niki sioki

At a recent Princeton University panel I was asked if the crisis created by AI is also an opportunity for fundamental changes to higher ed. Yes! I’ve been thinking and writing about this since before ChatGPT’s release. I see two big opportunities. The first is to separate essential skills from incidental ones. Here’s an analogy. When calculators became available, we didn’t stop teaching arithmetic in elementary school. That’s an essential skill. But in college calculus courses, we don’t make students do tedious calculations by hand; we let them use calculators. In that context, arithmetic is incidental. What every instructor needs to do — should have been doing for the last few years, really — is to painstakingly go through everything they teach and figure out which skills/knowledge are in the curriculum because they are essential, and which ones are incidental and can be relegated to AI and automation. Lots of student time can be freed up to focus on what’s truly important. A trivial example: students still need to learn to write, but formatting citations correctly is a pointless skill, and it’s distressing that many instructors continue to waste students’ time by making them learn this. The second opportunity to reform higher ed may be even bigger. In many ways the education system is designed to inhibit, rather than foster, students’ intrinsic motivation to learn. Imagine if an alien showed up to earth. They would probably find it absurd that humans are supposed to absorb knowledge passively for the first 20+ years without any practical context, and then find jobs, with no further need to learn or revisit what they’ve learned. The disconnect between education and the real world makes learning feel like an artificial activity in an artificial environment. This reduces the intrinsic motivation to learn. As a result, college educators rely heavily on the extrinsic motivation of grades to incentivize learning. We’ve all been through this and I think it goes without saying that this is just about the worst way to learn. There’s a well known finding in psychology that intrinsic and extrinsic motivation are in tension. So the two goals of classes — learning and testing — conflict with each other, and currently the former is almost entirely subordinate to the latter. How can we bring intrinsic motivation back in universities? AI (along with other information technologies) is gradually decreasing the barrier of expertise needed to actually _do_ something and contribute something to the world. I think educators should try to lean into this and reorient university education around producing new things and making an impact, and minimize the role of toy problems and simulated environments. In my dream scenario, learning could be entirely decoupled from the assessment, certification, and credentialing function of universities. The system has too much inertia for this to happen, but even a small movement in this direction would make a big difference!