I'm in the midst of a number of trips, as I mentioned in my last newsletter, so I'll keep this week's newsletter short. On deck for business travel is a visit to the University of Georgia next week for a talk on AI-aware teaching the morning of the 10th. Details here. (On deck for personal travel is a short getaway this weekend with my wife to Chattanooga to see the Arcadian Wild in concert. They played our wedding!) After that, I'm heading to the POD Network Conference in Baltimore November 18-20, so look me up if you'll be at POD, too!

AI Learning Assistants at Scale

Over the last couple of years, we’ve had a couple of episodes of the podcast devoted to the notion of an AI-powered learning assistant. This is the idea that you can design a custom AI chatbot that has access to materials from a particular course and can serve as some kind of tutor for students in that course. I’ve known of a number of faculty here and there building these AI learning assistants, but it wasn’t until earlier this year that I learned about a university that rolled out AI learning assistants to all of its courses. That university, Azusa Pacific University Global (formerly known as Los Angeles Pacific University), is entirely online and its courses are entirely asynchronous. I was very curious how system-wide AI learning assistants would work in that context!

This week on the podcast, I talk with George Hanshaw, director of learning solutions at Azusa Pacific University Global, about this very ambitious AI project that went from a small pilot to university-wide rollout in just four weeks. I also talk with Kavitta Ghai, co-founder and CEO of Nectir, the company that George and his team partnered with to provide AI learning assistants enterprise-wide. Nectir has recently signed a contract with the California community college system, offering its AI learning assistant platform to all 116 community colleges and potentially over 2 million students. It’s clear that this use of AI to support student learning has a lot of energy behind, but does it work?

In our conversation, George and Kavitta talk about both the faculty and student experience of this technology, why it’s a particularly good fit for asynchronous online courses, and why students choose to use this institutionally provided AI tool instead of a commercial tool like ChatGPT.

​You can listen to my conversation with George Hanshaw and Kavitta Ghai here, or search for "Intentional Teaching" in your podcast app.

The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching

My new book, The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching, co-authored with Annette Vee and Marc Watkins, is now available! It's available through major online retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble as well as from smaller retailers like Bookshop and from Norton. The ebook version is free for faculty who have adopted a W.W. Norton textbook, so if that's you, ask your Norton rep. And if you'd like to order multiple copies for a campus reading group, Norton offers a bulk order discount. Email me for details.