A future of couch potatoes

Meme from the Umbrella academy where student is using ChatGPT to do homework, and professor has used ChatGPT to generate homework

I've been a bit "behind" in my participation in ETMOOC 2.0. I've been enjoying keeping an eye on Discord, but I haven't really been participating as much as I would like to.  In a couple of weeks, the semester ends, so mental bandwidth should be freed up a bit ;-).

This past week one of the streams that crossed my little part of Twitter was about teachers using ChatGPT to give feedback to learners on the homework/essays that they've submitted for grading.  I managed to avoid most of this discussion - probably a symptom of having rolled my eyes so hard I almost knocked myself senseless 😂.  

When I stopped for a moment to consider the possibility of this thing being useful for teaching (assuming we put aside any ethical or legal issues that come with uploading a student's paper into this kind of platform), I was reminded of a comic meme that I saw on the ChatGPT subreddit last week (or was it two weeks ago).  While it is more focused on the workplace environment, I think it has applicability to education:

This whole discussion brings a few questions to mind:

  • If we're so bothered by students using AI to do their work, why aren't we bothered by having AI do our work?
  • If teaching is essentially a kind of caring task, doesn't it signal that we don't care about the people who submitted their work to us for comment when we outsource it?  I understand that there is an issue with workload and increasing adjunctification of academia, but AI is not the way to solve this, rather it's leaning into it.
  • If learners need to use AI to write their assignment for them what does this say about our assignments?  Might they be boring? Missing making a relevant connection?  Might it be a workload issue for students? Or, might it be a skills-related gap that prevents them from doing what they need to so? Or all of the above?  Creating more make-work for learners isn't the way to solve this issue.
OK, so you might be wondering where the whole couch potato thing is coming from.  Many years ago, when I was in high school, I had a math teacher (Mr. Erhardt).  He has a banner in his classroom that read "Math is not a spectator sport." In my memory this thing was printed on a dot matrix printer sometime in the late 80s, even though my high school experience was in the mid-late 90s ;-).  In any case, when we did math problems in Mr. Erhardt's class he always pointed to the banner when he wanted to solicit class participation.   When I became an instructional designer and I was thinking about active learning, Mr. Erhardt and his banner came to mind.  

I adapted this by saying that "Learning is not a spectator sport" and I started using the analogy of the course instructor/facilitator/teacher as a personal trainer.  Students go to class for the same reason they go to the gym - they want to get something out of it, but that something only comes when they do the thing that they need to do (push-ups, squats, burpees, 30 minutes on the treadmill, whatever). The personal trainer is there to demonstrate, to spot, and to give feedback so that you do the activities correctly and you don't injure yourself.   Ultimately it's the learner who needs to sweat and feel the burn. If the learner's goal is to watch someone else sweat, then there is a mismatch.  They shouldn't be at the gym.  They should be courtside at basketball games, or a hockey arena, or on the sidelines as people run a marathon.

If learners are using AI to not (metaphorically) sweat, and if we're using AI to not (metaphorically) spot and correct our learners, then why don't we just all agree to be couch potatoes?

Couch Potatoes of AI (Generated by Bing)


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