AI Is Undermining Learning in Higher Education
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses why AI is undermining real learning in higher education and why colleges may need to roll back technology use.
Key Takeaways
- Higher Ed Is Too Dependent on Tech - Colleges have fewer non-digital fallback options, which makes them especially vulnerable when technology fails or gets misused.
- AI Breaks the Meaning of Academic Work - If students and doctoral candidates are submitting AI-written work, degrees no longer reliably show expertise or effort.
- Professors Are Seeing a Sharp Decline in Authentic Learning - Complaints are rising because students are using AI instead of doing their own thinking and writing.
- Doctoral Research Is Now Affected - The video cites alarming evidence that over half of education dissertations contain significant AI writing, with many appearing mostly AI-generated.
- K-12 Offers a Practical Lesson - Schools are learning to reduce student reliance on chatbots and return to pencil-and-paper tasks when necessary.
Full Transcript
AI is wreaking havoc on higher education, and I think they need to get it figured out the way we're getting it figured out in K-12. See, in K-12, we realized pretty quickly that you should not put students on chatbots, and we're really starting to roll back the amount of time students are spending using educational technology, because we know we have a good fallback. We know we can go back to pencil and paper. But in higher ed, it seems like they're so stuck with technology, right? There was the Canvas ransom issue where the courseware that is used in, like, every college got hacked and they had to pay a ransom. The company that owns Canvas had to pay a ransom to get it unlocked for everybody just in time for finals.
So I think they're really stuck with technology and they need to break that addiction. They need to roll it back because AI is really undermining the educational process in colleges and universities. And this year I have seen just an explosion of complaints from professors that their students are not learning anything because they're not doing their work themselves, and it's very difficult to deal with all the accusations of AI use, which are probably mostly correct. And I saw this week a statistic that's really alarming because it affects the next generation. Now over half of education Dissertations. So, for people who are completing their doctorates, their dissertations contain significant AI writing.
And in a lot of them, it's the majority. Like, in the fifth of these dissertations, the majority of the writing looks like it was AI written. And I think there are bad AI detectors, and there are good AI detectors, but probably these numbers are about right. And I think we've really got to grapple with what's happening in higher education, because now we have these people who are, like, probably going to get doctorates, And what does it mean? What does it mean if a computer wrote your dissertation for you? Are you an expert if a computer wrote it for you?
Have you done the work if you haven't done the work? Like, the degree means that you have done the work, and if we break that relationship, What does it mean to really say that someone has a doctorate? So I think higher ed has got to get this figured out very quickly. And I think probably the right answer is that AI needs to not be a part of college at all, just as it needs to not really be part of students' work in K-12. But let me know what you think.
