341: How AI is Changing Education: The Future of Accessible Learning with Marni Baker Stein, Cour...

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening depending on where you're listening. Welcome back to AI in the Future of Work. I'm your host Dan Turchin, CEO of People, the AI platform for IT and HR employee service. As you know, we bring you fascinating conversations with the leaders in this community, the AI community, investing in better employee experiences. Every Monday, new episodes drop. Hopefully, you know by now we publish a weekly newsletter. If you're not already subscribed, you should be. There's a link in the show notes. Go join us there. We share additional fun facts, tips, some things that don't always get shared in the weekly episode. If you give us a like and a rating on Spotify, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen, we greatly appreciate it. If you'll leave me a comment, I just may share it in an upcoming episode like this one from Man Preit in Bangalore, India, who's a software developer at a tech services company. Manit's favorite episode is the one from season 3 about building a unicorn startup with the amazing and humble CEO of Zapier, Wade Foster. Go check that one out if you haven't heard it already. We learn from AI thought leaders weekly on this show. The added bonus, you get one AI fun fact each week. Here's today's fun fact. Mammud Azer writes in the daily Sabah online about AI and the future of education. In it, he says, 'AI is transforming education by offering tools and raising serious risks, making ethics-based AI literacy essential. Teachers can rapidly generate various types of content related to their lessons and use them in classroom settings. In this new landscape, the workload for teachers is undergoing a fundamental shift. While conversational tasks are decreasing, they must focus more on the individual development of each student. There's the potential to transform the educational environment from a traditional setting into a much more innovative and interactive learning space. AI-driven tools have the potential to reduce one of the most significant challenges for teachers, the disparity in students academic achievement. In this context, personalized learning emerges as a possible solution. AI systems bring not only benefits but also risks beyond concerns about data privacy. The most significant risk is that the content generated by these systems may or may not be accurate.' Of course, we'll share a link to that full article in today's show notes. My commentary, AI is part of the new fabric of society because we rely on the education system to train students to make positive contributions as citizens of the world. It's where we especially need thoughtful conversations about the evolving relationship between humans and machines, students and teachers. Expect more experiential learning, more assessments that focus on critical thinking and communication, and more socratic dialogues between students and teachers. All of that is aspirational today. But I believe we'll look back on this decade as the one where human ingenuity advanced more than it has in the past thousand years. And that is very germane to the conversation we're going to have today with Marni Stein who's the chief content officer at Coursera where she oversees the company's content and credential strategy and partner relationships. Coursera of course is the online learning platform one of the pioneers in the space. Started in 2012 by Daphne Kohler and Andrew Ing from Stanford. It's used by more than 175 million learners across more than 6,200 campuses, businesses, and governments to learn skills and earn degrees. Marni has more than 25 years of experience producing and scaling online and hybrid education programs. Prior to joining Coursera, she was chief academic officer and provost at Western Governor's University, where she led its four colleges serving more than 135,000 students. Before that, Marni held leadership positions focused on access, student success, and program design at places like the University of Texas, Hookham Horns, Columbia University, and the University of Pennsylvania. Marni earned her PhD in educational leadership from the University of Pennsylvania. Go Quakers. And without further ado, Marni, it's my pleasure to welcome you to the podcast. Let's get started by having you share a bit more about that illustrious background and how you got into the space.

Now in the intro I talked a little bit about the complicated future of education. From your perspective in one of the places that really as I mentioned it's been a pioneer for the last 14, 15 years. What do you see as the future of education?

So let's say for the sake of conversation there are three key types of constituents when we talk about the future of learning. There's the learner obviously, there's the educator, and then let's say there's the institution who's providing the content or the framework. I would go out on a limb and say every human is a stakeholder in one of those three categories. Maybe if you could take each one if that would be okay and talk about what we should expect to see change, starting with maybe the learner.

From the perspective of the institution, should they feel threatened or is the increasing presence of AI more of a threat or an opportunity for the business model that is higher ed?

In the HR community, there's a lot of talk these days about a future of work that involves a focus on skills versus jobs. To the extent that resonates with you or how you're exposed to the learning community, what does that mean and is that an accurate way to frame the future of education?

Much more satisfying answer than I usually get to a similar question. Okay, so I got to get your take on this. We had a great recent conversation with Dave Barchick who's the dean of the Kogod School at American University in DC and he was talking about renovating the traditional curriculum at least for undergrad business students to account for the fact that a lot of the skills that employers are expecting in the modern workplace are going to involve an understanding of some of these AI-first tools. We also had a conversation recently with a gentleman named Chris Karen who's the CEO of a company called Turn It In which is ubiquitous in higher ed. I think over 50,000 institutions use it to detect plagiarism. Is AI an impediment or a threat or a way to cheat for students? Or maybe more like Dave Barchick says, it's part of the new fabric of society. And we owe it to society to train these skills and not have students perceive it as something that they're trying to hide their use of.

Everyone listening, replay that answer. That was a really good answer. So I believe that it's an opportunity to introduce ethics into the curriculum and really celebrate this opportunity that we have to not assume that it's going to increase or even decrease cheating, but let's have the dialogue about what cheating is. Because as a productive member of society, you're going to be expected to be fluent with these tools. Let's not weaponize them. And I really feel like every degree, every technical degree, every liberal arts degree should include some component of ethics. What's your perspective on that? I don't see that happening fast enough, but I feel like it's our obligation as the community training these students to introduce them to the principles of ethics.

As prep for this conversation, I listened to a great conversation you had recently where you cited the impact that using AI to translate courses into multiple languages at probably higher level of quality is having on the learning experience. I think related to the point you just made, can you maybe share that example?

As we talk about all the benefits of AI as part of learning experience, it's also our responsibility to talk about potential downsides. We know that AI, at least when we're talking about language-based AI, is based on statistical modeling. Sometimes it gets things wrong. It certainly can replicate human bias. What do you think is our obligation as we're teaching learners and introducing more AI into the curricula to also educate about what could go wrong?

Well said, Marni. I've got to get you off the hot seat, but you're not going anywhere without answering one last important question for me. So roll back the clock to maybe Marni the kid who was a Gaucho at UCSB or Marni the grad student at UPenn. You studied educational systems. It's your PhD. What has changed? If you were to get a PhD today in that same topic area, how would that curriculum be different and what would it mean to have the same degree but today?

Well, this discussion, this space is evolving so quickly. We may have to have you come back and talk about the next version of this conversation because a year from now I don't even know what the same conversation would be like. We can't know. That's the world we live in. Well, like I said at the beginning, I think what you're doing is going to indirectly or directly impact every human. So I'm glad someone like you is thoughtful about how we approach these things. So really good hanging out, Marni. Thank you.

You bet. Where can the audience learn more about you and the work you're doing?

Brilliant. All right. Well, gosh, this one sped by, but that's all the time we have for this week on AI and the Future of Work. As always, I'm your host, Dan Turchin, and of course, we're back next week with another fascinating guest.