The Future of AI-Aware Teaching

My Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching co-authors Annette Vee and Marc Watkins and I had the good fortune to be guests on Bryan Alexander's Future Trends Forum the other week. If you missed the live show, the recording is now available on Bryan's YouTube channel. That recording doesn't include the text chat--which was a firehose!--but you'll get to hear us weigh in on

• What we mean by "AI-aware" teaching,
• AI as an arrival technology (that is, it just showed up with faculty or institutions asking for it),
• Some of our favorite examples of institutional responses to generative AI in teaching and learning,
• Student attitudes to generative AI and how students are using it (effectively or not), and
• How higher ed faculty and staff can keep pace with these rapidly evolving tools and their affects on learning

Bryan is a fantastic host and moderator, and we had really good questions from the Future Trends Forum community. I'm glad to have this recording available now!

What Students Say about Their AI Use

The other day on Bluesky, education professor Jon Becker shared a few highlights from a panel he attended featuring high school students talking about education policy topics. One of those topics was generative AI, and here's what Jon reported the panel saying about it:

This is consistent with what I've heard from students on panels talking about their AI Use, that students generally want to learn and worry about AI robbing of them of that opportunity, that students set their own boundaries about how they will and won't use AI in their studies, and that students are finding effective ways for AI to support their learning. Of course, the students who volunteer to speak on a panel perhaps not typical students, but data from the recent Inside Higher Ed Student Voice survey paints a similar picture:

The most common uses of AI selected by these survey respondents were learning support (personalized tutoring, explaining concepts) indicated by 60% of students, career readiness (resume feedback, interview prep) by 43% of students, and research / course projects (finding and synthesizing sources, developing ideas) by 41% of students. These seem like appropriate and perhaps boundaried uses of AI to support learning, although AI's role in tasks like personalized tutoring and synthesizing sources can be more or less helpful depending on the context and the student's prompt.

The panel that Jon attended and the IHE survey paint a rosy picture about student AI use, indicating that students make use of AI in ways that support and not undermine their learning. However, I can't help but think of some of the studies summarized in the March 2026 report “Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Offloading and Implications for Education” by Jason Lodge and Leslie Loble. As I noted in my blog post recently, the authors reviewed the current research on AI and learning, with a focus on cognitive offloading. More than one study indicated that students' typical default use of technologies like ChatGPT in a learning context treats the chatbots like answer machines, not effective tutors. This can lead to short-term performance gains, but at the cost of long-term learning.

So are students using AI in thoughtful, effective ways to enhance their learning or are they outsourcing their thinking and learning to their favorite chatbot? I think both things are true! Some students set good boundaries for their AI use, and these are students who are likely to be on a panel talking to faculty about AI. The research indicates that the more common use of AI by students is less helpful. One thing I've learned from the edtech rodeo is that we shouldn't let our views on a particular educational technology be determined by the worse use cases--or even by the most common use cases. We have agency as instructors, and we can help our students use their agency to learn about and shift to the best use cases of a technology like AI.

In fact, that was one of Lodge and Loble's main recommendations. Here's what they say about the "pedagogical solution" to cognitive offloading:

See page 25 of their report (or my blog post) for some teaching strategies along these lines. Or, you know, check out my new book!

Launch Party for My New Book

The good folks at W.W. Norton are planning a virtual launch party for The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching for Wednesday, July 8th, at 1:30pm Central. The author team will be there (Annette, Marc, me) to introduce the book and share our favorite elements of the book, and we'll have an "Ask the Authors" segment moderated by our fantastic editor, Erica Wnek. And you're invited! The launch party is free, and you can register for it here.

And, as a reminder, our book is now available to pre-order. The ebook is expected to be available July 1st (that's next week!), and print copies are expected to start shipping on September 24th. See my website for pre-ordering options.