The Ben Mulroney Show - Say goodbye to teachers, say hello to A.I.?

Episode Date: May 23, 2025

Guests and Topics: -Say goodbye to teachers, say hello to A.I.? Guest: Francis Syms, Associate Dean in the Faculty of Applied Sciences & Technology at Humber Polytechnic Guest: Dave Smiderle, who is a trained psychologist and administrator at Humber If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! https://globalnews.ca/national/program/the-ben-mulroney-show Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So as we know, in almost every discussion that we have, AI marches on its relevance and its integration into our lives is becoming deeper and more significant by the day. So when the CEO of a very big education company, Duolingo, comes out, Duolingo, by the way, is an app that allows you to learn a foreign language and uses all sorts of lessons and and devices by which to get those lessons to latch onto your brain and you learn you're supposed to learn English or French or Spanish or whatever you want far faster than in other scenarios. So when the CEO comes out and says they are going all in on AI to the point that they are they are getting rid of so much of the human education side of their company. And they are, I think they're opening up a hundred new programs, over a hundred new programs,

and all of them are going to be AI first. People are wondering, is this a bellwether? Is this a sign of things to come in the education sector writ large? So here to talk about this, is this a fear? Is it a fantasy? It's Francis Sims, the Associate Dean of the Faculty of Applied Sciences and Technology at Humber, as well as Dave, oh, Dave, I hope I'm gonna get your last name right, Smitterly. That's right. There we go, trained psychologist, as well as an administrator at Humber. So to both of you, I say thanks so much for joining us on this Friday.

I'm happy to be here. So Francis, why don't you tell me your first thoughts when when I hear this when I hear a CEO of a big company speaking, I say, will others follow suit? Yeah, so I think I think first of all, we need to realize what he's saying is not a neutral statement, right? He's he's in the business of selling tools that are made better by AI. He's focused on transactional learning. So when he talks about that, how AI should replace teachers, I think he went even as far as saying that really all schools need to be our child care centers or something

to that effect. What he's really saying is that he thinks his model of education is better than any other model of education. So everybody should drive towards that. Right. But what I like to think about is that education, like, you know, AI is great from the transactional perspective, but education needs to be transformational. It needs to focus on many other things than just handing a bill of materials over the students, over to the students to consume. And Dave, I think that's a really good place to start because in my mind, there are different types of educational experiences. And as Francis just pointed out,

yes, there's a transactional aspect to, you know, okay, I want to learn a new language. I'm going to know I learned that new language if by the end of it, I know that language. But when it comes to education of young kids, you know, grades, you know, one through 12, like all of that, it's it's there's so much more that goes into educating them. There's nuance. There's red flags that you've got to be ready for. There's team building. There's there's there's mental health awareness. There's a whole bunch that I don't know that AI is at all equipped to deal with. Yeah, no, Ben, I agree with you 100%. And even just to push that a little bit further, there's a lot of research that actually shows

that an emotional connection with a teacher significantly improves both what we would call the hard and soft outcomes. So if we're looking at better grades, better test scores, having an emotional connection or relationship with the teacher makes a difference. But what you're talking about is kind of also more the softer skills in terms of like being able to work with others, having resilience, mental health, being able to deal with stress, having a connection with a teacher, with a human being, makes a huge difference, whether you're in a K to grade 12, or even in post-secondary. But listen, when I was in school, my teachers were very, they employed the Socratic method, right? We have all the information. So you little children are empty vessels and you're

going to sit there, we're going to fill you with that information. Don't ask too, too many questions. We'll have a lot of questions for you come test time. That's really the model that I went to school with. I didn't really thrive in that situation, but it was what it was. Now, they aren't the purveyors of all the information anymore. AI does, in a lot of ways, have teachers beat on that front.

So is it about reinventing, Francis, what the teacher is? Yeah, and we talk a lot in these days about the skill traits and how there's a shortage in the skill traits. What I think is we need to move education more towards that model. And what I'm talking about is when you go in to the skill traits, you already have the tools.

You have the power saw, you have the screwdriver, you have the welding machine. And what the teachers are, are more like coaches. They're showing you how to use those tools and AI is one of those tools and showing you how to put it all together to actually solve a complex problem. And if you think about it that way, then the teachers are no longer just the knowledge keepers because you know, they can do it via Google, YouTube or chat GPT. But what it should do is allow the teachers are no longer just the knowledge keepers because they can do it via Google, YouTube, or chat GPT. But what it should do is allow the teachers more time to connect and spend with the students and focus on things like critical thinking

and systems thinking. Yeah, but there are so many things that AI can help a teacher do super charge. And if a teacher doesn't have to worry about building lesson plans or writing out quizzes, even grading those quizzes, if the AI is to be trusted, that could give them so much more time to either double down on other aspects of what makes a teacher special or have a little more spare time that they probably need. Yeah. And so Dave, we keep looking at this from the perspective of sort of the emotional requirements and the emotional needs of a student. But AI as a as a tool for a teacher could make their jobs even more enjoyable and therefore more fulfilling and then they would have a better mental health outcome.

In fact, we're seeing this happening in our own institution here at Humber Polytechnic, where teachers are beginning to realize the advantages of using AI. Even with that though, AI is based on a whole bunch of algorithms, right? That depending upon how you program them, might have biases in them. So one of the key things that's important for teachers is to become masters of using this particular tool, just like any other tool that they've had. But you're right, it can have a huge positive impact on what they should be focusing on with the students. So Francis, if you could divine for me,

if you could read the tea leaves, where do you think this is gonna go? Like, where do you think, there's a best case scenario, there's a worst case scenario, but realistically with your domain expertise, how do you see AI playing out? And like I said, let's use a public school system as an example. Well, I think that students are using AI on a daily basis, right? Chat, GPT, Gemini, whatever, whatever tool you have. And I think we're at a moment in time where teachers still don't really

have a sense of how to deal with it. In the beginning, two years ago, you know, people were submitting assignments that were chat GPT written and nobody could tell the difference. And what that told us, or solving multiple choice quizzes, you know, completely with AI. And what that told us at that time was that you cannot do assessments that way, that you need to focus on sort of more human contact, more complicated problems. And that's a huge challenge for teachers, right, to completely evolve. I mean, it's a positive thing because I think days of this PowerPoint, just putting a bunch of slides up and reading line by line, nobody enjoys that. Nobody comes to class for that. So I think that's a great thing that AI is breaking that piece. I mean, it's disruptive for sure.

But I hope that in a year or two, we breaking that piece. I mean, it's disruptive for sure. But I hope that in a year or two, we're going to see it as a tool that teachers say, Okay, I'm going to tell you something about, I don't know, the war of 1812. And I want you to go research it. Yeah, tell me what chat GPT says. And then let's have a conversation. And it could only take two minutes in the classroom, they could ask that question. And then they could have a healthy, dynamic conversation, instead of the

teacher spending, you know, 15 minutes with PowerPoint slides telling every single thing. So I think we're going to get to this world where it's integrated concept, it's just going to take a little while and it's well, but it is painful and it's gonna take a while and Dave is an administrator in a school, you know how slow things can go and how entrenched, entrenched powers can really hold on to what they have for fear of losing it,

where if they trusted in the system, the future could be better. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's a lot of kind of entrenchment in terms of doing things the way that I've been able to do them for like a millions of years, right? So that the big thing that we try to do as much as possible is provide workshops, provide training, show examples of how this could work. We get folks to work with each other. You've got the early adopters that say, hey, this is maybe not so bad. Yeah. Before you know it, you have folks that maybe have been teaching for 30, 40 years and say, wow,

I can save all this time on the stuff that it really isn't as meaningful using AI. And then I can focus on important stuff. So Francis and Dave, I want to thank you so much. Really appreciate this conversation. I know it's not the last time we'll talk on this subject, but I appreciate you on this Friday. To celebrate the days of our lives, 60th anniversary, W Network and Stack TV invite Appreciate you on this Friday. lives set to her, a helicopter ride over LA, and so much more. Watch Weekdays at One and look for the weekly code word to enter. Days of our lives.

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