Harvard research fellow says higher education must rethink what students learn in AI era

Higher education is at a crossroads as institutions across the country grapple with how to approach artificial intelligence in the classroom. Universities have instituted policies around the technology, while some professors have returned to paper tests and taken other measures aimed at preventing students from improperly using AI.

However, Harvard University Senior Research Fellow Christopher Dede says they are focusing on the wrong problem, and are not adequately preparing students to face a world in which AI is ubiquitous.

"The problem is that our educational systems are geared to teaching reckoning and their quality is measured by assessing reckoning, the GRE, the SAT, the LSAT, et cetera, et cetera. And so what we're doing is preparing human beings to lose to AI as opposed to preparing human beings with skills that complement AI," Dede told Fox News Digital.

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Dede is a seasoned professional when it comes to blending technology and education. He spent 22 years as the Timothy E. Wirth Professor of Learning Technologies at Harvard before becoming a research fellow with the university. Dede also served as the chair of the Learning & Teaching program at Harvard Graduate School of Education from 2001 to 2004.

Central to Dede's view of AI in higher education is the distinction between "reckoning," or calculative prediction, and "judgment." He traces this back to philosopher Brian Cantwell Smith, explaining that while technology is good at reckoning, humans are good at judgment, making the two complementary rather than competitive.

Dede noted that the vast majority of what he has read about AI in education is "about doing things better," such as revamping traditional teaching methods and automating them using generative AI. However, he argued that using AI to teach more efficiently overlooks a larger problem: many of the skills that students can learn from AI are also the ones that the technology will increasingly perform in the workplace.

"It's really important to remember that anything that AI can teach, AI is going to do in the workplace because it's actually much easier to build a workplace tool that just does whatever the skill is than it is to build a teaching tool that somehow has a glass box on top of the black box of AI so that human beings can learn how to do this," he said.

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He said that the focus needs to be on "doing better things" rather than simply "doing things better." Dede added that one of the core benefits of using emerging technology in education is actually being able to do something more powerful than what was previously possible.

Dede pointed to active, collaborative and project-based learning, as well as immersive simulations, as ways institutions can use AI to develop students' judgment skills.

He used a negotiations course as an example, saying that a student could take multiple classes on the subject and earn good grades without ever actually demonstrating the ability to successfully negotiate. However, he believes AI could be used to assess whether students actually possess the ability to apply skills they have learned in the classroom.

"So, what AI can do is to mimic the landlord or to mimic a used car dealer or to mimic your boss when you want a raise, and let you rehearse and apply all those wonderful things you learned in your negotiation courses through practice so that when the real world situation comes along, you can give a skilled performance that involves judgment," he said.

Dede argued that generative AI's language capabilities can also help analyze what students say and do during those performances, providing insight into what they retained from the course.

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As AI becomes increasingly common in professional settings, students will need to learn how to pair the technology's analytical capabilities with human judgment, according to Dede. He said AI assistants can do things that no human realistically could. In his example, he suggested that an AI assistant could examine large quantities of medical literature and draw insights from patient records. However, it also has its limitations, as AI lacks the ability to understand pain and morality or the difference between quantity and quality of life.

"The tools are great for the reckoning part, but they're terrible at the judgment part," Dede told Fox News Digital. He added that professionals could need to be re-skilled so they are able to use AI tools while also recognizing the value of the patterns that the technology picks up.

However, Dede cautions against relying solely on AI for reckoning, saying that students still need to be taught how to reason so the technology does not become "magic." He added that one must be able to discern when an AI tool is spitting out "hallucinatory reckoning" versus "genuine reckoning."

Simply knowing how to use generative AI may not be enough to give students the advantage they seek when entering the workforce.

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One of Dede's colleagues advertised an unpaid internship and received 200 applications from students eager for the opportunity. However, there was a problem. She noticed that the vast majority of applications appeared to be identical as students had put information about the internship into generative AI and told it to write a letter. Dede said his colleague was almost immediately able to eliminate a number of candidates because of her suspicion of AI usage.

The anecdote, according to Dede, illustrates why students need to develop skills to help distinguish themselves from what can be done using AI.

While students need to learn how to use AI without becoming overly dependent on it, Dede argued that restricting the technology in the classroom was not the answer. He said that professors returning to analog methods, such as blue books and paper-only tests in an effort to prevent students from using AI to cheat, are "missing the point entirely."

Dede believes professors in higher education need to ask why they are teaching something, rather than how they can stop students from using technology to cheat.

While he believes it is important for higher education to understand how to teach students to work with AI, Dede is not confident that there will be noticeable changes any time soon.

"I don't know if the elite universities will change, but a lot of the other universities will change in order to survive," he said. "And they'll come out with something that is ultimately far more powerful that's based around demonstrating that their graduates have judgment and understand enough about reckoning that it's non-magic and are capable of thriving on the kind of chaos that we see in the modern world."