11–20 of 146 posts
AI can help with content generation or scaffolding, but teaching is still a bidirectional feedback process. When the model can’t adapt to misunderstanding or context, students immediately feel the gap. It’s a UX failure more than a “should AI be allowed” issue
Also, there are hardly any good teachers left. Most are hired on sharing basis, who shuttle between multiple colleges.
It has been many years that most courses in most universities have inferior lectures than just watching a great series of YouTube videos. Many professors have no passion or training in teaching, they just want to do research. Or they have no time or pay to prepare a course. So of course they use AI slop wherever they can. Even if they record their lectures, that's almost never better than the best free ones out there…
When I started undergrad, my father told me that university was not for learning; that was what the Internet was for, and since I was in tech; it wasn't quite for proving myself either: that was internships and portfolio. It was, rather, for the people. And a place to grow up. That matters too.
I guess some small percentage of it was hallucinated, but if you want to call it a teacher/student relationship, it was pretty amazing.
It has been many years that most courses in most universities have inferior lectures than just watching a great series of YouTube videos. Many professors have no passion or training in teaching, they just want to do research. Or they have no time or pay to prepare a course. So of course they use AI slop wherever they can. Even if they record their lectures, that's almost never better than the best free ones out there…
This is too extreme of a generalization. There are obviously bad professors and universities that are not worth your money, but most professors at any halfway decent university are going to put a good deal of effort into teaching well. Getting a job as a professor is surprisingly competitive for the relatively low compensation because there are a lot of people who want to teach and teach well.
You can find some decent learning material on YouTube but it’s still mostly geared toward infotainment. I have a lot of bookmarks for excellent YouTube videos that I share with juniors on certain topics, but on average it’s really hard to find YouTube teaching resources that teach at the level of a university professor. When you do, it’s hard to get people to actually watch them as true teaching often involves slogging through some of the less exciting content as well. Most YouTube videos are designed to trigger “aha!” moments but only provide a surface level understanding. The type of learning where you think you understand a topic but couldn’t really explain it to someone else well or solve problems on a test because you haven’t gone through the full learning yet.
> Universities need to lean into the fact that for undergrads, they're only still good at one thing: proctured in person assessments. Also maybe community building.
You’re missing the biggest one of all: Accountability. We already saw with the MOOC trend that releasing high quality university lectures online from top universities is not enough to get many people to go through with learning the material. Getting them into a place where they know there will be a test and a grade and they have some skin in the game makes a huge difference.
Some people learned from MOOCs, but in general the attrition rate and falloff was insanely high from lecture 1 to the end.
I can't imagine having so little respect for my own reputation that as a professor I'd throw out unreviewed AI slop as my own intellectual work, but I bet nobody is getting fired for it so that's just a sign of my own stupidity. A professor with no pride, working for a university with no pride, giving students with no pride certifications that they can use to get ahead in an economy with no pride.
I'm bullish on AI in education, because of the possibility of creating an individual student model that the machine can use to constantly target weaknesses in understanding. But that hasn't been invented yet. What you would get now is a teacher that hallucinates, simply lies to bridge gaps, forgets what it was supposed to be talking about, and constantly fabricates references.
I just had a pretty amazing 4 hour session with gpt 5.1 going over my son's rare disease. Chat broke it all down for me in a really deep and clear way in the back and forth. Insights I've never gotten to from talking to docs, reading papers, reading bio textbooks etc. I guess some small percentage of it was hallucinated, but if you want to call it a teacher/student relationship, it was pretty amazing.
So I don't trust it anymore, at best it's a good start.
I just had a pretty amazing 4 hour session with gpt 5.1 going over my son's rare disease. Chat broke it all down for me in a really deep and clear way in the back and forth. Insights I've never gotten to from talking to docs, reading papers, reading bio textbooks etc. I guess some small percentage of it was hallucinated, but if you want to call it a teacher/student relationship, it was pretty amazing.
It's when you take that conversation you just had, make it into a PowerPoint, and try to sell it for 10000x what you spent on the credits that it really becomes lazy. Why expect anyone pay for that when they could have just asked the AI themselves?
I just had a pretty amazing 4 hour session with gpt 5.1 going over my son's rare disease. Chat broke it all down for me in a really deep and clear way in the back and forth. Insights I've never gotten to from talking to docs, reading papers, reading bio textbooks etc. I guess some small percentage of it was hallucinated, but if you want to call it a teacher/student relationship, it was pretty amazing.