{"id":164271,"date":"2025-09-23T17:11:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-23T17:11:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/164271\/"},"modified":"2025-09-23T17:11:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-23T17:11:10","slug":"is-ai-the-learning-tool-of-the-future-or-should-we-be-worried-about-its-use-in-higher-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/164271\/","title":{"rendered":"Is AI the learning tool of the future, or should we be worried about its use in higher education?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

University administrators seem paralyzed in the face of artificial intelligence’s rapid spread among students.skynesher\/stock<\/p>\n

Just two months after ChatGPT was launched in 2022, a survey found that 90 per cent of college students were already using it. <\/p>\n

Students aren\u2019t just using AI to write their essays. They\u2019re using it to generate ideas, conduct research, and to summarize their readings. In other words: they\u2019re using it to think for them. <\/p>\n

University administrators seem paralyzed in the face of this. Some worry that if we ban tools like ChatGPT, we may leave students unprepared for a world where everyone is already using them. But others think that if we go all in on AI, we could end up with a generation capable of producing work \u2013 but not necessarily original thought. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

I\u2019m honestly not sure which camp I fall into, so I wanted to talk to two people with very different perspectives on this. Conor Grennan<\/a> is the Chief AI Architect at NYU\u2019s Stern School of Business, where he\u2019s helping students and educators embrace AI. And Niall Ferguson<\/a> is a historian, senior fellow at Stanford and Harvard, and the co-founder of the University of Austin. Lately, he\u2019s been making the opposite argument: that if universities are to survive, they largely need to ban AI from the classroom. Return to the basics. Learn without the aid of technology. <\/p>\n

This interview has been edited and condensed from an episode of The Globe\u2019s Machines Like Us<\/a> podcast. <\/p>\n

Taylor Owen What are you seeing that makes you so worried? <\/p>\n

Niall Ferguson An immense amount of undergraduate assignments in universities all over North America are being completed by large-language models rather than by students. That\u2019s bad because if you\u2019re delegating reading, thinking and writing to ChatGPT, you\u2019re not learning to do those things. My argument is not that we should burn the machines, but that we have to create a period of time in the student day, and I would say it should be about six or seven hours long, during which they don\u2019t have access to AI. They\u2019ll have to read and think and write for themselves. <\/p>\n

You will have to abandon now decades-long practices of allowing students to do assignments in their own time with their laptops far from the supervision of professors. We\u2019ve got to go back to written and oral exams under invigilation.<\/p>\n

Taylor Owen Conor: Is there a way to use this within the classroom and within a pedagogical context? Can you just lay out a few of those best-case scenarios here?<\/p>\n

Conor Grennan AI gives us the potential of using the best potential learning tool that has ever been created in history to really advance and augment critical thinking in the moment. That\u2019s going to require a very serious rethinking of how we teach, and a very serious rethinking of the proxies for grading. This can take young people so far beyond where they are. And I\u2019m talking in terms of skipping entire grades almost with the ability to, if used properly, to go home, work with AI, and then have the teacher say, okay, our expectations for you are much, much higher. <\/p>\n

Taylor Owen Let\u2019s talk about cheating in the AI era. Is it the act of writing or the entire process of creating that essay? What if a student uses AI to develop their outline or to do a brainstorm their structure or something like that? Is that cheating as well? <\/p>\n

Niall Ferguson If you use it in the right way, it\u2019s potentially the greatest teaching and learning tool ever. The wrong way to use it is the way it\u2019s currently mostly being used, which is to cut corners so that you don\u2019t have to read, think or write. If you don\u2019t learn how to do those things, then you really aren\u2019t educated. <\/p>\n

I think what\u2019s important here is the idea that you don\u2019t say, here\u2019s an assignment, and then they go off and get ChatGPT to do it. You actually say, here are a set of things that we\u2019d like you to master. You\u2019re gonna do a whole bunch of problems and AI is gonna see how quickly you learn. It\u2019s gonna see you get along and it\u2019s going to respond to the way you do in the first run of problem sets. And that will generate the next set accordingly. <\/p>\n

Conor Grennan Incentives are everything. But what are the skills we actually really need? Do we still need to know how to write? Giant question mark. If we think about the calculator, all it did was democratize math. But it\u2019s not like kids don\u2019t have to learn math. My kids are going to kill me for saying this, but I think they need to write by hand or on an air-gapped computer, so they learn how to write. At the very root, kids need to learn what good writing looks like. Otherwise, I think that we are going come to a point of where everything is just AI slop.<\/p>\n

Taylor Owen What happens when we detach writing from learning? Can we do that at all, or is writing core to how we, particularly in that phase of our brain development, learn to think? <\/p>\n

Niall Ferguson What we really want to do in education is to have very, very fit brains. Brains that can very quickly absorb lots and lots of complex data, then they can think analytically, what does this signify? What\u2019s the pattern here? And then they can communicate to other human beings by writing or by speaking what they think they\u2019ve inferred from all of this. These are the things that make our brains fit. <\/p>\n

So I think just get into the mental gym, people. I say to the students at the University of Austin, one day I\u2019m going to come in here, I\u2019m gonna tell you, you\u2019ve got two days to read War and Peace, and you\u2019re gonna be just shut in the library with the book. And then you\u2019re going to come out and I\u2019m going to ask you, what\u2019s the meaning of this book? That\u2019s the kind of thing that a smart person can do. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: University administrators seem paralyzed in the face of artificial intelligence’s rapid spread among…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":103408,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,85009,61],"class_list":{"0":"post-164271","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-lc-gr","14":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=164271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164271\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/103408"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}