Imagining the Education of the Future with Zach Pendleton of Instructure

No sooner did we hear about the power of ChatGPT than we started hearing about students submitting essays using generative AI.

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Educational institutions, educators, learners, and concerned parents are still trying to figure out how to think about all of this. That's why I sat down with Zach Pendleton, Chief Architect of Instructure, the maker of Canvas learning management system.

"Education is in a hard place because it was one of the industries that was hit first and hardest by AI," Pendleton acknowledges.

I bring up the idea that this upending of education is driven by the fact that AI has revealed that the multiple choice exam and the essay are no longer viable methods of assessing student accomplishment. Pendleton adds his own observation, "I don't know any professor who uses multiple choice because they think that it is the best thing, that it is the most immersive, engaging, and challenging format," he says. "It was the format that was easiest to scale."

Will AI hinder learning?

While headlines have pointed to studies suggesting that students using AI learn less than their traditional counterparts, a deeper look at the data reveals a more complex picture. "A paper from MIT found that when students use AI, they're willing to spend more time learning because they expend less effort on cognition," Pendleton explains.