AI for Educators Design Lab Podcast
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Hi, everyone, and welcome to the AI for Educators Design Lab podcast. My name is Jennifer Maddrell, and I'm a learning experience designer with a PhD in Instructional Design and Technology. I've spent the last 20 years working with educators to tackle a range of challenges in teaching, learning, and technology integration.
This new podcast is part of my work at Next Path Design, where I focus on teaching and learning in the age of AI.
As I hear from everyone I work with, AI is reshaping teaching and learning faster than anyone can keep up.
For most educators, we're facing a tension that I like to call the convergence of messy and magical. While AI promises exciting innovation and efficiency, it also raises significant concerns, such as academic integrity, or student privacy, or their inclusion in the learning experience.
So if you're feeling [00:01:00] that AI is changing what you know about teaching and learning, and you want a space to think about how AI integration is affecting your context with your learners, then this podcast is meant for you.
My personal goal with this podcast is to connect with educators, instructional designers, and researchers who see AI not as just another tool to add, or a potential threat to monitor, but as a complex design challenge. One that involves tricky implications and constraints, and calls for a lot of judgment and awareness of your context and ethical thinking.
So instead of quick tips or AI hacks, I'm creating episodes that invite educators to pause and reflect on the real world pain points and the decisions that they're facing today, along with the trade-offs involved.
I've structured season one of this podcast to explore some of the most pressing challenges that educators have raised in recent conversations and surveys. So, I'll be covering things like academic integrity, learning goals, AI literacy, privacy and [00:02:00] inclusion, and then also AI policy.
While each new episode will focus on a specific AI-related pain point, they're all framed as part of a broader AI integration design challenge.
In other words, these individual issues are different entry points into the same underlying design challenge that begs one central question:
How do we design learning experiences, and think through ethical implications, and support teaching and learning when AI is part of the equation?
So rather than treating AI as either a magical solution or conversely an existential threat, my hope in this podcast is to frame AI as our new given.
This requires us to grapple with deeper design questions beyond what AI tools should I use or how is the best way for me to prompt AI?
Instead, I'm going to draw on real world teaching and learning examples as design cases with the hope to highlight the design tensions that AI is creating in everyday educational practice.
I'll then suggest sets of design considerations and [00:03:00] reflective questions you can use to work through AI integration in your own context.
My hope is that by the end of each episode, you'll feel less overwhelmed and more grounded.
And I want to leave you with approaches for thinking through these challenges rather than just having to react to them.
Importantly, my aim is not to suggest that I have any type of quick fix solution to share with you for all your AI integration challenges. Instead, this podcast is my way to engage in the conversations about AI most of us are having already.
In turn, I hope it will also help you think about some of the key design considerations you are working through in your own context and with your own learners.
So who am I making this podcast for?
Ultimately, this podcast is for anyone who's ever thought, "I can't tell if this student wrote this, or if AI did!" " My assignments that worked for years suddenly don't!"
" I don't want to spend time on AI surveillance, but I also don't know what else to do!"
Or, "Everyone is talking about AI [00:04:00] policies, but no one's talking about what that means for my relationship with my students!"
So if these issues sound familiar to you and this conversation sounds of interest, please keep an eye out for episode one, which I'll be launching in early March.
I'll be releasing new episodes about twice each month, and you'll be able to find them on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or you can head to our website at nextpathdesign.com/podcast.
And if you want to go deeper into these issues, I'll also be launching a free private community where you can share and compare ideas with other educators. I will also be releasing Design Briefs that are podcast companions to dovetail with each episode's themes.
Then later this summer, I'll be hosting week long Design Sprints where you can apply the concepts we're covering in this podcast and the Design Briefs directly to your own context.
So if this sounds interesting to you and you'd like updates on these or other offerings, please head over to our website and you can sign up at nextpathdesign.com/updates.
I can't wait to get started, and I hope you'll [00:05:00] join us. Talk to you soon.
