The Blended Teaching newsletter

Last week, Dan and I spent three days in San Antonio at the Financial Education Association conference. We expected papers on innovative teaching, some solid cases, and, now that AI is here, plenty of talk about cheating. The presentations were great, but the biggest lessons came from conversations over coffee between sessions.

Here’s what we learned...

Publisher quizzes no longer measure learning. AI can answer these questions reliably in seconds, and it’s driving grade inflation. So why are they still in use? Replacing them is a big lift, and most instructors don’t have time to build their own AI-resistant assessments. Administrators haven’t offered workable solutions, and publishers and ed tech companies have yet to offer scalable alternatives.

Instructors are vibe-coding their own tools. Several instructors who’ve moved away from online quizzes are building their own assessment tools: Excel plugins, AI chatbots, and even a tool that asks students questions out loud and grades their spoken answers with AI. Some were impressive, but I left worried about student data. As one instructor put it, “No one should be risking a lawsuit over this!”

I've been thinking about the BT team a lot this week, and I realized something about the decisions we're making at Blended Teaching. Take Braden: we hired him a couple of years back, right out of UNG's Real Estate program (thanks for the intro, James!)

Braden didn't have 'AI' skills, but he did have a lot of traits that we want in members of the team. Judgment, the ability to work under pressure & ambiguity, and a willingness to tackle something big and unknown & figure it out along the way.

With the exception of developers, everyone we are hiring, or looking to hire, has skills that look like these. Knowledge & the 'ability to use AI' matter much less to us now. So this all got me wondering: what are other employers looking for?

We need to talk about what employers actually want from our graduates now that AI is in every office, because it's not quite what the flurry of news articles over the last couple of years predicted.

Earlier this week I spoke with an instructor whose students (or their parents) are forking out meaningful sums for the premium tiers of ChatGPT and Claude.

I've been thinking about it all week!

The instinct is to ask what value those tools are actually creating. But I think the sharper question is what value families believe they're creating. Because that perception is now shaping how students show up to your class, what they consider a fair amount of effort, and what they think an assignment is really asking of them.

If a parent is spending $240 a year on a tool that drafts essays in thirty seconds, the implicit message to the student is: this is what serious academic work looks like now. Whether or not that's true is almost beside the point. It's the working assumption as students walk into your classroom.