Students fight back over course taught by AI
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Nov 20, 2025 at 8:24 AM EST
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Universities need to lean into the fact that for undergrads, they're only still good at one thing: proctured in person assessments. Also maybe community building.
Bad lectures delivered by rushed or apathetic professors is such a death march. Learning theatre.
This is too extreme of a generalization. There are obviously bad professors and universities that are not worth your money, but most professors at any halfway decent university are going to put a good deal of effort into teaching well. Getting a job as a professor is surprisingly competitive for the relatively low compensation because there are a lot of people who want to teach and teach well.
You can find some decent learning material on YouTube but it’s still mostly geared toward infotainment. I have a lot of bookmarks for excellent YouTube videos that I share with juniors on certain topics, but on average it’s really hard to find YouTube teaching resources that teach at the level of a university professor. When you do, it’s hard to get people to actually watch them as true teaching often involves slogging through some of the less exciting content as well. Most YouTube videos are designed to trigger “aha!” moments but only provide a surface level understanding. The type of learning where you think you understand a topic but couldn’t really explain it to someone else well or solve problems on a test because you haven’t gone through the full learning yet.
> Universities need to lean into the fact that for undergrads, they're only still good at one thing: proctured in person assessments. Also maybe community building.
You’re missing the biggest one of all: Accountability. We already saw with the MOOC trend that releasing high quality university lectures online from top universities is not enough to get many people to go through with learning the material. Getting them into a place where they know there will be a test and a grade and they have some skin in the game makes a huge difference.
Some people learned from MOOCs, but in general the attrition rate and falloff was insanely high from lecture 1 to the end.
Distance learning was basically a dimly-lit grainy video recorded 5 years prior being shown to hundreds of classes all over the country. Instead of teachers, "tutors" (we couldn't call them teachers) making barely above minimum wage answering questions of dozens of classes and grading things on Moodle/Blackboard. A real teacher would be responsible for a class but they would barely see anything, as they were just figureheads already busy with real classes.
I also remember some courses having almost half of the courses being long distance, so even people choosing traditional education were pushed into doing cost-saving computer shit.
The computers in the campus were obviously miserable to use, so I did everything in my power to at least make the software light enough so that people wouldn't suffer much, but in the end I hated myself for being in that industry.
I guess some small percentage of it was hallucinated, but if you want to call it a teacher/student relationship, it was pretty amazing.
So I don't trust it anymore, at best it's a good start.
It's when you take that conversation you just had, make it into a PowerPoint, and try to sell it for 10000x what you spent on the credits that it really becomes lazy. Why expect anyone pay for that when they could have just asked the AI themselves?
I can't imagine having so little respect for my own reputation that as a professor I'd throw out unreviewed AI slop as my own intellectual work, but I bet nobody is getting fired for it so that's just a sign of my own stupidity. A professor with no pride, working for a university with no pride, giving students with no pride certifications that they can use to get ahead in an economy with no pride.
I'm bullish on AI in education, because of the possibility of creating an individual student model that the machine can use to constantly target weaknesses in understanding. But that hasn't been invented yet. What you would get now is a teacher that hallucinates, simply lies to bridge gaps, forgets what it was supposed to be talking about, and constantly fabricates references.
Also, there are hardly any good teachers left. Most are hired on sharing basis, who shuttle between multiple colleges.
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