Technology for Student and Faculty Freedom

Sophie White: Hello everyone and welcome to EDUCAUSE Shop Talk. I can't wait for you to hear today's discussion. In this one, we talk about what faculty and students are really thinking about technology in higher ed. This is aligned with our 2026 EDUCAUSE Students and Technology Report that was just released and covers a variety of subjects related to students' use of technology. In this particular discussion, Jenay and I talk with Ayham Boucher, Freddy Ramirez, and Kristen Gay to represent the researcher, faculty, and student perspectives on technology and the student experience. A few things that we went over were a really interesting finding that generally students didn't think that they would need AI competencies for future workforce preparation. We talked about why that may or may not be accurate. Ethical concerns about AI in coursework and how different faculty members are addressing those as well as student concerns and the need for consistency and simplicity in learning technologies to consider students' work-life balance and also think about how to enhance the student experience while also keeping faculty autonomy of the way that faculty teach their courses balanced with the student experience piece.

So it was a really fascinating discussion. I hope you'll check it out and read the report.

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Hello everyone and welcome to EDUCAUSE Shop Talk. I'm Sophie White. I'm a content marketing and program manager here at EDUCAUSE, and I'm one of the hosts for today's discussion.

Jenay Robert: Hi everybody. My name is Jenay Robert. I am a senior researcher at EDUCAUSE and I will be your other host.

Sophie White: Great. We're really excited today to be talking about a new EDUCAUSE research report, the 2026 Students and Technology Report, as well as just in general, the relationship that students, faculty, staff, our communities are having with technology on campus in 2026. So I'll introduce our guests in just a bit and then we'll jump into it. First, we have Kristen Gay. Kristen is a researcher and experienced educator dedicated to advancing learning through data-driven insights with an emphasis on student needs and engagement. As a researcher at EDUCAUSE, she leverages her expertise to explore emerging trends in technology and higher education. Thanks for being here, Kristen.

Kristen Gay: Thanks for having me.

Sophie White: Great. Next up we have Freddy Ramirez. Freddy is a first generation transfer student at California State University Northridge and a student researcher in a cognitive psychology lab studying visual perception, learning, and technology. His research interests focus on imposter syndrome among marginalized and minoritized communities, particularly in educational settings. He also works as a tutor at Los Angeles Pierce College, where he supports students in their academic growth. Awesome work. Thank you for being with us, Freddy.

Freddy Ramirez: Thank you so much.

Sophie White: Great. And last we have Ayham Boucher. Ayham is the Executive Director of AI Strategy and Enablement at Cornell University, where he leads the institution's AI strategy and innovation initiatives in support of education, research, and administration. He also serves as an AI advisor to Fortune 100 companies and supports AI-driven startups as an advisor at Armory Square Ventures. In addition, he co-chairs an AI innovation accelerator comprising more than 80 US and global institutions. Thanks for being with us, Ayham.

Ayham Boucher: Thanks for having me.

Sophie White: Great. I'm really excited to talk about your experience too. You really span from private industry to our higher ed space. You also mentioned you're a faculty member, so I think we have a lot of different angles we could take in our questions. But I'm so excited to be here today. And I would love to just kick it off. Kristen, you were one of the authors of the research report that we mentioned earlier, the 2026 EDUCAUSE Students and Technology Report. Do you mind just sharing maybe a few key takeaways that you think are important for our community to think about related to that report?

Kristen Gay: Yeah, I would love to. Thanks, Sophie. I think first of all, I'll just mention that this survey is an annual report that we produced here at EDUCAUSE, and it is a pretty large survey. So this year we had about, I think, 8,600 students who completed the survey from 41 different institution types. So it was really kind of cool to see that we had strong representation from different institution types and sectors. And a few of the takeaways this year that were really interesting to me, there were so many, so it's hard to just focus on a few. But one I'll say since generative AI already came up is that students really did not seem to find it an important competency for their future career. And only 14 percent said that they plan to use it to a great extent in their future career. And I found that really interesting because we have all of these rich conversations right now about how AI is reshaping higher education, how it's reshaping the workforce just in general.

And students seem to have a different perspective on it, on its importance and on how they might use it in the future. So that was one finding I'd love to dig into and I'd love to hear from Ayham and Freddy about that as well. Another finding that was really cool to me is that students in terms of technology use really value simplicity. I think the message that was coming across loud and clear was less is more. We don't want to have to relearn how to use the LMS for every single course. We want clear instructions and organization. We want to focus on our learning and not how to use the tools for the course to the extent that you're just having differences just for differences sake. And so that was really interesting as well. And lastly, I'll add, it was really cool this year that we asked about factors that drive course preferences.

And so when students are choosing to take online courses or blended courses or onsite courses, what is really a motivating factor there? And three that really rose to the surface were work-life balance. So students really thinking, school is a priority for me, but it's not the priority. I'm a caregiver or I have a job or I have a family and I have friends I want to spend time with. And they have all of these other priorities. And I think that was a really cool takeaway from me that they have a really, I think, healthy view of the importance of their college career. And some other factors that came into that were flexibility and convenience, and so continued importance of flexible options for them, and then as well, learning preferences. So what works best for their learning. And I think across the board, across formats, something that came across there was that instructor presence is really important.

They feel more accountable and more motivated when the instructor knows their name and knows who they are. And I thought that was also a really helpful takeaway and one that can be applicable across contexts. So there are so many more I would love to talk about and hopefully will a few of those, but those are three I want to highlight.

Sophie White: That is really helpful. Thank you for that overview, Kristen. And yeah, there's so much we can dive into here. I guess I'd love to take, when I read through the report, I think the most surprising thing to me was that fact you mentioned about kind of a low percentage of students expecting AI competencies to be required in their future work. We've had so many conversations on this podcast about the responsibility of higher ed to be training students in these AI tools employers are expecting. So I'm curious, Freddy, what do you think about that? Do you think that once you finish your degree, you'll need to use AI in some way, or what do those findings bring up for you?

Freddy Ramirez: Yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting because my university, I believe almost all, if not all CSUs, I believe there's like twenty-three, they all switch to an AI integrated campus. So I actually, my professors in their course material have stuff about AI. And it's so funny. I literally had an assignment due yesterday that we were prompted to use ChatGPT for one of the assignments, and that's something new to me just because this just happened in my CSU where we started integrating AI and there's mixed stuff about other students' opinions about if we need it or we need to use it or have this AI literacy in the future about it. I mean, when it comes to my career, I mean, I plan on going to grad school and eventually being a licensed psychologist. So I'm not really sure if I could see an application of AI there with me, but I mean, I definitely do use AI and it's definitely something that is new to me to use it with my classes just because, like I said, we just switched to this AI integrated campus.

So it's all in the course material now. And going from community college to a university like Cal State Northridge at my community college, we had nothing like that. I didn't use AI in community college, so it's definitely a shift between going from an institution that doesn't use AI and to a university that does.

Jenay Robert: Yeah. It's interesting too, because from our other research, we see that when higher ed leaders talk about their motivations for engaging in strategic planning around AI or having AI initiatives, one of the top reasons pretty consistently over the last few years has been workforce prep for students. So it's something that's top of mind for higher ed education or higher ed leaders, but not so much so for students. I think that dichotomy is really interesting. So since you're on the other side of that coin, Ayham, I'm wondering what your perception is of that statistic.

Ayham Boucher: Yeah, I think that was the most surprising element in this report for me. And while I do think that a lot of different fields will use AI at different levels, I think it's safe to say that AI is changing the workplace in every way. So I think the disconnect might be that the students with less job experience have maybe less an idea about the expectation from the workplace. It's interesting though, I was just in a chat with Scott Galloway and Greg from Section AI about ... And they brought up this idea that obviously software development is a canary in the coal mine.

AI models are best at writing code, so you kind of have a peak to the future, but they did mention this as a closing remark that even though the software development is being, almost all code is being written by AI, software development jobs are on the rise. And two weeks ago, I actually read the same report and I was curious. So I vibe coded a thing to go and get five-hundred different job postings for only software development, not data analyst or anything else, just software engineers. And I asked the models to say, "Okay, which of these jobs don't require coding?" And it was about 34 percent of the job, five-hundred job postings today, they don't mention coding as a required skill. So that is a big change. Even though the software jobs are on the rise, about third of them don't require you to code. And in most cases in CIS institution, we do teach a lot of architecture and all of that, but we do teach a lot of coding as well.

So that's where the institutions are having to react because we're really in touch with the job market. So I think if that prediction just like Scout Galloway, but my prediction on this one that the students got it wrong, I think they're going to be using AI a lot. Now it varies. So for example, at that same meeting, a few representatives from Chanel were sitting there and Scott told them, because he's really an expert on branding and messaging, he told them, "Don't use AI for your writing, period, you're going to damage your brand." And I think the reason is because we are all AI detectors, even though AI detectors don't work, we really ... The moment I start to read the post and I get a sense that this AI, I just zone out and I stop reading it. So I think, for example, and we could talk about why models and writing are not improving as well as coding and agentic work, but that means for writers, I think they're going to have less pressure to use it.

They probably will use it for brainstorming, but not for copy editing for copywriting. So I think it will vary depending on where you are, but I would say the majority, there is at least a big change and sometimes it's significant.

Kristen Gay: Yeah. And I would add to that, I think there are some other factors that surfaced in the report that might help explain that response that we saw, which is that for the past two years, students have felt less prepared in technological competencies, so AI and non-AI emerging technologies than they have felt in other professional competencies. And so it could also be, to some extent, lack of exposure, restricted use. Many students said that their instructors are restricting use of these tools. And so it could be a lack of exposure. It could be concerns about being accused of mishandling AI. And I think it could also be potentially not being exposed to how AI is surfacing in a range of careers. And so I cited a study in the report that said that many job postings that list AI skills right now are not actually for IT roles or for tech roles.

And so I think there's room there for institutions to really think about what I'm kind of calling in my head AI in the disciplines. So what does this look like in different fields? What skills are kind of emerging and how can students be prepared to start working towards developing those skills?

Jenay Robert: Yeah. I think in a lot of cases, to your point, Kristen, I think we're missing an opportunity sometimes to help students see you actually get to craft this future thing. So I have conversations with students in my life all the time where they'll say, "Well, I don't really know how AI could be integrated in the career I'm considering." And I think the key there is students should feel empowered by a broader digital literacy education to understand what tools they have at their disposal and know that this is actually the generation of students who are going to implement these big transformations and these career pathways because they're coming in, they're fresh to the career, and if they can understand the technology, they can see what those new connections and new ways of doing things could be. So that's where I get really excited in thinking about those broader digital literacy movements or programming, I guess.

Ayham Boucher: Yeah. And I think we're also not giving students or any other work or justice with naming these things. We started naming early on prompt engineering, and now we call it vibe coding, but it's not just vibe coding, it's vibe founding, it's vibe researching, it's vibe data analysis, it's vibe. So my colleague Ethan Mollick from the Wharton School, he just did a vibe founding five days program where all the entrepreneurs are going to use AI tools to produce this idea of a startup and get it off the ground. And the conclusion is that they did as well and better, for sure better, than what he used to teach in a whole semester. And just the acceleration of how you could get your business off the ground and using these AI tools is obviously not shocked to us. We're using AI tools every day and the tools are getting better.

So it's really, we're misnaming these things and it's sending the wrong message, vibe coding. It's not about just coding.

Kristen Gay: I think too, a lot of the concerns that for some students who said, "I know I'm going to have to use AI or I'm going to fall behind if I don't do it, but I really don't want to." There's this reluctance. I think a lot of the concerns that they have are concerns that many of us as professionals in higher ed or adjacent to higher ed share. And so I think there's room to really bring students into those conversations about ethical dimensions to these tools, the opportunities and risks that they have because clearly they are also well versed in them themselves. And Freddy, I wonder if there are any thoughts that come up for you there, any conversations being had on campus that involves students like that?

Freddy Ramirez: Yeah, no, definitely. Yeah. Immediately when you said that, I thought about my assignment that was due yesterday about using ChatGPT. Actually, one of the students voiced their concern about the ethical problem with AI, and so they didn't want to do the assignment because we had to use AI. The professor didn't post an alternative assignment, so this student had to go out of their way to email the professor and then ask for an alternative assignment. And so they ended up getting the alternative assignment, but I think that's also, it highlights the ethical concern that students might have. Something that I also have a moral dilemma using AI too, because I know about the ethical problems that it comes with. So in tutoring, I haven't heard someone yet say anything about how they're going to need to use AI in the future. That's something that I haven't heard a student like voice, but I have had students that have used AI before in their assignments and stuff.

So I think it's not something that I think we could really escape. It's going to be around us. And I think that's why AI literacy is important and to know what good AI is versus bad AI or how to use it, how to prompt certain key terms or concepts into AI, how to phrase stuff with prose, like high prose, low prose, stuff like that. So I think that's also important, but I think definitely that experience that a student had was the most ... That's the most recent one that I've heard about this ethical concern of using AI in a class. So yeah.

Ayham Boucher: I do have a question for Kristen and you, Freddy, about this ethical concern. And Kristen, you read the report, Freddy, you live with all the students. How much of the concern is this emotional conflict with AI? AI is coming after your job, AI is damaging our careers, and how much of it is other things? For example, AI is bad because of X. It's not about me and my future security, in your opinion.

Freddy Ramirez: So it's interesting because I mean, I think my dilemma is not so much about taking ... It's not going to take my job in the future. I haven't really thought about it in that way. But for my personal, for the way I see my future, I know other people, my peers have talked about it in that way with job security and they're worried that then the future AI might take over their jobs and stuff. But I think where my feelings are at is it's the environmental problems that comes with. I also think the AI can sometimes be biased and it can discriminate sometimes because it's trained on unrepresented data. So it's just those things, and there's deep fakes and all those things. So there's so many different aspects that I think that I have heard from other students too, which are the same things I'm saying.

And so that's where more of the ethical concerns are at that I'm around the most. So it's not so much about AI taking my job or taking out other people's jobs, but I've heard most of it has been what I said, environmental, the discrimination, biases, and then also the deep fake ethical concerns. Yeah.

Kristen Gay: That's a great summary. And I would just add from the open-ended comments for the report specifically, the environmental concerns and bias came up, but I would say maybe more significantly, students seem concerned about AI replacing the cognitive work that they want to be doing as students, seeing it as almost a shortcut, like, I'm here because I want to learn, I'm investing in this, and if I use AI, I'm not learning, it's doing the work for me. And I think there are definitely ways to untangle that a bit and think about, okay, how can AI be used to enhance your learning and not replace the work that you're doing as a student? But I think there is a real concern there about the way that it might replace their learning and affect them cognitively as well.

Freddy Ramirez: Yeah, I think that's also something that I've heard a decent amount too, is that it's just like they're not really learning. They're just like, AI is just doing the job for them, and then it depends on context. It could be doing it for assignments or even a quiz or a test. But yeah, that's definitely a concern that I've also heard with other students tutoring about the AI, not so much about their career jobs, but their job being a student. So I think that's also important to note too.

Kristen Gay: Yeah.

Ayham Boucher: Can I ask one more follow-up question? Yeah.

Sophie White: Absolutely.

Ayham Boucher: So the other thing you mentioned, Freddy, about understanding bad use of AI and good use of AI. Now, I have seen the survey result, and we had similar one here at Cornell, and obviously students respond with high response rate for the good uses of AI. I use it for brainstorm, I use it to prepare me study and all of that. And then it drops significantly once the questions is, do you use it to write a whole assignment or do you use it to answer questions? And in both every survey, those really bad uses of AI, the response for yes drops significantly. It almost makes me think that students already know what is a bad use of AI and the good use of AI. Now, just because they're answering no, it doesn't mean they're not using it to solve the assignment, but they know to answer no because they identify this question as a bad use of AI.

And obviously you walk in a library at night at every college and you could feel OpenAI and Cloud GPUs melting right there. So what are your thought? Do we need to try hard to tell students what's a good use of AI, what's a bad use? But looking at the survey, it almost seems like they already know.

Freddy Ramirez: Yeah, that's an interesting question. I think the first thing that comes to my head is AI literacy is something I presented at a conference and we noted what is good AI and what is bad AI. And actually some faculty, some professors didn't even know. So that's why I'm like, okay, so if someone that's a professor doesn't fully know what good AI and bad AI is, then I think there is a safe assumption that some students might also, there's a good amount of students that don't know that either. But I think in terms of safe AI and bad AI with students that I've seen, there has been some ... I don't tutor English, it's not a subject I tutor, but I do, I'm around English tutors at our tutoring center on campus and I know that some students do bring in AI or just work that is just copy and pasted from AI.

And what's interesting about that is that I'm not entirely sure if they know what they're doing is considered bad or if that's ... Because there's so many different aspects of AI and how accessible it is and how to use it as a resource. And some of these students might not know how to ... They don't have access to those resources where they could learn these things. So it's a little bit hard if no one teaches you how to use AI properly. And so some of these students come in with AI work and the tutors know ... Most of the tutors are well versed in how to see what is AI work, depending on the words that are being used and the sentences and phrases that are being used. I know em dashes have been a huge thing and it's sad because I use em dashes and I've gotten flagged for AI before and there's that too.

But yeah, I think you're right to some extent. I think with how students know it's bad, but I still think there's a need for students to be taught what is good and what looks bad and how to utilize it, how it can be most effective with whatever they're doing, and especially in the educational context.

Jenay Robert: I really agree with you. And I think that there's a lot of nuance in between cheating and brainstorming. There are a million other things to consider that lie in the middle of that, especially in the context of higher education. And we see that in our research at EDUCAUSE too, when we ask people about the various risks or opportunities that they see for using AI tools in higher ed, we will almost always see some items that land on both those lists. And so some faculty would say, using generative AI to help me provide feedback to my students is a great opportunity, while others would say, "This is a great risk to perhaps damage the relationship I have with students." So I mean, I think that it can be very nuanced in there. And so really helping students have some of that broader digital literacy training, I keep coming back to this idea that our students can decide the future. They are active participants in creating the future we want to see when it comes to how AI is used, not just in higher ed, but across society.

Kristen Gay: Yeah. And I think in the report students, it was coming across clearly that they're concerned about being falsely accused of using AI inappropriately. Even when they are using it with integrity and they're concerned about, and maybe there's a little bit of a lack of trust in their educators trusting that they're using it with integrity. And so I think that's another factor here. And I think going back to, I think some of the research you've done, Jenay, that there at many institutions is not a unified AI strategy right now. And so I think that's part of it as well, that if leadership and if faculty and departments aren't agreeing on what the AI strategy is, what AI policies look like, then that leaves students, I think, confused and maybe concerned about how to use it effectively.

Ayham Boucher: Yeah, right. I think because it's really hard to simply define using AI. It's not easy to define. If I want to tell students don't use AI, I usually don't mean don't use it at all. It might mean don't use it for this specific thing, but use it for all the other things. So I think there was kind of like the students were asking for standardized guidelines and stuff like that. And I'm afraid they're not going to get that for two reasons. It's one, I think defining how you use AI is going to just become more complicated as it's integrated in all the different tools we're using. So that's alone is how do you navigate that? If you're opening Google, you're using AI. But then there is this other thing that's not one size fits all. So at Cornell, we're doing this leaning in and leaning out.

So if faculty comes to us that they need help to integrate AI in the classroom, we're going to support them. But the faculty come and say, "I don't want AI in my classroom. We're going to find ways to support them as well." This idea of AI on tap, not on top. So I think I see a future where different classes see the AI opportunity differently and the AI risk differently. So I don't think the students are going to get that standardized policy. I think it's going to be complicated and they're going to have to navigate how they're using AI in different classes. It's going to be a communication challenge.

Sophie White: It's a great point. And I'm really interested in this because I know, Freddy, you mentioned multiple faculty members maybe having different opinions on it. Ayham, I'm glad you mentioned how you work with faculty to make sure they have agency in their own course design. But I'm curious, one of the findings in their report was that technology consistently generally across courses is a recurring need that students identified. And this is going beyond AI, but thinking about learning management systems or other classroom technology. So I'm curious, how do you all think that we still leave this faculty autonomy for how they teach while making sure we're supporting the student experience and this very real need for technology consistency in courses? It's not an easy question.

Kristen Gay: After.

Ayham Boucher: I can go and give other people some time to think if we can. So I think now I'm forgetting my point, forgetting even the question. I think when it comes to using technology, I think using technology is not the main topic. I think what do we do as a result of using this technology is really more important. So for example, let's look at healthcare for a second away from education for just one second and we'll link back. If we know that AI is really better at collecting symptoms from patients and it doesn't get tired, it will always collect better symptoms and what the patient is experiencing. So if we want to free time the physicians and have AI ask the patient and save that time and collect better quality data, the question is, what do you do with the physician time? If it's just seeing more patients and spending less time with each patient, did you improve health care? That's a really important question.

What do you do with the physician time after you implemented the technology? We saw in this survey students really like technology, but they don't like spending less time with the teachers, with the faculty, with the TAs. They want both. So I think you implement the technology and then it's a lot more important that you're not spending less times. You freed up the time. You still need to spend this time with the students. So I think it's really important to bring technology and the human aspect together about how do you navigate the changes with this technology and how do you not diminish this one-on-one and this personal connection? Sorry, it took me a second to start answering that question too.

Kristen Gay: Yeah. I wonder if part of this is also still a bit of a response to the pandemic when everything moved online. I think when we came back to, we were kind of throwing spaghetti at the wall with tools that we were adopting like, "Let's try this and let's try this and how do we make this work most effectively?" And I think many institutions are right now in this moment of streamlining what is most effective? What brings us the largest ROI? What's most impactful for students and trying to reduce redundant tools as well. So I think that it might be part of it that even in selecting what we want to use, have a clear reason for why it supports an educational goal, have a clear value add for that tool in your class. And I think in terms of LMS, it was interesting to me because yeah, I mean, I think it would be probably impossible to have consistency across every course at an institution, but even looking at what you can control as an instructor, your own course, consistent naming conventions, keep things in a predictable place for students.

And I say this as somebody who taught online and had lots of moving parts in my LMS, but thinking about it just at the individual level and making sure it's clear and predictable for students, I think is a real step in the right direction. Yeah.

Jenay Robert: I think that when you think about balancing the faculty autonomy with wanting to provide some sort of standard experience for students or at least guidelines for students, this is something that we've worked on in our horizon research in the past, particularly the action plans that we've come up with our panelists. And something that I hear pretty consistently regardless of the topic is that you have to kind of decide as a community, here's the box of things that we can all agree on. We know for sure that there are these certain principles around data governance in particular. I think data governance is a big one that it's easy to find shared principles around, ethical use of tools, procurement processes. There are certain things that we can all agree we really want to commit to following consistently, but then there's really nothing wrong with differentiating what happens after that across, whether it's at the college level or the department level.

This is in fact something that data privacy and security professionals love to see that people own their data locally, and that extends to other governance practices as well. So data security policies, data privacy policies that matter to that particular piece of the institution that might be different from other pieces. And so then I would say that IT governance is similar to that. So there are certain ways that various parts of the institution would like to handle those IT issues. And so that's really where I would go with it in terms of advice about balancing is to first break down those silos to have those conversations, what are the elements that we all agree on that apply across the institution, but then give people that freedom at the department level or the whatever unit level makes sense for your institution so that faculty have that autonomy.

Sophie White: Fantastic. And I want to make sure we have time, Freddy, for you to respond to this question too. Just thinking about the mission of higher ed being to serve students, you are our customers and the people that we're here to support. So thinking about your own experience and maybe the students that you tutor as well, what do you have to say about technology consistency and how that affects your learning experience? Are there specific elements that if they aren't consistent can really set you back in a course or are there some things you don't care about as much? What has that been like for you?

Freddy Ramirez: Consistency. Yeah. That was a tough question because I haven't really thought about that. I haven't really thought about ... I guess, can you reframe that question a little bit so I can understand it a little better?

Sophie White: Sure. So anyone else, feel free to jump in. I'm not working in a learning management system day-to-day, but thinking about maybe your Canvas course, for example, and having specific assignments being listed in a specific tab and named a certain way, if it's a quiz versus an essay, one professor naming it a specific way versus another professor might name it, I don't know, a test. Does that confuse you as a student or are you able to translate between those faculty styles?

Jenay Robert: And I'll just add just quickly before you answer that this also extends to things like professor A uses this set of tools, professor B uses this other set of tools and they seem to do all the same things, but now I have to have two completely different sets of tools. That's another place that we often see this type of inconsistency, policy differences, like it's okay to use AI, for example. I know we don't want to consume the whole thing with AI, but some faculty saying you can use it, others saying absolutely not ever. So those types of differences in technology across courses.

Freddy Ramirez: Yeah, no, definitely. Yeah. I think as far as my own experience, I remember the consistency part I think is pretty important for me as a student because it could definitely be hard to ... I'll give you an example. I was taking a statistics course at my community college and we didn't use the book at all. We just based off of lecture, the lecture from the professor and the professor's notes. And I remember tutoring other students from a different class, and from a different professor too. And I think that I had a hard time. I remember having a hard time trying to tutor these students from different classes at the beginning when I started tutoring because it wasn't consistent. They were working from the book and I was not working from the book and there's different books being used and that was a huge thing.

I still see it now where even there's some professors that ... I had students that recently had problems with how to navigate Canvas because most of their classes are set up with the modules, the quizzes, assignments. And then I had a student come in that showed me their class and it didn't even have a syllabus in it. And I was like, "This is the first time I experienced this. " I was so surprised. I had a hard time helping them navigate the class and that was a big problem that I only recently saw and I'm sure other people struggle with it, but I guess they don't really come for help or I don't know what their case might be. But yeah, I think consistency is definitely important and I see it. I think it supported in my education and also my peers and students around me.

I definitely, I've had a decent amount of complaints with like one professor teaches something this way and another professor teaches another subject the other way and it doesn't flow throughout the classes. And I think it's definitely been a problem. I don't think a lot of people talk about it actually because this conversation we're having now is actually the first time I've voiced these concerns and stuff. So yeah, it's just a really interesting topic to talk about for sure.

Ayham Boucher: Yeah. And Freddy, if it makes you feel better, sometimes tools are confusing for faculty too. So a lot of times I'll be asking my TAs to set up something and if they come back and tell me how do I do this, I have a heart attack. I'm like, "Oh no, now I have to dig deep and figure it out too." I think it reports something about the work-life balance. I would like to talk about that because I do teach a class building agentic AI, so it's in CIS, but I have a class that I usually have ninety, one-hundred students. So I do have these conversations about from time to time, we have open discussions about talking about all these topics we're talking about today, and we have candid conversations. So I did ask them, "How do you balance..." I was frank about it, which assignments do you offload to AI and which assignments you do yourself?

And the answer was consistent. They said they do choose which assignments they want to do, and these are the topics that they're really interested in learning. And it's more likely they would offload the assignment of the topic that they have to do, but they're not really interested in learning. So it gives them kind of a sense of freedom of choosing and matching what they're interested in to do. So that was really eye-opening that it's not surprising, but it's this idea that the students get to choose and they will exercise that freedom on what do they work on longer hours versus taking a shortcut. It's based on their interest and what they're learning. So that asks you a question, are we not matching the students to the right courses and to the topics that they're interested in? Can we invest in that so that the students are not finding these assignments and assessments as a homework, but more like a curiosity that I want to learn?

So we could shift left a little bit and make sure that students are taking classes that they're interested in.

Freddy Ramirez: I think that's an interesting point too. Yeah. I mean, I've definitely taken classes that I have no interest in that have nothing to do with what I'm doing in the future, but I never looked at it in that perspective about getting me or AI allowing an opportunity to present a sort of freedom, I guess, with the coursework. But yeah, that's definitely ... Yeah, I think as far as how that applies with my life, I don't think I ... The way I do my assignments, I do it from ... Most of the time, I tackle on the hardest assignment that would take me the longest, and then I keep going down the list. But I haven't really done that part, which is, because I'm taking classes right now that I'm not necessarily interested in, but I haven't put that in or I haven't used AI for that.

I haven't looked at it in that perspective. And that makes me think the students that I'm tutoring, how they feel about that, how they feel about what classes they're interested in and what classes they're not interested in, how to utilize AI in that aspect.

Kristen Gay: Yeah. I think too, another piece of that is that institutions should really continue to offer flexible options for students. And so make sure if students can't come to campus because they don't have transportation or they work a full-time job or they have caregiving responsibilities that prevent them from coming, that they have other ways to engage in the course or to even register for the course. And I think students who are also asking for relatively simple things like upload lectures, record conversations to the extent that you can, make resources available if you miss a class and leverage some of these technologies that we have access to, to make courses more engaging, more accessible, and replayable so that I can ... Even if I was there, I can go back and revisit what we learned and what we discussed. And so I think there are a lot of opportunities there that can also support work-life balance.

Freddy Ramirez: Yeah, definitely. I think that brings up a good point too, because I think in my ... There's been some classes that I've definitely taken where I'm like, " I wish the professor would upload their lecture. I have a pre-recorded lecture for me to watch after. "I know some professors allow recording in their class, you could record the lecture in class with their consent. And I think to make stuff more or to make our student experiences more equitable, I think that's also very important to have those options available where ... I know right now I'm taking a class where if I miss a class, my professor uploads the lecture, or I think he does it anyways, but you can contact him for the video. But the point is that resource is still there, and I think that's really, really important. I know some schools, I know UCLA is a school that there's a decent amount of classes where they record their lectures, and these are big lecture halls, so these are hundreds of students.

And in my university, there's not really anything like that. So I remember my partner goes to UCLA, so that's why I remember hearing about that. I was like, " Wow, that's actually ... I wish I had that in my school. "But yeah, I think that's really important. And I hope that in the future there's more schools that have those opportunities like that where they could provide these resources where it's more equitable for students, for sure.

Sophie White: That's such a great point. And I think we're just getting to the point where we unfortunately have to wrap up the conversation because there's so much we could say. But I love what you just said, Freddy. I think about keeping in mind the needs of students and creating flexibility so that students can access the resources where they are, but also making sure that things are recorded with the consent of the faculty members. There are really sensitive courses that there may be a reason that faculty aren't comfortable having that content recorded, and that's a real consideration in this time as well. So I think it's important to think about who the faculty and the students are as humans and the needs that they have as humans and learners and professionals as we consider all of these elements going forward. So thank you, Kristen.

Thank you, Ayham.

Thank you, Freddy, for the great conversation today. Really appreciate it. I have a lot to think about after this one, and I hope everyone's able to check out the Students and Technology Report and let us know what you think too.