The pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value. – Ivan Illich

ACT 1: The Local Friction

The student looked at me incredulously.

“Why can’t I do the next module?” “

“Because you haven’t mastered the last module,” was my reply.

“But I completed it.”

“Yes, you did some work but you did not demonstrate the minimum mastery necessary to continue.”

This is a common conversation with my students these days. They are used to just sliding by and are really struggling with the idea that learning is a process. How are you supposed to evaluate process when no one seems to recognize it exists?

There are two systemic challenges to assessing process over product in our current educational systems. One comes from below from the students and the other comes from above from administrators and the policymakers that are pressuring them to demonstrate “accountability” in exchange for the public funds that make public higher education possible. Both sides are squarely focused on product.

ACT 2: The Systemic Vise

My students are used to checking in and out of courses and dropping in to do the minimum necessary work to create marginal products to “demonstrate” their learning. This is a suicidal strategy in a world where AI does a lot more than getting by.

Students treat each assignment as a product. If you miss one, then you simply make up for it on the next one. One thing they really struggle with in my class is understanding that getting “0’s” on Gold and Platinum assignments is part of the process.

I have some leeway (unlike many K12 teachers) in messing with their realities, because of a natural deference to professors. However, the “best” students, who are best at playing the school game, are most likely to complain about me “messing with their GPA.” Few understand what I am trying to do.

On the other side of the coin, my college is laser focused on “student success.” This is a result of a legislative mandate for colleges to prove their worth to receive funding.

This mandate is complicated because no one seems to know what “student success” actually means. The simple answer is to fall back on credentialing and completion. Of course, no one wants to hear that the easiest way to achieve this metric is to make all the courses easy.

My course exists between these two systems. So far, I haven’t gotten a lot of pushback from the administration, but I can see that happening if my failure and drop rates spike due to students playing the old game and running up against the realities I am trying to teach.

These are systemic problems that any course that takes AI seriously has to face. Large language models challenge the logic of product-based education. Just bolting them onto outdated pedagogical practices on students who conflate school with learning will not work.

However, the vast majority of “AI-transition” policy focuses on doing just that because of the realities of being caught between the two poles of administrative/legislative priorities and student expectations. Donella Meadows, the noted systems thinker, writes, “Policy resistance comes from the bounded rationalities of the actors in a system, each with his or her (or “its” in the case of an institution) own goals.” (Thinking In Systems, p. 113)

Systemic resistance is real. Meadows goes on to say that, “[R]esistance to change arises when goals of subsystems are different from and inconsistent with each other… In a policy-resistant system with actors pulling in different directions, everyone has to put great effort into keeping the system where no one wants it to be.” (Thinking in Systems, p. 113)

In other words, no one has to love the system for it to persist. More importantly, these groups pulling in different directions actually strengthens the system’s resistance to change, because the one thing all actors can agree on is the maintenance of the system.

The students want the system of product-based credentialing to persist because they’ve staked their livelihood on it. Colleges are likewise invested in it.

Then there is the problem of valuing the process itself. If both system actors see the value in producing a product exclusively, learning becomes an “event” of production. If the course focuses on the process, the rhythm of the class must be different.

My students often have personal crises over the course of the semester. Their student existence is often precarious with family and work pressures interfering with their studies.

Within the constraints of the industrial semester system, it’s difficult to modulate the speed of the course for them. That 16-, 12-, 8-, 5-week clock is always ticking, and I can’t really change that.

Some students can play catch-up in my system, but most can’t because there isn’t enough space for them to learn the lessons they need to learn in order to proceed. After a certain point, they can no longer get to the end of the course before the semester clock runs out.

This is not the fault of the course structure. It’s the fault of the outdated industrial clock ticking.

Lately, my institution has focused on the laudable cause of “student care” to ameliorate this problem. My course risks looking “uncaring” by insisting that education requires an investment of time. Process takes time.

Is it really caring to send them out into the world without an understanding of how the learning process works? How are they going to learn the process of lifelong learning that will be essential in a shifting technological and economic world?

It is easy to see how these systems produce inferior products that will have difficulty adjusting to the processes of an AI-driven world, where product is plentiful and processes such as verification, curation, the human premium, and taste will be decisive for their chances of “life success.”

ACT 3: Surfing the Currents

My approach to this wicked problem is to have the students produce a tangible work product as a demonstration of their learning. However, I focus on and assess the importance of process in my pedagogy.

It is this discordance of pace that is central to the friction that I must surf. I’ve seen this before as my courses have been process-based for a long time. The big difference is that the weight of my assessment has continued to focus on the products of my students’ work. This has shifted with the latest course redesign.

To cite just one example, my blogs were so easily gamed by AI that they lost their functional value in the process. Students viewed them as product, not as part of the process of refining their storytelling skills before transitioning them to the visual medium of the web. They’re not part of the course anymore.

The sequence of process-building from one module to the next is central to the pacing of the class after the redesign. Even moving through the modules is a building process. This is essential pedagogical practice going back to Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development.

I have already seen two students suffer crises that have knocked them off their pace. One was able to catch up. The other was not.

The only alternative to plowing on is to revert to the old, compromised system. I’ve seen colleagues do this and their life is filled with a losing battle against AI-generated product.

I worry about the systems of education being able to adapt to the frequency and amplitude of the waves striking it. Learning is still in those systems but it risks being washed away along with the vulnerable products.

Can my course survive? Only time will tell.