How AI Can Strengthen Learning Instead of Simply Delivering Answers

Wes Smith: Darren, thanks for joining us today.

Darren Person (02:46.011) Sounds good. Looking forward

Darren Person (02:58.171) Les, great to be here. Thank you so much for having me on.

Wes Smith (03:01.069) Hey, this is a topic that is very interesting to a lot of people, and that is, how do you balance innovation and education? How do you put students first in that? So a lot of people in ed tech are talking about this. Can you start us off with your argument about starting with students?

Darren Person (03:22.031) Yeah. So look, I think I’m a dad, right? So I have two kids, one that’s in the middle of their higher education and one that’s literally about to just start his higher education as well. So I get this really interesting perspective of also seeing education as part of it and seeing the perspective and the lens from the student side of the house firsthand as I watched them go through and learn in today’s world.

but also come from a background, both my in-laws were educators. So I kind of get this interesting view between two sides of the house. And of course I was a student, hopefully not too long ago at these days, but I was a student not that long ago. So I have an appreciation for the perspective of that. And especially now with AI being so prominent in students’ lives and in a lot of ways being pushed at them from many different angles, it’s really important that we take

a really responsible view, especially sitting in a company like an EdTech company like Cengage, and really making sure that we’re building the right solutions for both students and faculty to really help bridge that gap.

Wes Smith (04:30.085) There are so many AI tools out there. And I don’t know if your text chains look like mine, but I have a few text chains with different friend groups. And every now and then, I’ll get a text. This happened to me a couple nights ago. A friend said, hey, have you guys tried this tool? It’s crazy. Look what it does. It makes this and this and this. And then a conversation goes on about, oh, yeah, and I use this. And have you guys ever taken a look at this?

Anyway, it’s kind of interesting how AI is impacting our lives, but there’s a difference between impacting our lives with just new capabilities and complexity versus in higher education actually improving learning. So how do you address that issue?

Darren Person (05:21.647) Yeah, I know it’s really important question. think the clearest signal, I think is pretty simple. I think the foundational question is, is the AI helping the student build understanding or is it just handing over an answer? Right. And if you really think about it, like in education, you know, impact does not mean the student getting means they got there faster. Right. It actually means that the student can explain the concept. They can apply it in a new context.

They can even transfer that learning later. And I think that’s the real difference between assistance and then actual learning. So when you think about AI in this context, we need to think about how we use it to break down problems, like create curiosity, encourage things like persistence and like keep the student in the work. Cause if the student just reaches the answer on their own, you know, is that really a good signal?

It’s more about how AI becomes basically helping the student really be confident in understanding how they got to the answer, not the answer itself. I think that’s the hugest opportunity.

Wes Smith (06:35.289) You know, that’s I think the difference between these kind of these conversations with with that I think everybody we’re all having these conversations that is hey Did you see this look what look what you can do? Look how quick you can do it and you know, you all of those conversations don’t take into Consideration are you actually learning more? Are you retaining more? It’s not a higher-ed use. It’s more like we get to the answer faster in some of these but

Your point is in higher education, the whole point is learning and students have to be able to learn, but we’re not really set to validate that kind of learning as well as we could be. What do institutions need to do in the future with AI in mind to create that environment of learning and measuring learning as opposed to measuring getting to an answer faster?

Darren Person (07:31.899) Yeah, look, candidly, right? If an AI tool adds friction for faculty or makes learning harder to validate, it’s not ready, right? A helpful feature that creates more workload or confusion is not really helpful, right? one of the things that, and look, coming from an ed tech company, so things that we’ve been trying to do is to be very intentional. And that’s including tools that we’ve been building like our student assistant.

It’s about being grounded in the course context, tuned to the discipline, built around the vetted materials. So we know that the quality of the content and that the answers and the guidance that students are going to get are actually factual versus hallucinations. It’s also designed to guide. Like our student assistant was specifically designed to never give the student the answer two years ago.

We started with that as the premise. So it’s about creating that conversation. What questions are the students answering? We’re already seeing things like four to five times higher engagement and roughly a 20 % uplift in end of course grades. But it’s because of that conversation and guiding and the pedagogy being built into the student assistant versus a generic chat bot that’s just quickly about getting you

the answer that you want.

Wes Smith (08:58.253) Right, right. That’s important and it has to be the case in higher education. It’ll be interesting to see a transition between how students use that to learn now and then the tools that are just built for getting to an answer faster. Those are two different things, but in a higher ed context, one is certainly preferable above the other.

Darren Person (09:14.949) That’s right.

Darren Person (09:21.401) Yeah, and it’s the foundations of the, you know, hopefully of the premise, right? Like I had a, I had, was giving a, I was on a panel not that long ago at a conference and I had a student stand up and ask the question like, Hey, you know, I could learn all of this stuff by not going to school and reading a book. And I brought it back to like, why I think college and education is important. And it’s

It’s not just about reading the materials and digesting materials, but it’s the overall experience. It is the connection with your faculty member. It is the connection with other students. It’s those projects that you do together where you learn real life experiences that you’re not just going to get out of just reading a book or taking something purely in a virtual environment. It’s those interactions that are really important and being in the university as part of your maturing process as well.

And you’ll get that in other areas too, especially in the workforce as part of that, but you want to go in as prepared as you possibly can.

Wes Smith (10:25.455) So I like the direction that this conversation is going. Our audience, have a lot of higher ed institution leaders that listen in. Can you help us understand what is a meaningful collaboration between technology creators, ed tech partners, and institutions? How can presidents help shape AI adoption rather than just reacting to the product that

that EdTech puts in front of them.

Darren Person (10:57.209) Yeah, I think the first thing that I would say is that education is not a plug and play environment. And I think we, lot of organizations and especially some of the new technology is starting to be treated like we could just slap this in and make it work. So you can’t just drop in a general purpose AI tool into a course and assume that learning will magically improve, right? It just hasn’t happened.

I would say more meaningful collaboration starts with the pedagogy. You’ve said this to me as well. And some really core questions like, what are the learning objectives? What does good teaching look like in this course? Where do students struggle? Where should AI help? We can go on and on. And by the way, where should AI stay out of the way? That’s your question to ask too. It’s not just about where we infuse it, but where doesn’t it belong?

That’s also why I think the partnership model that you mentioned really, really matters so much, right? Institutions and technology partners, we need to co-design with faculty and test in real courses, look at the evidence, iterate based on what actually improves understanding. We’ve been spending a lot of time, we have panels of teachers who work with us to make sure that the way our student assistants are asking questions, that is what’s gonna give you the insights.

And I think we’ve seen this already, right? Like a cautionary tale is homework helper, right? Like there are these tools that have been launched into market by more consumer-based organizations. sure, maybe the technology may have helped the student move faster, but it then made it much harder for educators to validate real learning. And when you really think about that, that actually increases faculty workload and undermines trust.

That’s the opposite of what ed tech companies have been trying to do for the last 40, 50 years in this sector.

Wes Smith (12:51.715) Yeah, yeah, had Darren, we’ve had some conversations prior to this one. And in one of those conversations, you mentioned to me tools that will improve the ability for faculty to be able to construct courses, curriculum, and then deploy based on kind of the feedback, the regular feedback that they can receive from students using some of this technology. Tell us a little bit about the upside.

for faculty when they use technology that’s designed to assist them in instruction.

Darren Person (13:28.293) Yeah, no, this is probably the most important one. So when I think about education and learning, in a lot of ways, it’s like, how do we use technology? And in this case today, we’re talking about AI. Tomorrow it will be something else. But how do we use this technology to bridge that human connection between the faculty and the student? And I think that’s the more important part. And if you go into the workflow, on the student side, they’re really trying to learn the material and understand what

it means and how that’s going to apply to them in ultimately their future job, career, et cetera. For faculty members, they’re being asked to do more with less, right? As this technology rolls out, hey, more classes, more courses, more sections, more students. And that over time has driven this divide, right? The teacher has been pulled away from the students where the technology as we’re starting to look at deploying it is really about

gathering all of those insights and being able to support the teacher no longer in just helping them get the homework assignments graded, but actually identify problems that individual students have, driving more of that personalized learning. But it’s also about personalized teaching, right? It’s not just about making sure the student is getting the right question at the right time, but also that the teacher now is better informed across their entire course on how they can help each individual student.

and be able to bridge that connection where in lot of classes, just because of the scale and the volume, it’s nearly impossible for an educator to be able to make that human connection with every single student, right? They have to kind of select and pick. And a lot of times it’s the other way. It’s the student who basically reaches out to the faculty member and makes that connection first that way. Let’s be honest, a lot of young kids aren’t comfortable, you know, picking up the phone and being like, Hey, I got a bad grade on this test. I could use extra help. Can you help me? They’d be more comfortable if a teacher saw that.

recognized it and was able to reach out to them and say, hey, I see you’re having some issues with XYZ topic. Here’s some ideas and recommendations. That caring connection, I think, is what really helps drive education. We all have stories about a teacher who took an interest in us. And I think that really is foundations of education.

Wes Smith (15:43.437) Absolutely. Darren, love the way that you’ve grounded this conversation in how learning actually happens and not just around the technology, what the technology can do, but how it should support students and faculty. I think that that’s a great way to ground the conversation.

Darren Person (16:01.453) I it. I love this conversation. It’s such an important one. And I think the more we can stay focused together, like this isn’t about it’s not one company, it’s all of us partnering together. And I think if we keep putting the customer, both the people who have to deliver the education, as well as the people who are receiving the education, I think if we keep them at the center of everything that we do, I think that will help us drive the outcome versus moving away and moving to the outer edges of the technologies for the sake of technology.

Wes Smith (16:31.397) Well said, well said. Thanks for joining us today, Darren.

Darren Person (16:34.501) Thanks so much, Russ. Again, thanks for having me.

Wes Smith (16:36.645) You bet. OK.