Episode 20 - Anna Zendall: Is AI Literacy the New Professional Credential?
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Priten: Welcome to Margin of Thought, where we make space for the questions that matter. I'm your host, Priten, and together we'll explore questions that help us preserve what matters while navigating what's coming.
What happens when the classroom is preparing students for careers where AI literacy isn't optional? Today's guest is Anna Zendell, a social worker turned educator who now oversees healthcare management, human services and wellness programs at Bay Path University. She's currently in the middle of actually building an AI enhanced curriculum from the ground up as a live pilot that launched this fall.
We're gonna talk about what it really takes to retool a curriculum for ai, why adult learners in healthcare face a uniquely high stakes version of this challenge, and how one educator is trying to teach students to think critically alongside a technology that doesn't always get it right. This is about what responsible AI [00:01:00] integration looks like when the stakes are a patient.
Let's begin.
Anna: It's actually a really winding journey. I never had any aspirations to be a teacher initially. I became a social worker. And so I started out more in the clinical realm of things, and then I moved to the more of the macro realm and I ended up settling on community social work because as I talked with people, I quickly found all of these barriers that they were encountering that they have very limited influence over, especially a lot of people from marginalized background. So I wound up gravitating more and more towards community social work and eventually I ended up working with a major research one institution, university of Albany, doing a lot of community-based research and interventions.
And so I fell in love with that absolutely and utterly. I ended up going for my doctorate at the University of Albany in social welfare. [00:02:00] And then I had the opportunity to do a teaching assistantship. And it was online asynchronous. And I was really nervous. I was so nervous about it. But then as I embarked on the teaching. I just found myself falling. I fell in love with the research process with the challenge of I always ask you are much like social work. I ask the students what do they want from their, from their learning, what are their goals, their career goals, personal goals, anything.
It was a dementia course. So I also asked questions around lived experience and things, and so I fell in love with meeting their needs and their goal learning goals as well. And so, fast forward I did more and more teaching with the University of Albany, and then I got a full-time job. I still didn't have any aspirations to do more than adjuncting, but then I was offered a full-time job with another institution that was online, [00:03:00] serving online adult learners, um, Excelsior University. And so I was there for 12 years developing programs, teaching, getting to know students and faculty, and I quickly found that I love administration and my passion is the teaching and being with the students. And that guides me in all of my administration work.
And so as time went on, I was offered this opportunity at Bay Path University where I am now to work with a healthcare management program. So I went there, I was really intrigued by it, and. I went there and again, it's working with adult learners with a wide array of faculty from around the country. And, I also took on advising there and absolutely just loved it. And so I've been with Bay Path for the ringing two and a half years almost now, [00:04:00] and I oversee all of our healthcare management administration programs, our human services programs and our wellness and health promotion programs.
So that was my journey and I wouldn't trade it.
Priten: Yeah, that sounds amazing. I find the folks with the non-traditional path into teaching very interesting. You get to share, bring a different perspective into the education space, which is great. Before we talk a little bit about your current experience and conversations with your students, I'd love to hear a little bit about your earliest memory of an ed tech tool as a student yourself. So at any point in your education journey, do you remember an instance of having a very strong reaction, either positive or negative to the use of technology, , by a teacher of yours?
Anna: Statistics was my first big foray into technology. And it was not easy. It was sort of you know, here you, you buy your software, you kind of figure it out and good luck to you. And again, it was a doctoral [00:05:00] program, so I understand that, there is that element of, you do need to kind of figure it out for yourself.
It was really a challenge though, and I wound up finding somebody, fortunately in my cohort, who helped me, who taught me how to do it. That was great. By then I had already started to teach a little bit, and so I had it in my mind that I would always be sure no matter what level a student was at, even if I was teaching at a doctoral level, I would always make sure that they had the tools they needed and that they had someone to help them learn.
Priten: That seems like an important part of this is, even as we see like how AI is being rolled out at universities across the country, a lot of it is here you go, here's access to it. And I think that students are still probably to figure out exactly how it fits in to their learning process. Individually. I'd love to hear what the pandemic looked like for you. So at that point, were you still teaching at Excelsior?
Anna: Yes, I was. And because everybody was online in [00:06:00] certain ways, that didn't shift. What shifted was the student's ability to to attend to their classes, to be there consistently,, in their minds as well as, at the keyboard. I have been in healthcare, for just about all of my career, and it hit my students very, very hard because a lot of them were on the front lines or they were mid-level managers. So they, they were also right there on the front lines. So it was just extremely challenging. That was when Zoom was really coming into, its prime, I guess, you know? And so there were a lot of hiccups with Zoom and I was trying to have more Zoom meetings with my students in particular to support them better because, they were just, they were talking, you know, and sharing the distress that they had, you know, the loss, the profound losses that were accruing, people dying on their watches. , But also, , the losses of, of time with their [00:07:00] families, especially children, vulnerable elders and such. So that piece changed dramatically, the affective needs, the emotional needs, and giving them a lot of grace in the due dates with redoing things if they needed it with and I actually did strip out some assignments and scaffolded them differently knowing that these were extraordinary times and I wanted them to learn what they needed to learn without stressing them with the way that things were pre pandemic. And so I ended up shifting a fair amount of my curriculum and the courses that I taught and then the courses I oversaw as well, so that they could have the time that they needed and still never sacrificing what they needed to learn to be professionals, but just a different way to get there.
Priten: I'm curious because the online education piece wasn't new and you're talking about how differently your students [00:08:00] showed up because of the other factors that were changing, all of our lives, and especially your students who were working in healthcare.
What role did the technology play or did it play a different role than it did prior to the pandemic? I know you talked about those one-on-one meetings with your students. Did you notice that you were thankful for the technology, or did you wish it could do something else that it wasn't doing just yet?
Anna: That's a great question. I think one things I noticed was that my students were much more eager to use the voice technology. So, I would give them a choice paper , or presentation. And they were more often choosing the presentation. I think there was a craving for connection that was there. And so by and large, we were all very grateful for the technology hiccups and all, bandwidth and all, because bandwidth was a big issue for a lot of students too. So it was pretty interesting. Zoom was a nightmare initially because it got so quirky. I think because we were [00:09:00] already online, I actually was fortunate that a lot of the students I had in the class I was teaching at that time, I knew already to an extent. And so there was kind of a bond there already. So I would say we were pretty grateful for it.
Priten: I'm sure a lot of us share that sentiment. When we think of the last like few years in education, that was big crisis number one and big crisis number two seems to be ai. I'm curious how that's popped up in your context.
Anna: This is probably the first technology that I've experienced in teaching and overseeing programs where there is such a conflict between the student perception and the student understanding and the faculty perception, understanding, and then the administration's perception understanding. We are working through it as an administration, like a lot of universities, it's a little bit slow and methodical, or it has been up until recently. . Some students are using it pretty regularly and there are all [00:10:00] those tells. Some faculty are putting, notices, they're adding rubric rows, you know, use of ai will be an automatic zero, things like that.
I do see the tone changing a little bit though over this past year because I think over this past year it has just become so endemic in our society. And everybody's using it, including our faculty and everybody. We have faculty who are really intrigued with it and interested in seeing what it can do. And then other faculty who are afraid, they really want the students to learn and they're afraid that because of all the stressors and the adult learners life, that they'll take the more efficient road. You know, not even the easy road, but the more efficient road for them and some of them are doing it.
I think too, over the last three months we have started working on a pilot with an AI and that's been really fascinating. So we're working with a particular vendor and i've actually been [00:11:00] charged to take a program and convert it completely into AI enhanced. I've been curious for a few years about AI and I've been playing with the free versions, learning how to do the prompts and things like that. And also coming to understand what my concerns are about it. You know, the sort of the hallucinations, the going down rabbit holes that may be from a curricular perspective, you wouldn't want the AI to take our students, especially our earlier students who they might have been outta college for 15, 20 years and still be relearning how to do that academic think piece and they may have been using it quite successfully too, in their lives to plan vacations, plan menus. I planned some really awesome menus with ai, ChatGPT is very useful to me, in a lot of ways. And so working on this project has really given me an opportunity to test out the prompting skills [00:12:00] and to try and take the curriculum and adapt it because one of the things I've learned is that curriculum as it is, our typical kind of curriculum doesn't work really well with ai.
You have to recraft it and retool it. When we do learning outcomes, for example, we're all trained to use Bloom's Taxonomy, which is awesome. And it does align pretty well to career readiness , but it's too nebulous, I think for AI to use. So we have to break it down into, we have to break down each outcome into its component, baby steps, like you're guiding the AI and how to mentor the student.
Because essentially just to take a quick step back, what these courses in this program will look like is we're going to use the AI tool. Right now it's a closed system, although we may open it, so we're feeding the AI [00:13:00] materials that it will then use to teach our students, and then we're feeding it prompts. We're feeding it context to guide it in how it will mentor our students, and then we create interactive activities based on that so that the students will engage on something like, what are the differences between Medicaid and Medicare and then how do federal funds influence state Medicaid funds? So those sorts of things. , So we've been working a lot on that. And I actually found a wonderful informatics student who has an interest in AI in healthcare. And so she's been working, oh, she's phenomenal. She's, she was like one of our best decisions. So she has been going in.
First of all, taking it as a student, taking the course and the modules as a student, as we go through and build them. And I'm doing the curricular part. And then we have a instructional [00:14:00] designer as well who is really talented. So he's doing that piece and then our student comes behind us and takes it as a student. And then we talk through what are the prompts, where are they guiding her? , How do we need to shift this and how would our students receive this? And I go through it as well from the faculty side to just see, where do I see potential deviations, pitfalls, dark holes that it could take students down.
In higher ed, this is a really refined tool, but it still feels a little bit early in its infancy almost. Because, we're teaching it almost like you teach a child to talk. We're teaching it how to engage with the students based on its skillset. So that's a lot of what we're working on.
And then we could, we have the choice of, students submitting their work for AI grading and we opted against that. We're taking a very incremental approach. After the first course, I might open up a low stakes one, and then just kind of baby [00:15:00] step our own way into it until, trust is a bit of an issue for me with ai. So I also think that as a faculty and as a human being, I need to come to trust it with my students.
Priten: What are your students' reactions to this? This sounds like it's still early stages of the pilot, but are students expressing a enthusiasm for something like this to be integrated.
Anna: Interestingly, we haven't started yet. It starts in September. On September 2nd it'll be starting. So and the students do know who are enrolling in our program. I've talked to some of the other, some of my current students as well, and. They actually run the same spectrum as a lot of us do some are really uneasy with it. Especially if they think about AI doing the grading. They really value the faculty being there and hearing the faculty's experience. The first thing I had to do was to reassure that the faculty will still be there. And that it's almost going to [00:16:00] be 33 and a third with the ai, and then 66 and two thirds with the faculty and with their peers.
Priten: That makes sense. Like that's a concern. . But also that balance feels like it makes the most of the AI tools that are out there, but still continues to value those human relationships. You've talked about how you all are seeing how to productively use the AI tools within the students' learning journeys, with a program that's there's a clear career track afterwards. Do your students wonder about what AI skills they'll need themselves to excel in their career paths? Because obviously it's a very different conversation at that level versus when you were talking to middle schoolers and what role AI will play in their careers.
It's a very different conversation. And probably one that can play a secondary role, obviously with students who are adult learners in a, professional education program. There's a clear connection with their very next step. I'm curious if AI literacy and skillsets, like those kinds of things that come up and how so?
Anna: Definitely, [00:17:00] yes. Our students are asking for it and I felt a little badly that we and a little bit behind with that in a lot of the programs and a lot of it's that we've been trying to wrap our heads around everything that's happening with AI and figure out where to start.
And that's part of why we ended up partnering with a vendor who has a specialty in education, has taught himself. We felt like this was someone who could guide us on where to start For our students, they see it as an imperative that they need to know. And our, the employers too. Every quarter or so I take a look at healthcare leadership roles, , that are posted on Indeed, glassdoor, LinkedIn and ai literacy, AI familiarity is pretty, pretty high up, along the skills and along with that is,, I think it's not just passively using ai, but being [00:18:00] able to use it as a tool, but also vet the ai to do the critical thinking along with it. I see an opportunity too that I'm trying to work in with this project to be able to teach them that.
Priten: I think there's obviously two ways for us to integrate AI within how we interact with our students. There's using it to reach pedagogical goals that we had prior to the increase in ai. And then there's new skills that we might want our students to learn so that they can make most of the technology, later on. It sounds like you're finding a way to do both of those. It makes sense that your students are also asking for that second component a lot, right? I'm curious about when you look at these job descriptions are they making explicit mention of AI as a skillset or criteria?
Anna: Especially in the informatics and in clinical informatics, data analytics with AI interface, those sorts of things. And I've seen it too in, in finance, healthcare finance. AI is coming into its own in the really complicated world of healthcare [00:19:00] finance.
Priten: When we think about the use of AI in different industries, healthcare is definitely one that has the most regulations and the most bureaucracy, but also patient protection, regulations and laws in place. Navigating that alone, it seems like a major question for your students to know how, when, and how to use this technology in ways that adheres to those regulations.
Anna: Yeah, and to an extent too, we're really waiting to see how the federal government is rolling out their piece as well. As we're talking, there has been somewhat of a plan presented. And I'm sure that's going to be fine tuned over time. So we need to see what that will look like.
We also need to see what some of the other rules and regulations will look like as so many are changing under our current administration. That's something we talk about a lot in most of our courses. We have this new technology and you can't ask it questions in the same way. You can't go to chat GBT, there are dedicated healthcare interfaces with ai.
So that's [00:20:00] a first thing that a lot of people surprisingly don't recognize. They would go to what they know, which is chat, GPT or Gemini or something like that. But, that's just not acceptable. Organizations are literally writing the rules as they go. Much like we had to with social media.
Priten: Yeah. When you think about the next five years of education, especially in your context, is is there anything that scares you about where the technology might go?
Anna: I appreciate technology a lot and what it can do for us. My fear with certain technologies is that we become, we could become so dependent on it that we lose our capacity to critically think, to question the tools to double check and verify. And , that really does scare me. I see the allure of the technologies and how they are being built to keep our, I'm not gonna go so far as to [00:21:00] say that they're built to be addicting, although a lot of people say that, but they are built to keep our attention for extended periods of time, and to draw us into more use and. It's the how we use them and how we teach people to use them, especially in an environment where it's global. It's not something that can be confined to us and US regulations very easily or confined to one organization. It's just ubiquitous a lot of these technologies. So we've got the global context as well to think about.
And with every technology we have the opportunity for hacking. You go back to privacy and safety and security, the more interfaces we have and thinking about healthcare, the Internet of medical things, the IOMT, you have all of these openings for hacking for, stealing data, and worse things. We need to get a handle as a society, and in healthcare [00:22:00] as a sector, as an industry, we need to get a handle on that and come up with a cogent plan.
Priten: It seems like there's a lot of like reacting that every industry has to do in terms of figuring out like what the boundaries are, what the regulations are, but I think you're right that. The amorphous nature. Like it is not an entity, right? That's not like one company that's working on this product and it's so diffused that figuring out how exactly to regulate and then enforce those regulations is gonna be very interesting. Obviously you're working on the positives technology and benefits can provide so I wanted to ask about what you're excited about in terms of where technology can take us? .
Anna: I think about technology and AI for hospitals at home and for critical care at home and for people with dementia. People being able to be in their homes and spend less time in acute care settings or in institutional settings like nursing homes. There's so much with this technology and if we use it right within five to 10 years, we could have a [00:23:00] society when more and more people are able to live in their homes and communities with the help of technology , and humans, neighbors and community.
Priten: There was a project I was reading about ways to use generative AI to combat some of the loneliness crisis amongst the elderly., And they talked about at home, nurses a lot of the role they fulfill is being like providing some companionship. And how the world in which the generative AI like helps navigate or at least provides a medium for that. Dunno exactly what the research will say or whether or not it's an effective way to combat it, but just interested to see how folks are thinking about the potential for it too solve some of the problems that I think we all know and have like, been working on, but are very hard to do at scale. And so hopefully we on case scale some of those. Is there anything else that you would wanna share about your interaction with these technologies or any anecdotes that feel like you, you wish you had brought up?
Anna: I don't think so. Do you feel like you have enough from me, from my perspective?
Priten: I do. I think the professional connection part is an angle that we haven't had much yet on because we've been speaking so much to [00:24:00] K to 12 educators. I only had a med student last week, and that was really helpful in terms of, again, like starting to think through, it's very different to think about the technology and what impact it will have in 10 years and what our students need to know now when they're at that younger age level versus managing the reality of we still need to assess these students.
It still need to make sure that they're learning and not taking shortcuts. , But also they need to know how to use the technology for their jobs in a year. So yeah, appreciated that perspective of you all trying to pilot program of both figuring out how you'll teach better with it, incorporate it in ways to make your, the learning more effective for the students, but also help them start to build that intuition for when it's appropriate, when it's not appropriate, what it's limitations are all that. I'd love to hear more about how the pilot actually goes as well once it's underway, so maybe I'll shoot you an email sometime in the winter and see if there's any initial findings for how that went.
Anna: Definitely. Yeah. I think you also tapped into that piece about the lifelong learning. We can't teach students everything that they need to know about technology in our [00:25:00] program, so we have to. Also, a third prong to this is teaching them how to find the information that they need going forward and how to keep growing. Because the technologies, the AI is going to keep growing and growing and growing and getting bigger and even more ubiquitous, throughout all aspects of our life and careers. So, teaching them how to do that too is probably one of the most valuable services we can do in higher ed and in K through 12 too
Priten: Even when I think about the work we do with teachers, a lot of it ends up now being, it's not useful for me to sit with you for an hour and teach you how to use ChatGPT it really is like, how do we understand this technology so that you can learn how to use whatever tool comes at next year or two years from now? Because the pace is just so fast that it is gonna come down to like this, the ability to acquire the skill sets and the new knowledge more so than any preexisting skillset or knowledge based. It's daunting. I work in this space, I do this all day and get up, like, when did they announce this? What can it do now? [00:26:00] There's just, it's, there's just so much to consume, constantly and keep up with. And then, that's my job 24 or seven. Whereas if you're busy, jiggling other things and keeping up with latest research in other industries and you also have to keep up with AI stuff. It's very daunting.
Anna: It's a lot, but it's also fun.
Priten: it is fun there. It is very exciting. It's hard to sometimes to remember that when you're inundated with like other folks were concerned by basing struggles with it.
We kind of know that the AI is not going anywhere. The detection's kind of a lost cause at this point. And so it's a figuring out how we can make the most of it, but also helping our students build the, the right healthy habits with it rather than just try to police it.
Thank you to Anna for doing the slow, careful work of actually building a curriculum. Anna reminded us that integrating AI is fundamentally a trust problem. Trust between faculty and the tool between students and the institution, and between all of us in a technology that is moving faster than any one curriculum is going to keep up with.
Our instinct to meet students where they [00:27:00] are is exactly the kind of human-centered thinking that should be guiding this work. Keep listening as we continue exploring the ethics of education technology and pre-order my upcoming book on how to build that [email protected].
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