[Editors note: “No Stop” Heidi Weber has been a hero of ours for several years. Her courage fighting corruption at Globe University was documented on an episode of
First, I would like to thank Dahn, and all the other truth tellers who work tirelessly every day and sacrifice so much to elevate truth. Without them, any whistleblower efforts would not have half the positive impact that they do.
For years, I really struggled with the title of whistleblower. I thought if I could distance myself from it, all the resulting traumas would just disappear, and life would be “normal” again.
However, I underestimated how much a landmark whistleblower case, especially in higher education, would affect and continually haunt me. I’m glad now, that it did, because it forced me to see how much of an impact it has had on an entire for-profit sector. I learned it’s ok to allow myself to feel a sense of pride. After all, it was the most painful, stressful thing I imagined I’d ever go through.
Unfortunately, life didn’t get that memo and still had lessons for me about the depth of pain adversity, and struggle, in ways that I never imagined.
In the middle of the pandemic, my husband’s sudden unexpected stroke forced us into a reality we weren’t prepared for. Overnight, I became his nurse, advocate, cheerleader, and his sole rehabilitation task master, simultaneously trying to maintain and hold our home together and make ends meet.
At the same time, our once close, beautiful, adult daughters estranged from us without explanation, treating us as if we do not exist, and are of no value to them… *
All I knew, was that it resulted in leaving a pain and heartache so profound that has reshaped the way I understand love, loss, and resilience.
In the midst of these personal storms, I rediscovered a purpose in educating and helping others as an advocate. So, I added two post graduate certificates and learned how to support and even the field for families who feel powerless in a biased system financially incentivized to separate families and little accountability or oversight.
Injustice and unfairness still stir a fire in me, just as it had when I made that fateful decision to become a whistleblower, and it still inspires me to be relentless in seeking truth and fairness.
Only now, I have the unique experience and knowledge to inspire/teach others.
Currently, I’ve been writing curricula and developing an online training program for a Certificate as a Justice Support Advocate. It focuses on some basic foundations of civics, (no longer taught in school), finding your own resilience and purpose, the various types of advocates, incorporating it into your personal and professional life, and protecting yourself and the public at the same time.
My wish is for learners to find their own fire and realize that courage is easier found when you are fighting for what you know is true and just for everyone, no matter what that is.
I’ve also been doing family advocacy consulting work, as an affordable option for parents, alone or as a partner to their attorney to provide non legal support, evaluation, investigation, and provide fair, logical solutions:
1. For parents facing or concerned about unethical practices in the Child Protective Services (CPS) system to audit, teach and ensure that parents are being portrayed truthfully with reasonable realistic goals to reunite the family, if indicated.
2. In high conflict custody, providing evaluation and screening for signs of parental alienation, and support, education, and resources (to both parents) on how to navigate being a divorced family, as well as providing recommendations to the Court (if indicated) centered around the best interests of the child and importance of both parents to healthy development.
If you would like to discuss either of those services or more info on the advocacy certificate course, please contact me at [email protected]. I’m shooting for February or March 2026 to have the website, and course available online.
These years have been painful, transformative, and defining, but with pain comes growth and wisdom. Life still had more lessons…. to show me there is no limit to how much I can carry and keep positively moving forward.
*Adult children from “normal” average parents have become an almost celebrated (unhealthy) trend over the last ten years especially, for many adult children who have been influenced, poisoned, or alienated against one or both parents by undertrained therapists, peers, and social media influencers, allowing avoidance of responsibility, self-discipline, or concern for others.
When Starr Dixon heard the Trump administration was floating a proposal last spring to eliminate Head Start, the 27-year-old parent in rural Michigan cried for a week.
The free, federally funded early learning program has been life-changing for her and her young daughter, she said. It provided stability after Dixon, who lives about 100 miles north of Lansing, left a yearslong abusive relationship.
While her 3-year-old daughter has blossomed socially, emotionally and verbally in the program during the last year and a half, Dixon has taken on numerous volunteer positions with Head Start, gaining experience that she can put on her resume after a 7-year gap in employment. She hopes to ultimately apply for a job at Head Start.
“It has just completely transformed my life,” she said.
This year, I talked to people in communities across rural America and learned how Head Start is essential in places where there are few other child care options. Head Start also provides an economic boost for these areas and serves as direct support for parents, many of whom go on to volunteer for or get jobs at their local programs.
Related: Young children have unique needs and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free early childhood education newsletter tracks the issues.
Though my reporting focused on western Ohio, parents in other parts of the country, like Dixon, shared similar stories with me about how critical Head Start is to their lives. But since January, the Trump administration has taken what some call a “death by a thousand cuts” approach to the program, firing federal staff, closing regional offices and offering no increase in spending on Head Start in budget proposals.
All those moves have caused chaos and upheaval. In Alabama, Jennifer Carroll, who oversees 39 Head Start sites run by the Community Action Partnership of North Alabama, told me she is reassuring the families she works with that her program’s funding is stable for at least the rest of the year. Carroll fears that if parents think Head Start funding is in jeopardy, they’ll pull their children out of the program, disrupting their learning.
Another example: Keri Newman Allred is the executive director of Rural Utah Child Development Head Start, which operates Head Start programs spread across 17,000 square miles in central and east Utah. Newman Allred estimates her programs, which employ 91 residents and serve 317 children, can survive for one more year. After that, without more money, they will have to make cuts to the program if they want to give teachers a raise to meet inflation.
While other Head Start programs can supplement operations with private donations, Newman Allred’s programs serve some of the most sparsely populated parts of America, known as “frontier counties,” where there are no deep-pocketed philanthropies. Her programs rely solely on federal funding.
In April, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, abruptly shuttered five of Head Start’s 10 regional offices. Programs in Maine that were without directors or that needed assistance with regulations, finances or federal requirements have been left to go it alone without consistent, daily support.
“The closure of regional offices has all but crippled programs,” said Sue Powers, senior director of strategic initiatives at the Aroostook County Action Program in the rural, northernmost tip of Maine. “No one’s checking in. When you’re operating in a program that is literally in crisis, and you need [regional staff] and do not have them, it’s more than alarming.”
This story about Head Start was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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Though it’s expected that teacher turnover will decrease over the next few years, it’s estimated that there were at least 49,000 vacant teaching positions and 400,000 underqualified educators instructing in classrooms nationwide during the 2024-25 school year, according to a project led by researchers from the University of Missouri and the University of Pittsburgh.
Texas has one of the highest teacher underqualification rates in the country, according to the University of Missouri-University of Pittsburgh research project.
Between the 2019-20 and 2024-25 school years, the total number of uncertified teachers in Texas jumped from 12,900 to 42,100, the Texas Education Agency found. That means 12% of the state’s total teachers were uncertified by 2024-25 compared to 3.8% before the pandemic.
On top of that, 34% of the nearly 49,200 newly hired teachers in the 2023-24 school year had no Texas teaching certifications, according to TEA data.
Texas makes a change
Texas’ growing reliance on uncertified teachers stems from the District of Innovation policy enacted by the state legislature in 2015.
Some 986 Texas school districts participate in the program, which essentially automatically allows them to waive teacher certifications even though it was initially intended just for career and technical education teachers, said Jacob Kirksey, an assistant professor of education policy at Texas Tech University. Kirksey is also the associate director of the university’s Center for Innovative Research in Change, Leadership and Education.
Since the pandemic, however, there has been a “dramatic spike” in districts using the District of Innovation program to help with hiring uncertified teachers for foundational subject areas, Kirksey said.
According to Kirksey’s research, Texas’ use of uncertified teachers with no classroom experience led to major learning losses for students. Those taught by new uncertified educators lost 4 months in reading and 3 months in math compared to their peers taught by certified instructors.
But a major shift is underway: HB2, a new state law enacted in June, will phase out all uncertified teachers in foundational content areas by the 2029-30 school year.
Now in Texas, Kirksey said, “we’ve seen the extent of the damage. I think our legislature realized, ‘OK, we created this hole, and now we need to put in the work to fix it.’”
HB2 also incentivizes districts to hire high-quality teachers, he said. Under the new law, districts can receive $1,000 bonuses for every teacher they certify who previously lacked necessary credentials. Other larger bonuses can be earned from the state for mentoring and training teachers.
South Carolina embraces uncertified teachers
On the flip side, some states are implementing laws that would allow more uncertified teachers to enter classrooms.
In South Carolina, for instance, a law enacted in May launched a five-year pilot program that will allow public school districts to hire uncertified teachers — capped at 10% of a district’s instructional staff.
These teachers must have a bachelor’s or master’s degree with at least five years of relevant work experience in the subject area they are hired to instruct. Uncertified teachers must also enroll in an educator preparation program within their first three years of instruction.
The new law comes as South Carolina’s school districts reported over 1,000 teacher vacancies at the beginning of the 2024-25 school year — 600 fewer vacancies, or a 35% decrease, from the previous year, according to a November 2024 analysis by the Center for Educator Recruitment, Retention, and Advancement.
Dena Crews, president of the South Carolina Education Association, said she’s concerned that the law doesn’t require uncertified teachers to take any foundational training before they can instruct students. “The business world and the education world are not the same,” she said.
Uncertified teachers also don’t have any incentive to stay in schools and won’t face any consequences if they quit in the middle of their contract, Crews said. For instance, if one of these teachers doesn’t know anything about classroom management and they can’t get students’ attention for days on end, they may not want to come back and teach.
“So those kids are left at a deficit,” Crews said. “That didn’t help with the shortage. It helped with the shortage for a couple of days and really didn’t do anything, because those kids didn’t learn anything.”
Overall, Crews said she hopes South Carolina’s uncertified teacher pilot program “will not become the norm” for states and school districts nationwide.
Texas has watched its uncertified teacher policies play out longer than other states, Kirksey said. Some lessons learned from watching this trend, he said, are that states facing educator shortages should avoid the easiest option, which is to “deregulate everything” for teaching regulations like in South Carolina. Instead, states should look for ways to prioritize training people to become high-quality educators.
“I do think it’s just a matter of time before folks realize that if we choose to de-incentivize quality, then it’s going to impact kids,” Kirksey said.
Kirksey said he doesn’t believe there’s a lack of qualified adults who can teach. Rather, there’s “a lack of educators who are willing to be in the classroom, who are well-prepared.”
That’s why states and districts ultimately need to address issues with teacher pay, burnout and job satisfaction, Kirksey said. In Texas, he said, “I feel like, as a state, we finally recognize that.”
By Rob Carthy, Director of International Development, Northumbria University.
Attending Duolingo’s inaugural DETcon London, I anticipated a day focused on the evolving landscape of language testing. What I experienced was a candid, and at times controversial, conversation about the geopolitical, political, and technological pressures facing UK higher education. Duolingo may have been the convenor, but the themes of the day went to the heart of the sector’s future.
Here are ten of my key takeaways from a thought-provoking day.
1. Crisis is the New Business-as-Usual
“Since I started, we’ve faced crisis after crisis.” These words from Katja Lamping, Director of Student Recruitment at UCL, resonated deeply. From the pandemic to the fall of Kabul, Ukraine, and Gaza, the past five years have demanded a level of institutional reactivity we’ve never seen before. The clear message was that this isn’t a blip. As former Home and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw bluntly put it, the first rule of preparing for uncertainty is to “expect that the unexpected is going to happen.” For university leaders, strategic planning now looks less like a road map and more like training for a cross-country race in the dark.
2. Agility is Now a Core Competency
The flip side of constant crisis is the need for agile solutions. We heard how the Duolingo English Test (DET) became a vital tool during the pandemic because it was accessible when physical test centres were not. This story is symbolic of a wider truth: our traditional processes and partnerships can be brittle. To keep our doors open to global talent, we must build resilience and responsiveness into our operations, from admissions to student support.
3. The Political Headwinds are Strengthening
Jack Straw’s portrayal of the government’s immigration white paper was sobering. He spoke of a view that some university business models are “not sustainable.” And highlighted the view in Westminster that the student visa route was being used as a “racket” for asylum claims. I might have disagreed with him – many in the room did – but this is a view held by many and is a reality we must face.
Straw, and later in the day Rory Stewart, said the mood in Westminster is hardening regardless of who is in power. This government wants to bring down immigration. It’s often said Brits don’t mean students, but the stark reality is the government wants to get numbers down, and students are one, if not the easiest, lever they can pull. We must be on the front foot, demonstrating our commitment to robust compliance and ethical recruitment, and articulating the immense value international students bring—a value HEPI’s own research has quantified at a net £37.4 billion for the 2021/22 cohort alone.
4. Technology Can Deliver Both Access and Integrity
A powerful message came from Duolingo’s CEO and co-founder, Luis Von Ahn, who shared his personal story of growing up in Guatemala and seeing how English proficiency could transform a person’s life, yet how prohibitive the cost of testing was. His core argument was that technology should be a democratising force. But most compellingly, he tackled the security question head-on. He argued that far from being less secure, an AI-powered test can offer greater integrity than a traditional test centre. The ability to use AI to monitor hundreds of behaviours simultaneously—from eye-gaze to keystroke patterns—in addition to human proctors, presented a powerful case that a digital-first approach doesn’t have to mean a compromise on security; it could, in fact, mean the opposite.
5. The Biggest Risk of AI Might Be Inaction
In a fascinating session on technology, Dr. Laura Gilbert OBE of the Tony Blair Institute offered a powerful counter-narrative to the usual fears around AI. She argued that the biggest risk might be “not doing it at all.” While we worry about academic integrity, we risk missing the opportunity to use AI to solve our biggest challenges, from relieving the administrative burden in admissions to revolutionising personalised learning. Her point that technology like AI is essential to sustaining public services like the NHS has direct parallels with the financial challenges in our own sector.
6. Trust in Technology Must Be Earned
Dr. Gilbert was clear: you cannot just demand trust in AI. It must be earned through what she called “radical transparency.” For universities adopting tools like the DET for high-stakes admissions, this is a critical lesson. We must demand evidence from our tech partners that their tools are secure, equitable, and have been rigorously evaluated for bias. Publishing that evidence, as Duolingo was highlighted as a good example, should become the industry standard.
A crucial warning from Dr. Gilbert was that if left to market forces, AI will inevitably make the advantage more advantaged, worsening societal inequality. For a sector committed to widening participation, this is a profound challenge. As we adopt AI, we must actively and consciously steer it towards closing, not widening, access gaps. The goal of using technology to reach students from previously untapped regions is a noble one, but it requires a constant and active focus on equity.
7. AI Isn’t Just A Buzzword
It’s a transformative force in assessment, personalisation and inclusion. I was struck by Duolingo’s mission-led approach, especially its ability to deliver high-quality, low-cost English testing to learners across the globe, including refugee and displaced students. Innovations like adaptive testing, AI-driven speaking practice, and real-time fraud detection redefine what “secure” and “authentic” assessment looks like. The session challenged my assumptions about test integrity and proved that democratisation doesn’t mean compromise. The balance between rigour and compassion resonated strongly—proof that access and excellence can coexist. At Northumbria, we’re increasingly mindful of our role in enabling fairer pathways into UK higher education. The Duolingo English Test is no longer a disruptor—it’s fast becoming a vital enabler that we should all be paying attention to.
8. Is it a Brave New World?
Rory Stewart’s session offered a powerful analysis of our turbulent times, contrasting the post-1989 era of liberal democracy and globalisation with our current “shadow world” of populism, protectionism, and a retreat from a rules-based international order. Stewart highlighted key shifts, including China’s rise without democratisation, the 2008 financial crisis, and the chaotic impact of social media and failed interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Stewart warned that global trends, like Trump’s attacks on US universities, could easily manifest in the UK, emphasizing that “what happens in the US can come here”. These attacks include significant funding cuts and threats to academic freedom over perceived ideological biases. This serves as a stark reminder for UK higher education to remain vigilant against similar political pressures.
9. A Little Can Go A Long Way
The session on the carbon cost of testing made me sit up. John Crick from the International Education Sustainability Group (IESG) revealed that switching from test centre-based exams to online alternatives can cut carbon emissions by up to 98%. The equivalent of planting a Sherwood Forest of trees every year. The analysis showed that the biggest environmental impact comes from travel to test centres, especially in regions without local provision. What struck me was how easily we overlook this area in our sustainability strategies. IESG’s meticulous modelling gives us a much-needed baseline to challenge assumptions and examine the unintended carbon consequences of our English language policies. It’s a conversation starter—but one we in international education need to have now if we’re serious about meeting climate goals.
10. Our Soft Power is Precious, But Not Guaranteed
The conference ended with a discussion on the UK’s soft power and the launch of Duolingo’s Welcome Project, which seeks to provide a place for students displaced by the turmoil in the US with opportunities in the UK.
While our leading universities remain beacons of global influence, the day’s discussions made it clear this cannot be taken for granted. A domestic political narrative focused on clamping down on immigration, combined with financial models that are visibly creaking, risks tarnishing one of the UK’s greatest exports. We must collectively find a way to reconcile the need for control and sustainability with the projection of being an open, welcoming, and world-leading destination for education.
Rob Carthy is the Director of International Development at Northumbria University, where he leads the university’s international student recruitment strategies. He is focused on developing a sustainable and diverse international community in Newcastle upon Tyne. Find him on LinkedIn.
A pedestrian walks through Sproul Plaza at the University of California at Berkeley. Picture: Justin Sullivan
I have greatly benefited from an academic and leadership career spanning three continents over 40 years, and always viewed the US as a different stage, but one with much to learn from.
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BALTIMORE — Students who experience “learned helplessness” — the belief that even with effort, they will not progress — can resist help, be quick to surrender academically and exhibit passive behaviors, said speakers at the Council for Exceptional Children’s annual convention on Thursday.
To educators and families, these students — whether with or without disabilities — may seem lazy, defiant and resigned to failure, speakers including special education teachers from Alabama told a conference session.
However, students’ lack of self-confidence and sense of powerlessness can actually stem from early childhood traumas and from past negative school experiences. But all is not lost, the speakers said: Learned helplessness can be unlearned through academic interventions and by celebrating successes — even small accomplishments.
“When we get these babies and they come to us at 3, 4, preschool age, we have got to start pumping them up to think that they can conquer the world,” said Michelle Griffin, a learning specialist at Tarrant City Schools in Tarrant, Alabama.
Here are the speakers’ recommendations for increasing students’ resilience and control over their learning:
Encourage a growth mindset
For students with learned helplessness, success can feel out of reach, leading them to believe that no matter how hard they try, they’ll miss the mark, said Danielle Edison, a special education teacher in Tuscaloosa City Schools in Alabama.
Over time, this pattern can contribute to a significant learning gap and lower academic achievement. “By recognizing these signs early and implementing strategies to counteract them, we can help students regain confidence in their ability to take ownership of their learning,” Edison said.
Teaching students to have a growth mindset — a belief that one’s abilities can improve through strategies and dedication — can help combat learned helplessness, the speakers said.
To help students recognize their potential to improve, educators can encourage them to ask for help when needed. Teachers should also avoid doing the work for the students, setting unrealistic goals, or preventing them from making mistakes, the speakers said.
“We can encourage a growth mindset by helping students use setbacks as learning opportunities rather than insurmountable barriers,” said Lena Cantrell, a 10-year Alabama educator who is pursuing an education specialist degree in special education at the University of Alabama. “Students become more willing to persevere when they see that failure is a step, not a stop.”
Have a supportive learning environment
Equity-focused interventions are another important tool. According to Cantrell, these can help students feel valued and capable of success.
“Cultivating a supportive environment plays a pivotal role,” Cantrell added. “When students know they are in a safe, understanding and encouraging space, they’re more likely to engage actively and take risks in their work.”
Giving students autonomy in their learning and encouraging them to advocate for themselves can strengthen their problem-solving skills and confidence, Cantrell said.
This doesn’t mean teachers are on the sidelines, said Amy Yarbrough, a special education teacher in Alabama’s Jefferson County Schools. Teachers can support students’ sense of control in their learning through physical and verbal prompts or by modeling a desired task.
For example, by showing students how to close a plastic sandwich bag and then encouraging the student to do it on their own, a student can become more independent in that activity, Yarbrough said.
Celebrate wins
To help students overcome negative thoughts about their potential, teachers need to show positivity and encourage their students to be realistically optimistic. That means celebrating even the small steps toward success.
Having positive affirmations can increase students’ motivation and resilience, the speakers said.
“Help them experience success over and over again so that they’ll want to experience it more,” Griffin said.
We recently wrapped up our AI Learning Design Assistant (ALDA) project. It was a marathon. Multiple universities and sponsors participated in a seven-month intensive workshop series to learn how AI can assist in learning design. The ALDA software, which we tested together as my team and I built it, was an experimental apparatus designed to help us learn various lessons about AI in education.
And learn we did. As I speak with project participants about how they want to see the work continue under ALDA’s new owner (and my new employer), 1EdTech, I’ll use this post to reflect on some lessons learned so far. I’ll finish by reflecting on possible futures for ALDA.
(If you want a deeper dive from a month before the last session, listen to Jeff Young’s podcast interview with me on EdSurge. I love talking with Jeff. Shame on me for not letting you know about this conversation sooner.)
AI is a solution that needs our problems
The most fundamental question I wanted to explore with the ALDA workshop participants was, “What would you use AI for?” The question was somewhat complicated by AI’s state when I started development work about nine months ago. Back then, ChatGPT and its competitors struggled to follow the complex directions required for serious learning design work. While I knew this shortcoming would resolve itself through AI progress—likely by the time the workshop series was completed—I had to invest some of the ALDA software development effort into scaffolding the AI to boost its instruction-following capabilities at the time. I needed something vaguely like today’s AI capabilities back then to explore the questions we were trying to answer. Such as what we could be using AI for a year from then.
Once ALDA could provide that performance boost, we came to the hard part. The human part. When we got down to the nitty-gritty of the question—What would you use this for?—many participants had to wrestle with it for a while. Even the learning designers working at big, centralized, organized shops struggled to break down their processes into smaller steps with documents the AI could help them produce. Their human-centric rules relied heavily on the humans to interpret the organizational rules as they worked organically through large chunks of design work. Faculty designing their own courses had a similar struggle. How is their work segmented? What are the pieces? Which pieces would they have an assistant work on if they had an assistant?
The answers weren’t obvious. Participants had to discover them by experimenting throughout the workshop series. ALDA was designed to make that discovery process easier.
A prompt engineering technique for educators: Chain of Inquiry
Along with the starting question, ALDA had a starting hypothesis: AI can function as a junior learning designer.
How does a junior learning designer function? It turns out that their primary tool is a basic approach that makes sense in an educator’s context and translates nicely into prompt engineering for AI.
Learning designers ask their teaching experts questions. They start with general ones. Who are your students? What is your course about? What are the learning goals? What’s your teaching style?
These questions get progressively more specific. What are the learning objectives for this lesson? How do you know when students have achieved those objectives? What are some common misconceptions they have?
Eventually, the learning designer has built a clear enough mental model that they can draft a useful design document of some form or other.
Notice the similarities and differences between this approach and scaffolding a student’s learning. Like scaffolding, Chain of Inquiry moves from the foundational to the complex. It’s not about helping the person being scaffolded with their learning, but it is intended to help them with their thinking. Specifically, the interview progression helps the educator being interviewed think more clearly about hard design problems by bringing relevant context into focus. This process of prompting the interviewee to recall salient facts relevant to thinking through challenging, detailed problems is very much like the AI prompt engineering strategy called Chain of Thought.
In the interview between the learning designer and the subject-matter expert, the chain of thought they spin together is helpful to both parties for different reasons. It helps the learning designer learn while helping the subject-matter expert recall relevant details that help with thinking. The same is true in ALDA. The AI is learning from the interview, while the same process helps both parties focus on helpful context. I call this AI interview prompt style Chain of Inquiry. I hadn’t seen it used when I first thought of ALDA and haven’t seen it used much since then, either.
In any case, it worked. Participants seem to grasp it immediately. Meanwhile, a well-crafted Chain of Inquiry prompt in ALDA produced much better documents after it elicited good information through interviews with its human partners.
Improving mental models helps
AI is often presented, sold, and designed to be used as a magic talking machine. It’s hard to imagine what you would and wouldn’t use a tool for if you don’t know what it does. We went at this problem through a combination of teaching, user interface design, and guided experimentation.
On the teaching side, I emphasized that a generative AI model is a sophisticated pattern-matching and completion machine. If you say “Knock knock” to it, it will answer “Who’s there?” because it knows what usually comes after “Knock knock.” I spent some time building up this basic idea, showing the AI matching and completing more and more sophisticated patterns. Some participants initially reacted to this lesson as “not useful” or “irrelevant.” But it paid off over time as participants experienced that understanding helped them think more clearly about what to expect from the AI, with some additional help from ALDA’s design.
ALDA’s basic structure is simple:
Prompt Templates are re-usable documents that define the Chain of Inquiry interview process (although they are generic enough to support traditional Chain of Thought as well).
Chats are where those interviews take place. This part of ALDA is similar to a typical ChatGPT-like experience, except that the AI asks questions first and provides answers later based on the instructions it receives from the Prompt Template.
Lesson Drafts are where users can save the last step of a chat, which hopefully will be the draft of some learning design artifact they want to use. These drafts can be downloaded as Word or PDF documents and worked on further by the human.
A lot of the magic of ALDA is in the prompt template page design. It breaks down the prompts into three user-editable parts:
General Instructions provide the identity of the chatbot that guides its behavior, e.g., “I am ALDA, your AI Learning Design Assistant. My role is to work with you as a thoughtful, curious junior instructional designer with extensive training in effective learning practices. Together, we will create a comprehensive first draft of curricular materials for an online lesson. I’ll assist you in refining ideas and adapting to your unique context and style.
“Important: I will maintain an internal draft throughout our collaboration. I will not display the complete draft at the end of each step unless you request it. However, I will remind you periodically that you can ask to see the full draft if you wish.
“Important Instruction: If at any point additional steps or detailed outlines are needed, I will suggest them and seek your input before proceeding. I will not deviate from the outlined steps without your approval.
“
Output template provides an outline of the document that the AI is instructed to produce at the end of the interview.
Steps provide the step-by-step process for the Chain of Inquiry.
The UI reinforces the idea of pattern matching and completion. The Output Template gives the AI the structure of the document it is trying to complete by the end of the chat. The General Instructions and Steps work together to define the interview pattern the system should imitate as it tries to complete the document.
Armed with the lesson and scaffolded by the template, participants got better over time at understanding how to think about asking the AI to do what they wanted it to do.
Using AI to improve AI
One of the biggest breakthroughs came with the release of a feature near the very end of the workshop series. It’s the “Improve” button at the bottom of the Template page.
When the user clicks on that button, it sends whatever is in the template to ChatGPT. It also sends any notes the user enters, along with some behind-the-scenes information about how ALDA templates are structured.
Template creators can start with a simple sentence or two in the General Instructions. Think of it as a starting prompt, e.g., “A learning design interview template for designing and drafting a project-based learning exercise.” The user can then tell “Improve” to create a full template based on that prompt. Because ALDA tells ChatGPT what a complete template looks like, the AI returns a full draft of all the fields ALDA needs to create a template. The user can then test that template and go back to the Improve window to ask for the AI to improve the template’s behavior or extend its functionality.
Building this cycle into the process created a massive jump in usage and creativity among the participants who used it. I started seeing more and more varied templates pop up quickly. User satisfaction also improved significantly.
So…what is it good for?
The usage patterns turned out to be very interesting. Keep in mind that this is a highly unscientific review; while I would have liked to conduct a study or even a well-designed survey, the realities of building this on the fly as a solo operator managing outsourced developers limited me to anecdata for this round.
The observations from the learning designers from large, well-orchestrated teams seem to line up with my theory that the big task will be to break down our design processes into chunks that are friendly to AI support. I don’t see a short-term scenario in which we can outsource all learning design—or replace it—with AI. (By the way, “air gapping” the AI, by which I mean conducting an experiment in which nothing the AI produced would reach students without human review, substantially reduced anxieties about AI and improved educators’ willingness to experiment and explore the boundaries.)
For the individual instructors, particularly in institutions with few or no learning designers, I was pleasantly surprised to discover how useful ALDA proved to be in the middle of the term and afterward. We tend to think about learning design as a pre-flight activity. The reality is that educators are constantly adjusting their courses on the fly and spending time at the end to tweak aspects that didn’t work the way they liked. I also noticed that educators seemed interested in using AI to make it safer for them to try newer, more challenging pedagogical experiments like project-based learning or AI-enabled teaching exercises if they had ALDA as a thought partner that could both accelerate the planning and bring in some additional expertise. I don’t know how much of this can be attributed to the pure speed of the AI-enabled template improvement loop and how much the holistic experience helped them feel they understood and had control over ALDA in a way that other tools may not offer them.
Possible futures for ALDA under 1EdTech
As for what comes next, nothing has been decided yet. I haven’t been blogging much lately because I’ve been intensely focused on helping the 1EdTech team think more holistically about the many things the organization does and many more that we could do. ALDA is a piece of that puzzle. We’re still putting the pieces in place to determine where ALDA fits in.
I’ll make a general remark about 1EdTech before exploring specific possible futures for ALDA. Historically, 1EdTech has solved problems that many of you don’t (and shouldn’t) know you could have. When your students magically appear in your LMS and you don’t have to think about how your roster got there, that was because of us. When you switch LMSs, and your students still magically appear, that’s 1EdTech. When you add one of the million billion learning applications to your LMS, that was us too. Most of those applications probably wouldn’t exist if we hadn’t made it easy for them to integrate with any LMS. In fact, the EdTech ecosystem as we know it wouldn’t exist. However much you may justifiably complain about the challenges of EdTech apps that don’t work well with each other, without 1EdTech, they mostly wouldn’t work with each other at all. A lot of EdTech apps simply wouldn’t exist for that reason.
Still. That’s not nearly enough. Getting tech out of your way is good. But it’s not good enough. We need to identify real, direct educational problems and help to make them easier and more affordable to solve. We must make it possible for educators to keep up with changing technology in a changing world. ALDA could play several roles in that work.
First, it could continue to function as a literacy teaching tool for educators. The ALDA workshops covered important aspects of understanding AI that I’ve not seen other efforts cover. We can’t know how we want AI to work in education without educators who understand and are experimenting with AI. I will be exploring with ALDA participants, 1EdTech members, and others whether there is the interest and funding we need to continue this aspect of the work. We could wrap some more structured analysis around future workshops to find out what the educators are learning and what we can learn from them.
Speaking of which, ALDA can continue to function as an experimental apparatus. Learning design is a process that is largely dark to us. It happens in interviews and word processor documents on individual hard drives. If we don’t know where people need the help—and if they don’t know either—then we’re stuck. Product developers and innovators can’t design AI-enabled products to solve problems they don’t understand.
Finally, we can learn the aspects of learning design—and teaching—that need to be taught to AI because the knowledge it needs isn’t written down in a form that’s accessible to it. As educators, we learn a lot of structure in the course of teaching that often isn’t written down and certainly isn’t formalized in most EdTech product data structures. How and when to probe for a misconception. What to do if we find one. How to give a hint or feedback if we want to get the student on track without giving away the answer. Whether you want your AI to be helping the educator or working directly with the student—which is not really an either/or question—we need AI to better understand how we teach and learn if we want it to get better at helping us with those tasks. Some of the learning design structures we need are related to deep aspects of how human brains work. Other structures evolve much more quickly, such as moving to skills-based learning. Many of these structures should be wired deep into our EdTech so you don’t have to think or worry about them. EdTech products should support them automatically. Something like ALDA could be an ongoing laboratory in which we test how educators design learning interventions, how those processes co-evolve with AI over time, and where feeding the AI evidence-based learning design structure could make it more helpful.
The first incarnation ALDA was meant to be an experiment in the entrepreneurial sense. I wanted to find out what people would find useful. It’s ready to become something else. And it’s now at a home where it can evolve. The most important question about ALDA hasn’t changed all that much:
I drew much inspiration from this morning’s listen to Derrick Bruff’s interview with Jane Southworth about AI across the curriculum. Derrick Bruff’s podcast, Intentional Teaching, gives us bountiful opportunities to learn from the experiences of educators who are transforming educational experiences for students across a wide variety of disciplines and contexts. While the episode did focus on what is obvious from the title, AI Across the Curriculum, I drew a lot of inspiration well beyond just that topic of AI. There are many layers of what they talked about that go well beyond the broad topic of artificial intelligence. Other aspects of leading and teaching within a university context are shared well beyond the particular initiative they discuss.
Jane talks about the difficulty of making such a massive change across a complex institution. She made a few jokes about the difficulties, although she said it was such lightheartedness that I felt such kindness toward her in what must have been such challenging endeavors. Consider what it takes to make something like this happen, and all the committee work that it takes, all the different people that are need to be talked to, all the perspectives to consider. The intricacies, not just to make something work, but to make the fruit of that work visible to students such that they enroll in the program and pursue the educational aims beyond the requirements for their majors. Jane shares examples of them starting an AI certificate program within their curriculum. The mammoth effort that it was to make that technically possible from an operations standpoint, such that someone could take the right classes and that they would go through all the curriculum committees and get that to work within their policies and procedures is one thing. But another layer I found quite fascinating was how do you then make that visible to students such that they’re even aware that this certificate exists and that they find it of interest and worthwhile to pursue further learning.
As Sam Cooke sang years ago, I also “don’t know much about geography.” There’s no doubt in my mind that I have subscribed to some of the myths that Jane described about her discipline of geography. Jane described how in the United Kingdom, when she was in college, that it was the third or fourth most popular degree. Geography graduates found themselves receiving among the highest earnings as they left school, as well as being surprised when they discovered just how much more the field is than studying rocks, like they had initially believed.
