AI is disrupting our world. Nowhere is this more evident than in education, especially higher education. How will our students learn? How will we assess them, and how will we teach them in this new technological environment?
These are all questions I have received as an administrator and as an economic education researcher. To join this conversation and learn how some faculty are adjusting, I reached out to Dr. Shishir Shakya, Assistant Professor of Economics at Appalachian State University.
Shishir has redesigned all his courses—he teaches econometrics and statistics—to answer one question: what happens if we stop preparing students for the job market of 2022 and start preparing them for 2028?
Timestamps
00:49 – Intro: How AI is disrupting education
02:17 – No homework, no midterms, no finals — what replaced them
11:22 – The moment AI broke his old teaching model
16:05 – Inside his AI-powered oral exam system
24:33 – "If students can't use AI, why can professors?"
39:06 – Preparing students for the job market of 2028
We get into:
Why he cut his curriculum down to the "absolute theoretical minimum"
His AI-based oral exam system that catches understanding gaps missed by multiple-choice tests
The uncomfortable question I pushed him on: if students can't use AI, why can professors?
Why he thinks every student needs to start thinking like an engineer
What "flourishing" means in an AI economy, and why creative destruction isn't just a threat
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Correction
In this video, we referenced "David Susskind, cosmology at MIT"; what we meant was Leonard Susskind, The Theoretical Minimum, Stanford.
Enjoy the episode.
Teaching and AI are forms of distillation with knowledge being passed down not unlike spoken word transmission prior to written words, or more importantly the printing press. The way Dr. Shakya is discussing asking questions of students to measure information gaps is the same as probbing AI for Data Voids (typically biases from the programming, analogous to teachers having a perspective on the materials.)
I like the aspects of smaller classes because you can interact and update reference points more accurately than in cattle-class sized lectures. Those tend to lean into recitation and not the passing of knowledge or critical thinking.
AI hasn't reached the point where it does nothing more than parrot information, and hopefully accurately. Three sentence synopsis is great for bullet points, not knowledge.
*Admittedly I have a LLM (Little Lary Memory) we trained at work comprised solely of materials I have read or written. It's purpose is to ensure I cite material correctly rather than rely upon recall from 30 years of classroom or professional training.
This is the first semester i am allowing AI in the classroom so this is right on time!