but here is a public pre-print version.

Abstract

This study, originally prompted by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on educational practices, examined Canadian faculty members’ expectations of teaching and learning modalities in the year 2026. Employing a speculative methodology and thematic analysis, interview responses of 34 faculty members led to the construction of three hypothetical scenarios for future teaching and learning modalities: a hybrid work model, a high tech and flexible learning model, and a pre-pandemic status quo model. In contrast to radical education futures described in the literature, the findings do not depart significantly from dominant modes of teaching and learning. Nevertheless, these findings offer insights into the expectations that Canadian faculty members have with respect to future teaching and learning modalities, the contextual issues and concerns that they face, the use of speculative methodologies in educational technology research, and the potential impacts remote learning trends have on the future of education in Canada.

Edtech history, erasure, udacity, and blockchain

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On March 22, 2024

In emerging technologies, future education, futures, generative artificial intelligence, scholarship, short reflections

This thought in Audrey’s newsletter (update: link added March 30th) caught my attention, and encouraged me to share a related story.

 [Rose Eveleth] notes how hard it can be to tell a history when you try to trace a story to its primary sources and you simply cannot find the origin, the source. (I have been thinking a lot about this in light of last week’s Udacity news. So much of “the digital” has already been scrubbed from the web. The Wired story where Sebastian Thrun claimed that his startup would be one of ten universities left in the world? It’s gone. Many of the interviews he did where he said other ridiculous things about ed-tech – gone. What does this mean for those who will try to write future histories of ed-tech? Or, no doubt, of tech in general?) Erasure.

 

Remember how blockchain was going to revolutionize education? Ok, let’s get into the weeds of a related idea and how most everything that happened around it has also disappeared from the web.

One way through which blockchain was going to revolutionize education was through the development of education apps and software running on the blockchain. Around 2017, Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) were the means through which to raise money to build those apps. An ICO was the cryptocurrency equivalent of an initial public offering. A company would offer people a new cryptocurrency token in exchange for funds to launch the company. The token would then provide some utility for ICO holders relating to the app/software (e.g., you could exchange it for courses, or for study sessions, or hold on to it hoping that its value would increase and resell, etc). The basic idea idea here was crowdfunding, and a paper published in the Harvard International Law Journal estimates that contributions to ICO’s exceeded $50bn by 2019. The Wikipedia ICO page includes more background.

A number of these ICOs focused on education. Companies/individuals/friends* would create a website and produce a whitepaper describing their product. Whitepapers varied, but they typically described the problem to be solved, the blockchain-grounded edtech solution they offered, use cases, the team behind the project, a roadmap, and the token sale/model.

To give you a sense of the edtech claims included in one of those whitepapers:

“The vision is the groundbreaking disruption of the old education industry and all of its branches. The following points are initial use cases which [coin] can provide … Users pay with [coins] on every major e-learning platform for courses and other content they have passed or consumed… Institutions can get rid of their old and heavy documented certification process by having it all digitalized, organized, governed and issued by the [coin] technology.”

I was entertaining an ethnographic project at the time, and collected a few whitepapers. For a qualitative researcher, those whitepapers were a treasure trove of information. But, looking online, they’re largely scrubbed, gone, erased. In some cases, ICO’s founders’ LinkedIn profiles were scrubbed and online communities surrounding the projects disappeared, even as early as ICOs didn’t raise the millions they were hoping for.

Some of you following this space might remember Woolf, the “world’s first blockchain university” launched by Oxford academics. And you might also remember that, like other edtech projects, it “pivoted.” See Martin Weller’s writing and David Gerard’s writing on this. Like so many others, the whitepaper describing the vision, the impending disruption of higher ed through a particular form of edtech, is gone. David kept a copy of that whitepaper, and I have copies of a couple of whitepapers from other ventures. But, by and large, that evidence is gone. I get it. Scammers scam, honest companies pivot, the two aren’t the same, and reputation management is a thing. But, I hope that this short post serves as a small reminder to someone in the future that grandiose claims around educational technology aren’t new. And perhaps, just perhaps, at a time of grandiose claims around AI in education, there are some lessons here.

 

 

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