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00:00We decided to change everything, change culture, change design, change intellectual structure,
00:04use technology, move in new directions, and then we began measuring learning outcomes.
00:08For all the talk about changes in higher ed, including just this week, when the University
00:13of Virginia became the first public college to agree to Trump administration oversight,
00:18the biggest cause for change, AI, doesn't come up all that often in the political debate.
00:24For nearly a quarter century, Michael Crow has led the university that is by some measures
00:28the largest in the United States. Few people have thought as much about American higher education
00:34while also having the ability to influence it on such a large scale. But when we first talked with
00:39him a little over a year ago, we didn't cover artificial intelligence. A lot has changed since
00:45then. AI will leave a lot of white-collar people behind. Another uncomfortable truth linked to AI.
00:51AI. AI. AI. AI. AI. It's not a bubble. Obviously the most disruptive technology in the history of
00:58and con. Egalitarian access to knowledge is at the highest level in the history of our species.
01:03What we have is a walking, talking, reference library on any subject. And we never had anything
01:07like that in our society before. We wanted to know how artificial intelligence
01:11is changing the American college experience, what it means for the teachers and students who have now
01:17made it a regular part of their lives. But we also asked Crow about the outcomes for recent graduates
01:24and how his school is preparing students for an economy that is moving very fast.
01:29What does that do to teaching? I mean, back in the olden days, we wrote essays. We wrote blue books
01:34back when I was there. How do you do things like essays and evaluations?
01:39Well, I think what has to happen, and we've experienced this at ASU with our 6,000 factor members,
01:43several thousand of which are already AI trained, is you have to up the game. Perhaps we were learning
01:48too slowly, too incrementally, too much in a regimented or industrial way. With the AI tools
01:52that are available now, you can up the game, enhance the question complexity, enhance the answer
01:58complexity, expect more of the students. We had somebody give their test out of the business school
02:02to an AI system to get everything right instantly. Well, then the test is too easy. The test is too
02:07simple. So you need, it's basically a way, in our view, to accelerate learning, to broaden learning,
02:11and to speed learning. So you have to look at it as a new way to basically make the game more
02:15intensive. The model's always changing. So Plato, you know, was against the written word. He thought
02:19everything should be thought through verbally and communicated verbally. There were unbelievable
02:25forces against the development of the printed book. And so the internet and its development,
02:31the web and its development all had people that were against it. And so AI changes the model in the
02:35sense that it speeds it up and intensifies it. It personalized the learner's experience, but it
02:40doesn't teach those core things. There's no values being taught. There's no values being experienced.
02:45There's no lived experiences being built. So what we really have here now is we just have this massive
02:50hyperspeed calculator capable of going to all of the digitized information, you asking a question about
02:57that information and getting the most probable answer. It's all about the questions that you're asking. It's
03:02not about the answers. It's about the questions. And that's what people need to really figure out. Does it
03:06change the notion of cheating? I'll bet humans have cheated for quite a while. It does change the nature of what is
03:13your work. Now, if you're answering a complex question, and you're using a reference library and
03:17an AI system to answer that question, that seems legitimate. If you're if you're using it to produce
03:22your analytical response, that's supposed to be demonstrative of your ability, well, then you're
03:27cheating. Now you have to then build a system which recognizes the ability to gain access to these
03:33tools. Now, sometimes it's just going to be you in there by yourself taking the test, because they've got to
03:38know that you know how to ask the question. You know how to derive the answer that your brain works
03:42in a certain way. Beyond that, the AI systems are going to enhance learning in every possible way. And
03:47then the idea of cheating will change. At this point, are there some things that you can learn that AI
03:52cannot teach you? Absolutely. I mean, you know, an AI system can't teach you to be innovative. It can't teach
04:00you to be creative. It cannot teach you grit. It cannot teach you the discovery process. It cannot teach you I
04:06mean, it's a machine. It's a it's an advanced hyper speed calculator. It can do things that you can't
04:12do. It can think around corners that you can't see. But of course, so can it so can a dog. And so and so
04:19it's it's it's a powerful analytical tool to enhance our mental capabilities not to replace them. In order to
04:26ensure that AI is a springboard rather than a crutch, Crow says students and teachers will have to raise the bar.
04:33And one place he's already seen signs of AI's ability to supercharge progress is in the school's
04:40research programs. It's almost unbelievable. We have probably 50 research groups that are using
04:45advanced AI to solve unsolvable problems to figure out how to process materials or manage the Mississippi
04:51River in a different way in terms of the flow of the water and the flow of the dirt and other things
04:55that go down the river. We've got people doing advanced chemistry. Now we're using AI systems to
05:00think beyond the way that we normally think to create more revolutionary opportunity. There was a study
05:07recently done by some of our faculty at the speed with which you could complete the work equivalent to a
05:12dissertation in in genetics, 14 days. What that means then is that the PhD that normally takes four or five
05:18years to set up the experiments, do the experiments, do the work, be evaluated. Maybe the PhD student of the future will do the
05:24equivalent of 20 PhDs. That will speed up the cures for cancer. That will speed up the analytical tools
05:30that will help restore sight in human beings. That will that will speed up the techniques that use
05:34electromagnetic current to affect people with Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative
05:39diseases, all of which are computationally limited. Certainly the world has changed enormously since I
05:45came out of college a long time ago now. But my sense is the rate of change has really increased
05:51maybe even geometrically, how fast it's changing. How do you prepare graduates today for a world 20, 30,
05:5740 years down the road that I can't even imagine? So there's there's no way to prepare someone for
06:01something you don't know what it will be except one thing. What we call we're attempting to take all the
06:07people that are coming to our university, 120,000 degree seeking students, 700,000 other learners who are just
06:13taking courses with us digitally and otherwise. Can we help create you to be a master learner? Can we
06:20help you to be a person capable of learning anything, adjusting to anything, adapting to anything? It's
06:26really that because we don't know what all of the adaptations that will be required are. We do know that
06:30you should be grounded in you know American history and economics and the role of democracy and and
06:36certain subjects in math and science and so forth and so on. And then after that we find a learning path for
06:40you to take where you learn to learn. We don't care what your major is. You can I met a kid the other
06:45day was majoring in opera and physics. Great, fine, fantastic. That's how that kid learns and so and so
06:51that's what we're after. How do you how do you create universal learners capable of learning anything?
06:56That's the pathway. We hear at 40,000 feet about a shifting employment situation for recent college
07:03graduates because of AI. Are you seeing any of that in the real world? We're not we're not seeing that in
07:08our graduates. Now the problem with people talking about all college graduates there's more than 20
07:12million people in college. A couple million go to what you think of as sleep away colleges. You know
07:17they go they go to places where you're you know you're living on campus. The other 18 million go to
07:21college in some other way community college online some kind of other course and so forth. So we're not
07:26seeing any change. You know we're seeing the same level of anxiety. We're seeing the same level of the
07:30process where you know more than 95 percent of our students that graduate as undergraduates are employed or in
07:36graduate school within the first year almost all within the second year. So we're still you know
07:42seeing good ROIs. But what we are seeing is students you know who are quite savvy you know adjusting their
07:49trends. So we're seeing a slightly downward trend in computer science and a slightly upward trend in
07:55double majoring and triple majoring. More people moving into analytics and supply chain and all kinds of
08:01other things. And so the market for learning is also adjusting. We measure our success based on who we
08:11include. Crow hopes the size and scope of ASU will help with that adjustment allowing students to react
08:18quickly and build new skills for the changing world. And in a school made famous for opening its doors
08:25rather than being exclusive he thinks the most important skills of all can come from unlikely
08:31places. We've even got ways now that we're using advanced AI enhanced robots to help people that
08:36aren't qualified to get into a particular college to do what they want to do to get them qualified.
08:41Guess what? When we get them qualified they have more grit and determination than anyone else
08:45who sort of walked into it from high school and they outperform everyone. There's a theme going on right
08:50now that every college has been overrated, oversold. What do you say to parents?
08:54What we have is a way for your child, your student to learn on the path that's going to enhance their
09:01ability to be most adaptive throughout their life. So don't worry about their major. So we get these
09:05parents that say well my kid needs to major in accounting so they can get a job or they need to
09:09major in anything other than political science or history or English where they'll never get a job.
09:13That's actually not true. Some of the hottest things that we have that we're producing right now
09:17are English majors that can code. And so they have a broader perspective and they can code. And so we provide
09:24free coding classes to everyone in the institution. We provide other ways in which you can double
09:28major, triple major, take other kinds of things. And so what we say to parents is let's find the way
09:34where your kid is going to smile while learning, while preparing themselves to be a master learner
09:40and you'll have to worry about them less. If they take a fixed thing in a fixed way and a fixed pathway
09:45they could find themselves in an alley and no way out. We're trying to make sure that that doesn't happen.
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