A.I. in the Classroom with Brent Warner

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Learn practical ways to integrate A.I. in the classroom with clarity and care.

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Artificial intelligence isn't coming for higher ed. It’s already here. In this episode of the Student Success Podcast, I sat down with Brent Warner, a faculty member at Irvine Valley College and host of the DIESOL Podcast (Digital Innovation in English as a Second or Other Language), to unpack the practical implications of AI for college faculty and students. This wasn't a “robots will replace us” conversation. It was an honest, grounded look at what educators should consider right now.

Here are five key takeaway and some action steps to consider:

1. Get Curious About How Students Are Already Using AI

Action Step:
Start class conversations about AI use. Ask students how they’ve encountered tools like ChatGPT. Create surveys or quick classroom polls to understand their experiences and motivations. This opens up a nonjudgmental space to build shared awareness and clarify expectations.

2. Carve Out Time to Experiment Without Pressure

Action Step:
Schedule “AI sandbox” time during department meetings or professional development sessions. Use this time to explore tools together, ask questions, and brainstorm how AI might enhance—not replace—teaching. Encourage colleagues to try one small use case, like generating a sample quiz or brainstorming discussion prompts. (Check out the list of resources below that Brent discussed).

3. Redesign Assignments to Promote Higher-Order Thinking

Action Step:
Identify which assignments can be completed entirely by AI (e.g., generic essays) and revise them to emphasize critical thinking, personal reflection, or real-world application. Consider integrating process-focused checkpoints, like annotated drafts or video reflections, that showcase student thinking along the way.

4. Use AI as a Planning Tool, Not a Final Product

Action Step:
Leverage AI to support your own workflow. Try using it to generate draft lesson plans, rubrics, or sample prompts. Review and revise with your own expertise. This not only saves time in the long run, but models responsible use for students.

5. Stay Equity-Focused in AI Integration

Action Step:
Survey your students on their access to technology and include free or low-barrier alternatives when assigning work. Discuss ethical use of AI and share guidance on navigating bias and misinformation. Include clear policies in your syllabus but most importantly, invite dialogue, not fear.

Final Thought:
You don’t need to overhaul your course overnight. But small, intentional shifts can build your confidence, and create a more transparent, equitable environment for students navigating AI.

 
Key Chapter Makers
00:00: Introduction

03:10: Why Faculty Shouldn’t Panic About AI

07:35: Students Are Already Using AI

13:00: AI in the Classroom

19:00: Rethinking Assignments 

25:15: Transparency with Students

37:00: Conversations and the Learning Process

42:20: Be Curious, Be Reflective, Be Human

Brent’s episode resources
Brisk: https://www.briskteaching.com/
PlayLab: https://www.playlab.ai/
BoodleBox: https://boodlebox.ai/
Anna Mills on the Opposite of Cheating podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gP2zrYClyXE
Process Feedback: https://processfeedback.org/
Draft Back: https://draftback.com/
Brisk: https://www.briskteaching.com/

Also, check out Brent’s Podcast, DIESOL (Digital Innovation in English as a Second or Other Language): https://diesol.org/category/podcast/

 
About Brent Warner
Brent Warner is an award-winning community college professor focusing on integrating technology and innovation into the language learning process. He works with teachers and organizations across the globe to provide practical advice for helping English Language Learners take advantage of tech to help them communicate more clearly. He blogs about technology integration in the ESOL classroom for TESOL International, and he is the co-host of The DIESOL Podcast, focusing on innovation in ESOL, and is the author of Edtech for Multilingual Learners: 48 Fun & Flexible Activities for Every Classroom, published by ISTE.

About Dr. Al Solano
Dr. Al Solano is the Founder and Coach of the Continuous Learning Institute, where he partners with colleges and universities to strengthen student success and equity through sustainable, campus-driven practices. A strong believer in the power of kindness, Al coaches higher education teams using his signature framework—the “Three Cs”: Clarity, Coherence, and Consensus.

With decades of coaching experience, Al has worked directly with more than 50 institutions and trained thousands of educators nationwide. His widely used, practitioner-focused articles on student success strategies, institutional planning and implementation, and educational leadership are embraced by campuses across the country.

Al began his career in K–12 education, later serving in roles at two community colleges. A proud community college transfer student, he earned his bachelor’s degree from Cornell University and a doctorate in education from UCLA.

Transcript

Al: 0:01

Welcome to the Student Success Podcast. If you work in higher ed and want to learn ways to support students, check out today's episode.

Brent: 0:09

[Quote teaser] So we talk about it directly at the class and then again, trying to be transparent and helpful with them I think does a lot to mitigate the fears around it. And so what I've found actually happens quite often in my class is students will come up to me and they're like I did this part with AI, is that cool? Yeah. Or I'll say probably it would be better for you to think this through on your own and then work it through, and they're like, oh, okay. So I had one student actually a few weeks ago and she's like I'm really struggling to find the line of where acceptable use for me versus where I'm not learning, and I said that's an awesome thing that you just said to me, because that already shows that you're considering what matters and what doesn't matter in your learning process, right, so so being able to go through that.

[Quote teaser] Am I working to help students learn or am I working to, you know, bust them on doing something wrong? And you know I mean we all know that the reasons for cheating have very little to do with, like, I want to be a cheater. It's much more related to the stresses that they have and the you know, personal issues they've got going on. So are we finding ways to open up those real human conversations with them where they feel like they can talk to us about it?

Al: 1:28

Welcome to the Student Success Podcast, Brent.

Brent: 1:33

Thank you. Glad to be here. 

Al: 1:33

So, tell us a little bit about yourself. 

Brent: 1:36

Yeah, my name is Brent Warner. I'm a professor of English as a Second Language at Irvine Valley College. I know a couple of my colleagues have been on the show before, so I'm excited and nervous to be next to them. They're great people. You had Professor Kaminsky on, as well as a few other people. So, anyways, I teach at Irvine Valley College. I have spent a long time working in using technology for language learning, using tech to support students, so I'm kind of like a you know, a little bit of a techie nerd, along with the language learning side of things and so obviously that kind of tied in and got crazy with the artificial intelligence conversations over the last couple of years. And then I also do a couple of podcasts around similar things, so like technology and language learning, technology in higher ed, and I'm happy to share links with you for that stuff later. But I'm just excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Al: 2:38

Oh, I'm so excited to have you here, Brent. I've been following you on social media for a while, and I have a very close relationship with Irvine Valley and it's just so nice to have you here. And what I wanted to focus on today because I've noticed a lot of your posts have been around what you've been learning about AI artificial intelligence was wondering if we can learn from you kind of some baseline knowledge about AI and then, further down the road, we can take it to a conversation around AI in teaching and learning, because there's a lot of camps that are kind of forming out of this and I would like to kind of get your thoughts on that. And it's ever evolving, right, it's just exponential. So thus far, what have you learned? Would love to get your insights.

Brent: 3:30

Yeah, so I guess I'll start with it's impossible to keep up with the AI stuff. So if you're listening and you're like, oh, I'm feeling like I'm falling behind, I don't know anybody who's like, I'm on top of it, you know, like I mean even the, the biggest names and things are like I you know, we can only do a few things.

Brent: 3:50

You know you only take care of a few things, so don't worry if you're if you're falling behind or if you feel like you don't know what's going on. Um, but kind of, as you said, Al, there are a lot of different takes on the AI thing. Right, a lot of people don't like it, a lot of people are gung-ho with it. I think I get a little nervous because I think I present myself as gung-ho all the time, but I also have a lot of very legitimate concerns and I do occasionally share those things too. So it's like, hey, this is gnarly, this is scary. What happens if you know irresponsible people get control of the information, and you know like I worry about things. Like you know, people are moving towards using AI for searches instead of you know Google and human made things, and so there's concerns on those levels.

Brent: 4:47

There are also really amazing opportunities for students to work with artificial intelligence, to challenge their learning and their understanding of concepts and how they're thinking about the ways that they're interacting. And I think the biggest thing that I kind of want to share, conceptually, that I think is worth sharing and knowing about overall with AI, is that, like all tools, you kind of get out of it what you put into it, right. And so you're going to see that there are people who have limited interaction with it and say that it's a limited tool and go well, okay, but how much have you done this? How have you tried this thing? And then it's like oh, I didn't know you could do that, or I didn't know that you could kind of customize it to do this other thing, and so you kind of have to be flexible in exploring these things and then also realize that we are in such early days with all of this.

Brent: 5:37

I think that's the other part that is tricky, because we all want to say, well, we want the answer, we want to know what we're doing and how to deal with it. And it's like, well, we can't deal with. I mean, we can deal with it as much as we know, but these things are changing so quickly that it's a little bit unfair to students, it's unfair to other faculty members to make solid decisions right now about what we're gonna be doing for the next several years. We really have to be ready to pivot all the time.

Al: 6:03

Having to make decisions about AI, especially the classroom. What do you recommend or what do you see evolving as a way for us to have more clarity around it, some realistic, thoughtful boundaries around it? Do you see, for example, is it best for each department to have kind of its own little AI work group or campus-wide work group? How do you see this so that it eventually lands in a syllabus, it eventually lands in how we have our students use AI.

Brent: 6:46

Yeah, so I'm one of the co-chairs of our AI task force on campus, and so that is a question we're dealing with all the time. I think one of the problems with it is that we don't want to dictate to people what they must do in any situation. It's not my job to tell you what you do as a professor I'm speaking only to professors at the moment or faculty but it's also to empower people, no matter what they think, hey, I love it. Hey, I hate this stuff. How do I deal with it? Because, regardless of what we think, as a teacher whatever side or however in the middle you are on it your students are going to be landing in all sorts of different places as well, right. And so we're not just able to say this is absolutely what it's going to be, because you could say you're blocking AI and your students just go okay, well, I'll just go use one that you don't see me using, right. Or you could say I love AI, and you might have a student I just met with several students recently who said we want to know every time our teachers are using AI and we don't like it in our classes, right. And so we're saying, okay, well, we're getting these different perspectives and being so again, it's hard to make decisions in ways that are so specific to anyone's needs that I think we're all going to have to kind of make these choices kind of from the ground up and so but also to be open-minded enough to say, hey, what I did this semester might not be the final answer. Maybe I'm going to try something different next semester and if I don't like it, maybe I'll play with it again and see what the possibilities are next time around, and if I do like it, maybe I'll start to see what problems are coming. So I know I'm kind of covering the whole spectrum of like every possibility of answer, but really the truth is you need to work with your students on these, and so for me, the biggest part is being really transparent. If I want to explore these things, I definitely am talking to my students and telling them hey, this is when I'm using AI, this is what I'm using it for.

Brent: 8:54

Let's talk about responsible use, and I think a lot of teachers are still kind of unfortunately, not broaching the conversation with their students and they're just kind of letting it go with the assumption that students understand the differences between using it appropriately and not. But if the teachers don't know that, I think it's a struggle for this. I mean, it's definitely a struggle for students to know that, and so we are all responsible right now for kind of know that. And so we are all responsible right now for kind of guiding that conversation and helping students figure out what that means. Possible in 10 years that, as students have come through from you know much longer experience of having used them by the time they get to college. Then, okay, we kind of understand these concepts. But I tell my students right now I'm like you guys are the guinea pigs, like the guinea pigs, and that's a hard thing and a hard place for you guys to be. So let's work together and figure out what it means.

Al: 9:51

So back to this AI task force for a moment. Then, are you seeing in this task force, over time, maybe developing not a top-down, and this is what you have to do, but at least a set of guidelines? You said, responsible use, right that there's some faculty are not having conversations, so do you see a task force helping to develop something as a resource for faculty to work with?

Brent: 10:18

Yeah, so we're, we're building a best practices guide. But the problem is we started building it with, with the big team, and you know we ended up with like 50 or 60 pages of stuff and it's like, well, this is way too much. There's no way anyone's going to read this. So how do we shrink it down to two pages, right, and and, in a good, beautiful design that people will actually look at, right? So when you actually get the text, it's probably more like one page, maybe one and a half, right? And so we know that people aren't going to look and read an entire manual of things, but if we can kind of give them guides to say like, hey, this is something that seems to be useful that people respond to, well, these are ways that you can open up the conversation with your students, and that's not to say it's making decisions on it, but it's about saying, hey, let's understand what we're expecting for these things.

Brent: 11:12

I'm sure you've seen, things like the AI assessment scale, like, hey, don't use any, use a little bit, use more and fully use it as part of your process. Right, there's, you know, different approaches to opening these conversations. Um, that's not the only one, right? Um, other people are saying well, now that I recognize how my students are interacting with it, I'm having them, share with me what they're expecting, what they're wanting and what they're actually learning from. But I was also reading today an interesting article by Ethan Malik and he was talking about. You know, a lot of us are creating these illusions of learning.

Brent: 11:55

Students might be using AI and thinking that they're learning, but actually they've been using it as a crutch, and so, even though they feel like they're learning, when they're tested afterwards they're not necessarily showing what they've understood. It does go the other way if they're trained and understand the processes, then they're actually learning more and getting better grades on assessments, and so it's a question of, like all things, is there a pedagogy behind it? Is there an understanding on how we're implementing these things? These studies are still coming in, and so we kind of have to kind of be aware of the changing tides and the shifts and try our best to apply these things as we're working with our students through it. It is a lot but, but, but it can be fun, right? Because I think when you're working with your students together. Through the process, it becomes a much more shared conversation instead of just the burden of all responsibility is on you alone, which is heavy.

Al: 12:54

And Brent, how are you using AI? How are you leveraging it for your pedagogy? If you wouldn't mind sharing.

Brent: 13:03

Yeah. So I use it a couple ways. One in my class I have. So the very first assignment we do in my class, in my academic writing class for academic writing for multilingual learners, students write a paper or a first day diagnostic type of exam and I use it to give AI feedback. I say, I'm not even looking at it, let's just look at the feedback that you're getting from AI. And so they immediately know it's AI and they start scanning through it and I try to set up the prompt for AI to give feedback on them in a way that students would understand. So it'll be like hey, give them information about this and this, but I'm not trying to say make it good or make it bad, but then the students can start looking and immediately they're picking out things that the AI is giving to them and they're like, oh, hold on a second.

Brent: 13:50

This is kind of weird, right Like this. You know, I know that. You know I use the example all the time. I know that I'm supposed to capitalize proper nouns, but it didn't tell me anything about the proper nouns and I realized that I did it here. Oh, it's missing things. What does that mean for you? What does that mean for your learning, if you're trying to use these things later on, right? So it's not me coming down and saying you're bad for using this or anything like that. It's more of an open opportunity for them to discover what comes out of AI, and so that's the first level of things.

Brent: 14:22

Later on, when we do writing assignments, I just started a new process where I have it give a feedback at the top of a document. So, very specifically, I'm using Brisk. You click on brisk and it can create this feedback based on your rubric, and so what it does in my rubric currently I have five different categories that are, you know, gradable, and so then I say, hey, use these categories, use this rubric to create feedback that the students can use as talking points so that when they go into the language lab to get help from a professor we have we're lucky to have that kind of system on our campus, but then my students can go in and they can say hey, here's a checklist of 20 things, you know, four things from every all five categories, and I think I want to talk about this one from this category. I want to talk about this one from this category.

Brent: 15:18

So now they're able to go into the lab with a predetermined idea of what they're trying to get done, because they've already been given a little bit of feedback before they go and talk to the professor in the lab, whereas before and this has been a problem for us, you know, at our school, at least for as long as I've been working there which is the students come in and they go check my paper, Is it okay? Right, and it's like well, these, you know, totally decontextualized, stripped free questions, and it's not their fault. They don't know what to ask, right, they don't. They don't know what to see about their work. And so now that they're just being given little bumps, they can say, oh okay, well, now I get a chance to start the conversation or start the ideas before I go in, and it may be right, it might not be right, but at least I'm able to start talking to the professor about those things. So you're starting off with a little bit of an AI kick and then bringing it back into the human side of things for them. That's one thing. Another thing that I do is I'm using PlayLab, but there are some of these tools, like BoodleBox or whatever, that you can build the bots on the back end. So these are the agents, they call them, or the GPTs. They've got 100 different names. It's really annoying, but you can basically go. You can build the prompts on the back end, so then the students interact with whatever you've asked it to do. So I'm doing things like this.

Brent: 16:47

I do games for my students. So, for example, in my class because grammar is an issue and you know some of my students are still trying to master grammar forms I have games where I set it up. So one of the games that I have is Shohei Otani's secret spy adventure type of thing, and so it tells a story of Shohei Otani moonlighting as a spy and he's trying to do all these things, and what it does is it gives you a paragraph, a short paragraph, and it gives the students three verbs in the dictionary form of the verb, and their job is to then convert it into the past tense, right, and then it looks at what they did and it says okay, you accurately did it. Then the story will continue. If they don't accurately do it, then Shohei fails on that little part of the mission and is not able to continue to save the world or whatever else it is that he's doing. And so if you kind of turn these things into games or learning opportunities, that's kind of like, choose your own adventure-ish style, right where it's like, okay, I'm moving through these steps and then, and then my successes lead to more success, possibly my, my failures lead to whatever. But they're not even really thinking about the grammar stuff so much.

Brent: 18:03

I mean, they're doing it and they're kind of going through, but it opens up fun opportunities for exploring, where they're saying, hey, this story is kind of cool, I get to see what happens, and not so much. Okay, I'm just doing a workshop and a worksheet type of thing and checking off things on a list and writing the same word next to it, with no, the traditional paper versions that can't interact back with the students, and so you can get some real opportunities to make this a lot of fun for them. And you know it's still low stakes. It's like did you do it? What did you find? You can kind of review things with them. They're not always 100% accurate, so I wouldn't do it for testing at this point, but for interactions for the students and for them. And I just did a very informal survey with my class and they're like let's do more of these things. These are fun for us, they engage us right, and you can make all sorts of different customizations endlessly, kind of to the limit of your imagination.

Al: 19:03

And what program was that, Brent, that you used to do these customizations?

Brent: 19:08

PlayLab, playlabai, and the reason that I use that is because it is FERPA compliant, meaning that the data is not being trained on. So whatever the students write in there and I still don't want them giving their private information but I will say like, hey, this at least we know from them they're locking down the information. So anything that you say is not being trained on. You're getting the benefits of the AI stuff, but you kind of stay away from the potentially dangerous and scary stuff.

Al: 19:42

Ah, oh, that's so cool you're finding a way to embrace, and I would imagine that takes a lot of work at first, a lot of time and effort to put this together, create the prompts, but in the long run it saves you time actually.

Brent: 19:59

Yeah, so then once you start building these things and PlayLab is cool too, because you can click a button and remix ones, and so it'll basically make a copy, and then you can go into the back end and say, oh, I want to change this. It used to be a past tense activity and now I'm going to change it to. You know a noun clauses or subject verb agreements Again, speaking from my language world. But regardless of what subject you're teaching, you can do these kinds of things and really customize them and say like, okay, how am I going to bring my students' understanding of the world with the content that I'm trying to teach? And there's a lot of ways to explore. I think we're really just starting to scratch the surface on what people are going to do with it.

Al: 20:43

So I'm imagining myself I'm a student in your class and I'm understanding that, Oh okay, I get to use AI. He has structured it in a certain way. Do you have any language that deals with, and you know, this has been the issue from the very beginning about how students may use AI for cheating. And then there's all these so-called AI detectors, and how do you deal with that? What kind of language do you use for students on that?

Brent: 21:13

So we talk about it directly at the class and then again, trying to be transparent and helpful with them, I think does a lot to mitigate the fears around it. And so what I've found actually happens quite often in my classes. Students will come up to me and they're like I did this part with AI, Is that cool? And I'm like yeah, or. Or I'll say probably it would be better for you to think this through on your on your own and then work it through. And they're like, oh, okay.

Brent: 21:41

So I had one student actually a few weeks ago and she's like I'm really struggling to find that the line of like where acceptable use for me versus where I'm not learning and I said that's an awesome thing that you just said to me, because that already shows that you're considering what matters and what doesn't matter in your learning process, right, so being able to go through that and have them reflect on their own learning and the value of it, rather than having a bot do something, so I'll talk about those types of things, right? Like, hey, if you went to a golf course and you had a robot hitting the golf balls for you, are you going to say that you drove it? Sorry, I'm not a golfer so I'm not sure what a good number is, but, like you know, are you going to say that you drove the ball 200 yards or whatever else it is right. And so then they're like, oh, hold on a second. What does that mean then for my learning, right? And so opening the conversations up like that, in a more informal way, instead of putting hard, strict limits on it with, in the syllabus, you know, you can have your syllabus language, of course, but it's it doesn't matter. Like the syllabus is not a thing that students care about, right, they care about the relationship that they're building with their teacher and that what they're building with their learning. And so if, whatever you have in the syllabus, you can say, hey, let's set this up, but if you're not talking with them and showing them the ways through it, then I don't think that it's particularly valuable, except just to have a record of what you've done.

Brent: 23:09

So, or what you've said that you're going to, what rules you said that you're going to enforce I guess that's probably a better way to say it. And again, you know, do I want to be a police on this? This? No, every teacher kind of has that same anxiety is like am I working to help students learn or am I working to uh, you know, bust them on doing something wrong? And you know, I mean we all know that the reasons for cheating have very little to do with, like, I want to be a cheater. It's much more related to the stresses that they have and the you know personal issues they've got going on.

Brent: 23:43

So are we finding ways to open up those real human conversations with them where they feel like they can talk to us about it, versus and I'll tell you, this has taken me a long time. Like I used to just be like a you know hard, like, oh, you didn't do it, you're done. So I've kind of had to build my own softening over the years too, and so it's not just like a you know hippy-dippy, like we all love each other and that's all good, right, it takes me time. But then I'm saying like, well, what's actually the best thing for my students, what's really going to help my students? And this is moving away from the AI thing but like, that human connection with them is what then makes it easy for me to start having the conversations around what they're doing. That is appropriate or not appropriate on certain levels.

Al: 24:29

Yeah, you know, fundamentally, regardless of a policy, a technology, whatever it is, it always goes back to that basic human to human connection. To have that as the foundation, is key to all of these innovations, right? So you're using AI in so many cool ways for teaching and learning. I'm sure you've heard colleagues use AI for like, what are some of the things where you're like, oh my gosh, that's cool, I got to you know, look into that soon.

Brent: 25:07

Oh my gosh. So these things happen all the time, you know. I mean, I think some of the interesting things are these new tools that are starting to come out that help students along with their writing processes, like the actual full on and you know, they get get they get little responses as they're going. And some of these things are, you know, made by um, these companies out there that are building all sorts of things, uh, and so I can't remember the name of it, but I just listened to um, I think it was. Uh, who was it? Maybe Anna Mills? Uh, on the Opposite of Cheating podcast. I'm not sure if you've listened to that one yet, but anyways, I think it was her.

Brent: 25:49

Anyways, sorry if I'm wrong when they're listening, but basically the idea, hey, there are these tools out there that are really using students writing and analyzing it as they're going, but not giving them answers, but also kind of, you know, I kind of think of these things as like bumper bowling, right, where it's like, hey, just, let's just move a little bit this way to get back on track, let's move a little bit that way to get back on track. And so I think that if we start seeing AI use from these companies that is actually meant to help students grow. We're going to see a lot of really positive things. If we start seeing so many of these companies which are just like these cheap wraparound services on top of you know, these are the wrappers, right, it's just like hey, basically it's chat GPT, but it's got a different name and it's you know, going to write your essay for you. Well, you know, like your essay for you. Well, mmm, you know like what value is that right, and and so I'm excited to see when, when we see like ethical, student focused companies building out, I am excited, but I think they're still in early stages. I think a lot of the hucksters earlier, and so we're gonna do some time sorting those out.

Brent: 27:02

But regardless, I do have students that are playing with or, sorry, colleagues who are playing with things that like hey, what level of translation for a really more beginner level students might they need? Or we're building out some of these things for some of our student centers, where students can get help from bots that are letting them get the basic information that might have taken too long or been dug, you know, buried deep somewhere in the website and so we say, well, use this website as a resource and then when students ask questions, just answer them immediately. So we're playing around with some of those possibilities on campus as well. Besides, you know, classroom use, but looking at other ways to support students, and you know we've seen it so many times where they're like, hey, I need help late at night and there's nobody on campus and there's nobody, you know, on the library desk. What do I do? Can I get something better than the kind of old fashioned logic tree chat, and so we're trying to build some of those conversations as well.

Al: 28:06

Ethically focused companies. Yeah, not too many of those around, I think.

Brent: 28:17

I know and this is the part that kills me so like, so this is what ends up happening is that where we find these little, basically colleges, right, like a small college department, that's like, hey, we're going to build this thing out, but then they don't have enough funding for it or whatever else happens? And so it's always this kind of back and forth where it's like, hey, as soon as I find something that's made by professors or college teachers or whatever else it is, then I'm like, okay, let's explore that. And a lot of times they'll start off with making it free and they're not necessarily, you know, aiming towards making a bunch of money, and so that is, that's something that I try to look for, but that, you know, a lot of the companies, as you're saying, they're like kind of hide it or they put it behind all these fancy numbers, and so you again, as always, you kind of have to be diligent in your search.

Brent: 29:12

And then I really like this idea recently that a few people have been talking about, which is when you're reaching out to these companies, you're saying, well, what are you doing to support students? Right, like you're making money on students, and now we're seeing not to get too far into the crazy world that we're living in, but like we're seeing, students losing support all across the country and across the world how are you, as a company, supporting those students that you are now making money off of right, and are we willing to ask those questions of these companies and corporations and see what they're willing to do? Because if they're making millions and millions on these tools, what's the payback right? How does it go on both sides?

Al: 29:55

Right, you know the last what, five or six years there's been a lot of talk, a lot of discussion on reimagining grading. I'm sure you're very familiar with the whole, you can call it ungrading or all these different kinds of ways to just talking about how do we rethink it and I was wondering, from a grading standpoint, what are your thoughts on that and AI?

Brent: 30:25

Yeah. So I think this is another thing that helps me get buy in from my students, which is I do the ungrading thing or limited grading, and so basically the vast majority of my assignments, are pass, no pass. Right, you got the work, you got the minimum requirements for it or you didn't. And so the way that works is that my students have unlimited times to resubmit their work, as long as they get it back to me within a week of my feedback. Then they can get another submission and another submission all the way to the end of the semester, and so for the most times, most students will get it in two or three times, right? They're like, okay, now I see what's going on. But to me, I treat that as the opportunity for, like, we talk about it, like the shooting baskets, right, you're like, hey, you don't just shoot one basket and miss and say I didn't get it right, you keep on shooting and you keep on practicing over and over and over again. And you don't also say, hey, I made it once. Obviously I'm a pro basketball player at this point. Well, that's not true either, right, and so, so it's about that saying like, hey, show that you got the skills and then we'll move to the next spot over and try that again. So this is my process, uh, for the majority of my assignments with my students, and so when we're doing AI related stuff too, that all fits in right. So it's like, hey, show me that you're practicing with these things, show me that you're interacting with it. What are you learning from it? Let's take a look at your reflection on it. Did you really you know, was your interaction with AI useful for you in this conversation or not? Because, again, my goal is to have them show their learning process overall, um, and when they're, whether it's AI or not, right, but they're, they're going through those types of things. And so my whole approach because of that is a little bit different maybe than the way some other teachers might be dealing with things, but it does allow me the freedom to say, well, let's experiment with this thing and see what happens, right, and so we work it through that way.

Brent: 32:30

I do have friends who are doing things like hey, I'm getting AI to give suggestions on where the rubric on this assignment might be, and then I'm using that as my starting point to alleviate the mental burden that comes with tons and tons of grading, whether that's rubric grading or not. I think those it's very cool, it's very interesting. It has some problematic areas, of course, right, and we say, well, how much do we trust this and how much are we double verifying all of these, these things? And so you have to kind of have a teacher who is dedicated to figuring those things out as they're going through. Um, I'm not very comfortable with you know, just like click a button and AI will grade for you.

Brent: 33:13

That's not where I am, um, but I do like the idea of saying, well, what are the redundancies in work or the things that are not really bringing value back to the students, and how can I use AI to reimagine the way that I'm approaching those things? And again, I don't have all the answers, I'm just starting, I just experiment, and so I think you know, all the things you've seen me post are like hey, I'm testing this thing out. I try to be very practical with what I share, and it's not like right now we're talking a little bit heady, but I think most of the stuff that I share is like this is exactly what I did, this is what, this is how I tried it, this is what the result was, and you know, try it for yourself and see if it works the same way.

Al: 33:57

Yeah, I love that your approach is to students to show the learning process, and I think where a lot of faculty struggle with this is time and capacity.

Al: 34:10

When I was a re-entry student, I went to community college. I was very lucky that I found a pretty I mean, he was a pretty fantastic math instructor. I believe he actually had a K-12 background, and when we had the quizzes I found it it was, I was just astonished at this, because it was so different from how I grew up. He said I don't care if you get the answer right or wrong, but he would spend so much time because he wanted to see us do the whole problem and he would give us points on our process and how we learned that and yes, we get a bonus if we got it right but he wanted to see our learning and so I could imagine, but it will take some time to trust it to save time using AI, yes, and so before AI though, Brent, how did you find the time, or did you find that it wasn't actually a very large percentage of students who were turning in the rewrites, and that's what made it manageable? I'm just wondering how you're able to manage that.

Brent: 35:24

For my writing class, for example. My students write in Google Docs and so we have it's all inside of Canvas with the Google LTI thing, right. But we go into the Google Docs and the students do their writing process, and so I say, okay, you have to write every single letter of every single word inside of the Google Docs, from the beginning to the end. There are tools out there. Unfortunately, they're starting to charge more and more but there's a new one which is called Process Feedback, which kind of scans through it and gives an analysis of the writing process and you can kind of watch a video of the students writing process. If you need to do that, um, there, I've talked about this for a long time. There was a tool called Draft Back, which is also good, um, but they just started charging an annual subscription fee and so I'm like, anyways, um, but, uh, so one, you can use that as a way to talk to students about how they write. It's not just about catching them right and saying like, oh, okay, you're doing these things right, but it's like hey, what are you doing in your writing process? I see that you're often writing at 3am. Do you think that's the most productive writing time for you or whatever else it is. So that's one part where you can have real conversations about what they're doing. The second thing is, as soon as they've turned in their first draft, you have them switch their writing from editing mode, which is your normal writing, to suggesting mode, which is essentially track changes on microsoft word in google doc. It's called suggesting mode. So then the students go in and they start deleting words or adding in vocabulary or changing the phrasing or rearranging whatever. But all of that stuff gets shown inside of google docs, and so you it starts getting messy very quickly because there's like you know lines through words and you know new words put in, but on the side, on the comments, it tells you, hey, this is what happened, and you, as the teacher, can then go through and click on the check mark and say, yes, I like this change, or I can go right underneath it and talk to the student about why that change isn't necessarily a strong thing to do. And so then now we're working on a fully immersive and interactive document. This is not even AI stuff, this is just, you know, google Docs, but you're now kind of doing a back and forth on a live document where they're starting to see their whole process and I can see what they're doing, and so it's like okay, now I see why you made this change. I suggested that you did this, but you know you chose to do it or you chose not to do it. Let's talk about what you did. So again, you can see that whole writing process, go on with the students through this um, and it definitely takes.

Brent: 38:01

I mean, I'm not, you know, like not to say that. You know you're going to zip through all of these things, but and I do have some benefits of having you know somewhat smaller classes so I'm not like doing you know 200 students or you know 300 students or anything like that. I don't know exactly how I would adjust. I think AI comes into part of it.

Brent: 38:22

So Brisk, for example, does have a focused feedback option which is kind of meant to do the same thing, where it actually runs through the document and gives you feedback on sections. It's not as precise as I would like, because I will highlight a single period and make a comment on like hey, let's talk about why you put this period inside the quotation marks instead of after the parentheses, as on your citation or whatever else it is, um, but brisk will like highlight a whole line or, you know, kind of talk about broader concepts, um. So as these things get better, I think it will be more possible for, you know, teachers with larger classes. But I do hope that classes like writing are not too large, because that's not really serving students very well either.

Al: 39:06

Google Docs, all right.

Brent: 39:11

Yeah, so use Google Docs is my answer.

Al: 39:13

Can you imagine doing all this by hand back in the day? Oh my gosh.

Brent: 39:19

Oh yeah, well, I mean, it's like, know, like, and people did that, right. It's like you'll write your little notes on it and you say you know wrong word or whatever else it is, but then you can't write back on top of that over and over again, right? And so now the cool thing is students click a button, it's back in my hands now, I can immediately work with it, and so that process does work pretty well.

Al: 39:40

So you're in what we would call the humanities. Have you happen to see anything cool of what your colleagues in, let's say, in STEM have used AI? By any chance?

Brent: 39:55

A little bit there. We have people in STEM and in math who are exploring things and trying to figure things out, but they are still well again with the tools that are generally available. They're finding that, like AI, you know, does create unreliable information. You know math, it still does weird things with like two plus two equals five, don't, you know, right, you know? I mean not it was that bad early on.

Brent: 40:29

It's still problematic and there are, there are ones, but I'm not as familiar with the math and STEM outputs. I know there are some people who are trying to figure what places they want to use them for, but I'm not a hundred percent sure you know how that world is going. On the other hand, we're seeing all this stuff in the actual science communities where they're using AI for, like you know, trying to help solve diseases and you know, like doing all these, you know, hey, breakthroughs on cancer research and all these amazing things. So I would be very surprised if we don't see soon a pretty big shift into people going wait a second. Actually, if we're able to really solve medical problems, for example, let's take a real look at what this means, for you know ways that we can teach and learn as well.

Al: 41:18

I read a research paper of how AI was actually more accurate in diagnosis than doctors, which fascinated me. What a cool tool. As we kind of start winding down here a little bit, I was wondering about how do you use AI personally or for fun? We talked a lot about professionally, for the classroom. Is there any ways that you use that personally?

Brent: 41:47

Yeah, a little bit. I do some. I do for fun. I do image generation. I was a very bad Photoshopper. Not very bad, sorry, I was an intermediate Photoshopper.

Brent: 42:00

I guess I used to love making little fun jokes and things like that, and so now I'll do things like instead of doing my own photoshop, I'll build out images that are fun. You know the just silly, silly things, of course, right, um, and there is some use that I use it for. Uh, you know, every once in a while, novelty use, right, like, hey, what should I cook today? I've got this in my fridge or whatever else. It is those those kinds of fun things. Um, and a little bit of things like planning out. You know I'm, hey, I'm gonna be flying to Japan, you know, in the in the summer, give me some ideas of places that I haven't been to or whatever else it might be.

Brent: 42:38

But the truth is, I've got skepticism around some of these things as well, and so, while I will play with them, I'm not a super hardcore user for my private life. I'm trying to get like, hey, tech is my working life thing and I'm moving more towards like spending time in nature. But there are some cool things, like taking a picture of a flower and saying, hey, what is this flower? And it gives you all the information on that flower. So I love those kinds of things, um, I was told recently we're not supposed to say this expression anymore. I'm not sure, but touch grass, right like hey, get out there, just get connected to the world, breathe some fresh air, right, like all those types of things. So, yeah, so I do like it, but I am slowing myself down and trying to be less of a techie in my private life.

Al: 43:35

Yeah, I think I saw you posted a marzipan cake of you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I tried it and it didn't work out.

Brent: 43:47

Did you upload your own photo for that, or or did you just? Did you prompt the whole thing?

Al: 43:50

No, I uploaded and said create a Marzipan. Uh, it was no comparison to yours, man, yours was really cool.

Brent: 43:59

Yeah, that one turned out really well and I was like, okay, and that was the first run at it, so doing things like that are totally fun and silly and you know whatever. But um, but yeah, so that one, I uploaded it my my kind of profile photo that I have on LinkedIn or whatever, and, um, and it did a really good job of actually making it look like me looking like an edible cake. It's ridiculous. But you know, the other thing here too, Al, that I do want to point out is like we have to have some fun with this stuff. We can't take it all too seriously all the time.

Brent: 44:32

Like I totally get the concerns, and you know whether that's environmental or ethical concerns and all those things, and it's like what an amazing thing to just be able to play with some of these things and have a little bit of fun. Um, you know, every once in a while I'll do things like let's try and make a comic and see what the comic looks like. Um, you know, back when I was younger, I used to do, uh, you know zines I was into like the you know the punk rock scene and all that. So so it's like kind of bringing back some of my own just personal value. Creativity be really, you know, a lot of fun and then, and you share these things with your friends and have a little levity in life too is important, so I do recommend it.

Al: 45:17

Yeah, no, I've prompted to do a lot of funny things. I asked it to do a song about the committee structure at colleges. It's hilarious, and I've done within the family just really hilarious songs and prompts and we would send to each other and doing it in other languages. It's great fun. Now speaking of because I I recall that you were in Japan for a year, do you have any insights of how they use AI there?

Brent: 45:52

Yeah, so it's a little bit weird one. Japan went all in. They're just like use everything, there's no restrictions for anything, and so it was like it was a very weird approach, uh, especially for Japanese, who are very rule-based, you know, in a lot of ways, but in daily life, I had friends with kids and all these things and the conversations were not there, right. They weren't worried about kids using it. And it may be they'll, you know, again, it'll might catch up in a year or whatever else it is, but they, it wasn't a concern, it wasn't a thing that they're like, oh, they're gonna be cheating or whatever else they're gonna be doing with these things. It was just like a non conversation.

Brent: 46:33

And when I would bring up AI, people just look at me like, uh-huh, okay, well, let's go check out this other. You know, whatever we're doing here, right, and so it was like not a lot of people. You know professors, when I went to universities, they were definitely talking with me about it, but, like the average Japanese family and the average Japanese person on the street was not particularly interested, although there were definitely magazines and I saw books and all sorts of things out there. So the conversation is happening in some places, but it didn't feel like the massive swarm of conversation like it is in the States.

Al: 47:09

Yeah, and I would imagine, because you teach students from so many different cultures, that has a particular way of how they look at AK as well in your classroom, right? One of the last things I wanted to ask you about is, imagine there's a a formal mentoring program at Irvine Valley and you are a mentor to 15 incoming faculty, to 15 incoming faculty in your department. What would be your top three? Well, it doesn't have to be three, whatever number you want, Brent. What would be the top tips guidelines, whatever you want to call them for their use in AI? These are first time teachers knowing that they would have used AI as students. So what would you, as a mentor? What kind of guidance would you give them? What tips would you give them as they enter the classroom

Brent: 48:11

That's a great question. So I think the first thing is I always say treat your classroom like a laboratory. That's for you and for your students, right, if we're really doing the best that we can for our students, we can't say that we know all the answers or how things are always going to turn out, always going to turn out, and part of the learning process is failure. Right, things don't always work. We all have lessons that was like oh, I thought this was going to be amazing and it didn't work out, right.

Brent: 48:44

I think a lot of people, and especially younger teachers, may be coming in, feel like a pressure to get things right all the time and it's like, well, I would have wasted two hours if I did this wrong. Right, and so, whatever, whether it's AI or not, it's like, hey, give yourself the grace to be a teacher. If you are working to support your students, you will have more wins than failures over the process of things. Right, so it's okay to experiment with these things and see what works and see what doesn't. Two, involve your students in the learning process. This is what this current generation is looking for and this is what they value in their learning process, trying to understand that and then also being willing to push back on it, because I think the other thing that happens is, hey, let's all do what, what the students want to get done, and make sure that we're working and supporting their needs.

Brent: 50:10

But we also know, as professionals, actually this works, actually this is what happens in the learning process. And so really being willing to apply those things and say like, hey, it's not just that it's my history, but that there is a long, research, of study and using actual research and real information, that then we can say let's apply these ideas out to things, and so the experiments are great if they're founded in research-based practices.

Al: 50:43

So do you have any other parting words of wisdom, Brent?

Brent: 50:48

No, I think it's just be respectful of where people are with the need of, or the the fears and excitement around AI. Right, I, as much as I can, I always worry that people feel like I'm pushing an agenda on one side or another, and I really my biggest goal is that people just open their mind to what possibilities there are, and that could be positive or negative, and so I think that, as we're talking to other people, it's very tempting to push our thoughts on them. This is in all things, but around the AI conversation, like how do we be respectful of each other, how do we open up these conversations, even when we disagree? And keep moving forward for the betterment of our students? If you keep that question in front of mind, I think you'll build good relationships with your colleagues, I think you'll build good relationships with your students and hopefully, you'll see more successes as you keep moving down the line.

Al: 51:50

Beautiful. So thank you for participating in the Student Success Podcast Brent.

Brent: 51:56

Thank you for having me. I really appreciate you asking me and I hope that at least one thing that I oh that's my other thing is try to learn one thing right when you get a learning session, you don't need to take away a hundred things. If you got one thing out of it, that's a good use of time. So I hope that there was one useful thing inside of there.

Al: 52:14

Oh, I'm sure there is. Thank you.

Thank you for listening to the Student Success Podcast. You can subscribe to the show and newsletter on the Continuous Learning Institute link below and, of course, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you.