Online Homework is Dead - Episode 47
00:00:00 Jon Bergmann: Are online schools is dead? Can we ever send online homework home again? Today, that's our topic. In this week's episode of Reach Every student
00:00:20 Jon Bergmann: Welcome again, John Bergman. Here we are talking about online homework. Last week, I had the great privilege of going to New York City, where I was invited by the Sloan Foundation. Mr. Sloan, by the way, he helped start General Motors and then gave it an endowment way back in the eighteen hundreds. And they support lots of great causes. And so it was an honor to be invited to a Stem AI symposium. Uh, symposium might be the wrong word. Maybe a think tank. There were twelve people around the room. Ballpark. And I felt at first, honestly, somewhat intimidated because I was the only guy in the room without a PhD, and I was there having conversations with some just really amazing, amazing thought leaders in higher education and Stem. And one thing that one of the participants, actually the leader, Lorena Barbara from George Washington University, she showed us all was the comet browser. The perplexity browser called comet. So perplexity is an AI tool and you can download for free the comet browser. I have been playing around with the browser and it is an agentic browser. And so what I did, I thought, well, let's see what it will do. I went and opened up one of my online quizzes. I and there's a button in perplexity or in comet, I guess you would call it, where you can click on the assistant button. Scare quotes, real scare quotes. And in the assistant I typed in, please answer all the questions. It then took over my browser guys, it took over that browser. It looked at all the questions. Some of the questions even had images, would analyze the images and it got one hundred percent on a forty two question quiz thing. do you realize that the idea of us sending home to students homework, if you will, that AI will be able to do better than the students can. And it took five minutes or something like that for it to go and analyze each question. And I was watching it, so to speak. Reason, if that's even the right word, because it's not alive. It's just a it, right. It's a machine making predictions, but it got all the right answers. And it makes me really underscore this. Teachers listen carefully. We cannot send home cognitively complex tasks any more. If we do, too many students will allow AI to do that for them. Now there are students who will who will rise to the occasion and say, no, I'm going to resist the temptation and I'm going to want to. Do this work for myself, and I'm going to do the hard work of learning and all this kind of stuff. Some people have been arguing with me about this topic saying, well, our homework isn't hard enough, or our, you know, you're you're not designed your class well enough. Well, I'm not sure how to solve that. Like, I'm trying to think now globally, I've got a defined curriculum that I'm supposed to teach. Probably you do too. And in that defined curriculum that's been established over decades, uh, about what's an important thing for a student to know and be able to do. That curriculum has been around for a long time, and for us to change that in the world of education, I think, is totally, I don't think it's wise. I think, uh, our society has deemed certain things important for students to know, and I'm not going to disagree that that's all true. Are there some things that we're teaching students that we shouldn't? Of course. Yeah, I believe that's probably true. But I'm not going to be the judge of what English books students should read. I'm a science teacher. I'm going to let that I'm going to leave that to people who, like, know more about teaching English than I do. And I'm going to trust those experts that they know what's best in their field. Now, we probably need to have a frank conversation about what we're teaching. But anyways, I've had some people reach out. I created a video, by the way. Go to my YouTube channel. it's learning the number four mastery and you can find I think I titled the video Online Homework is Dead, and I've had some comments on that on that video. And one of the comment was from a person who said, I teach online classes, what do you think I should do? And you know, the answer is, I have no idea. I think your job is in dire threat. Uh, since that time, I've been thinking about this. I've dialogue with some colleagues, and one colleague has a really good point. One colleague, he said yesterday, or a couple days ago, we were chatting about this whole thing and he said, I think the idea of testing centers are going to have to like, make a comeback. So if you are teaching in an online school, uh, giving students a test at home is is not going to work anymore. Uh, and so what you can do is you have a testing center. Students will go into the testing center. You may even have to like even build Faraday cages around these because now, of course they can have AI glasses and AI watches and AI someday. I hear they're getting to AI, uh, contact lenses, because the key thing here, guys, to me, is I want our students, uh, to become deep learners and the deep learners who then, as they become a deep learner, can then use AI in positive ways to enhance their work and not to replace their work. Those students will be the ones who become the leaders of the next generation. And to some degree, I know that's always been true. Always those who choose the hard path early in life. not always, but those are the ones who tend to be our successful leaders of the future. And so I would. But we've got to be careful because too many of our students can become that. But if they get, if you will, too tempted to do the wrong thing, then they're going to shortchange their own self. Another colleague and I were talking about this and and what she said is she says, I just think what's really going to happen, we're going to see again. And I've said this. But she echoed that same thought is that there's going to be those students who take the hard road and those who don't, and that's going to separate the leaders of the world from those who, you know, just let life happen to them. And I think we really need to rethink what that's all going to look like as educators. Because if now these agentic their agents, if agentic browsers take over and I don't see that not not happening, it's going to happen. It's inevitable. I mean, it happened a week and a half ago. Uh, and it it's going to take over how people interact with the internet. And if you haven't seen an Agentic browser, you will soon and you'll be using it. And then you're going to have this quandary as an educator is, how do I teach? In light of that, I've been also talking to some of my other colleagues here at my school, and honestly, we feel like we're pretty good, uh, because many of us are are teaching via a flipped classroom model with a flipped classroom model. The students, we still assign homework, but the homework is now for the students to still continue to watch a short video or do a reading. They come prepared to class. Now, some students might not watch the video, but they might. But they're going to be assessed, if you will, when they come into class in a more controlled environment on what they have learned. And if they don't do that, they want to like, have AI help them learn it. I don't that's fine with me. If they don't want to watch my cheesy video about frictional forces in a physics class, and they want to have the AI tutor them, I am one hundred percent okay with that. Uh, the key is that they then come in and they do the cognitively complex stuff in the classroom. And now when we test them, one thing that the AI is not figured out yet, thank you, Is that our students take their exams in a lockdown browser or potentially just on paper, old school, and then they have to then demonstrate what they've learned. I think one thing it will do, it will reduce, if you will, in my classes what percentage I assign to sort of like the homework grade, it's going to be diminished. And then the summative and the formative assessments, those things that happen in the class will be assessed at a much higher percentage. Otherwise, I think what happens is the grade will be padded up. Honestly, I think one of the other options we should consider. In fact, I sat next to the guru of alternative grading and specifications grading. He's written a book about it, uh, Doctor Robert Talbot. He was at this meeting in New York, and I think he's really on to the idea that's where we need to eventually move towards is a different way that we think about grading assessment. One college professor, Aeronautic aeronautical engineering, I think is what was what she's going to do is she's going to do oral exams. Uh, she said that and some of the other ones cringed. They said, I don't. That takes so much time. And she says, I'm going to figure it out. There's lots of things to think about as we move forward in this new era. I think it's honestly easy for us in the K-12 world, because we have more contact hours with our students in a week than does a university professor, and so much of the learning needs to happen outside of the actual class time at the university level. But at the high school, you know, elementary school level, we see our students are much, much more minutes per week. And so we can make sure that the hard stuff, if you will, is happening in the class. So is online homework dead? Yes. I think at this stage we need to realize that we cannot trust the security of that. And it's no fun for you as a teacher to grade work done by AI. It's a waste of your time and it's it's not indicative of what the students actually learned. So we're going to have to really rethink what this looks like. And I'm trying to figure it out along with a lot of you, and I would love to hear your comments about what you think and what you're doing to use AI in productive ways, or to create a more secure learning systems. If you've got a better idea than I do in terms of like flipping the classroom is the only way to really basically have any homework at all. I would love to hear it. Give me give me your comments in the in the podcast or reach out to me at John Bergman. I would love to hear more about what you're thinking about how to do this. We we have, as I said at the end of that video that I made about this comet browser is, uh, we have entered a new era. We are in a new era where, uh, you know, it's the wild, wild West, and we're trying to keep up as educators. It's frustrating. It's hard. And I encourage you to keep keep working on this. And especially I think about the younger teachers. You know, I'm an old teacher, I'm sixty one years old, and I've still got some more years in me, but I don't have fifteen. And I think of my own children. Two of my children are public school teachers, and my daughter in law is is a teacher as well. So I've got a lot of teachers in my family, and they're going to have to deal this for decades. And for me, I might have a decade. Uh, and so what is this going to look like going forward? So I would really encourage you to we have to lean in and figure out what does education look like in light of agentic AI browsers. And FYI, just just two days ago, guess who responded to perplexities? Comet AI browser? Yeah. ChatGPT announced uh, their, uh, Atlas browser, which is an Agentic. It's the same kind of deal, uh, using their backbone. So this arms race between the AI companies is a real deal. It's happening very, very fast. And you know, another concern I have, Robert Talbott. In fact, I was reading one of his LinkedIn posts about this just, uh, earlier this week. So I've been playing around with this comet browser, and I'm beginning. Oh, I like it. It's doing some things for me as an expert. I was in it this morning, but he made a post on LinkedIn that really made me like him. If he was fed on, I think it was Facebook or one of the social media platforms, he was fed an ad from perplexity, who is the maker of this comet browser? And it basically said, you know, we're trying to show you how to get that four point oh here, download this browser. And so they're encouraging students to use their thing to cheat as a marketing ploy. And his statement was I'm I'm deleting it right now. I liked it for a time. But any company that does this I cannot support. And so I'm I'm starting to do the same thing is we we have to hold these companies accountable for what their they are so disrupting so rapidly education that we and we are trying to just respond so quickly. It is a difficult we are in a difficult place in the history of education. And I know you're probably frustrated. I'm frustrated, and we've got to figure out how to do this so quickly and pivot, which is not something that education especially, well, K-12, higher ed, probably more. We don't pivot fast. we did at the Covid era, but we didn't pivot very well, let's be honest. And we're going to still we're going to have to pivot and change so rapidly. Hey, I hope this this is a Debbie Downer, uh, uh, podcast, but it's where we're at. And sometimes, you know, you got to go to the doctor and you got to get that diagnosis. And you know what the problem is. And then we got to figure out how we can fix it. And I don't know the answer. I've got some ideas. Right. Don't do the cognitively complex or don't send the cognitively complex tasks home. Do that in your class. And yeah, use flipped classroom to do the any resemblance of homework. By the way, if you're interested in flipping your classroom. Hey, my website John. John. So John has no H and Bergman has two N's dot com. I've got some, relatively inexpensive online courses on how to flip your class. Well, in the age of AI, I would encourage you to hop in there, look on the courses tab or link or whatever it is. You'll figure it out to, uh, learn the best uses of Flipped Classroom. I started seeing kind of a resurgence interest, a resurging interest in flipped learning because of the age of AI. And so anyways, I hope that this is useful. Have a great day. I encourage you to click subscribe. And by the way, if you have feedback, reach out to me on my website, John Bergman, and say, hey, here's a topic I'd love you to talk about. I want to listen to the listeners. That's you guys. Tell me what you want me to talk about. And, uh, I'll try to incorporate your suggestions into the actual podcast. Hey, John Bergman, out now. Go and reach every student.
