Auto-Woke

Auto-Woke

Part of upping my game as a professor this year is that I am trying to go beyond the technology platform I have used for the dozen years I have been teaching graduate business school. My approach to teaching has been to structure my lectures (which have all tended to be two to three hours in length) using PowerPoint slides. The Microsoft Office Suite has ruled my and many other people’s business life for many years. I use Word, Excel and PowerPoint pretty much exclusively for my various business functionalities. I don’t tend to use the database or other functions that exist in the suite of software, but those three I use literally multiple times each day. As most people know these days, on my iPhone and iPad devices the Word equivalent is Pages, the Excel equivalent is Numbers and the PowerPoint program is called Keynote. That’s all well and good, but whenever I move a file from one place to another or from one device to another, I do the transfer via the Microsoft formats. It used to be that Microsoft and Apple didn’t play nice together, but that has largely gone away and while the two are not totally seamless, the problems tend to be minor like fonts available or occasionally formatting. So PowerPoint is my go-to way of structuring and preparing a lecture to give any of the classes I teach, or, for that matter, for giving any speech that I might be asked to give.

But let’s face it, PowerPoint has been around since 1987, making it just ten years short of the age of the personal computer (really five years since ubiquitous adoption) altogether. I started using it as a professor in 2007, so it was well honed by then and to this day, I consider it a solid platform that has not been effectively replaced by anyone or anything. A slide deck is a critically important key to doing business. As important as Word is to communication and Excel is to analysis (financial and otherwise), PowerPoint is more important because it is the vehicle for advocacy of many different sorts. With PowerPoint you can pitch an idea and make your case. And with PowerPoint you can craft a lesson and lead students through a lecture slide by slide and leave a trail behind to post for them to reference so they don’t waste time and attention taking notes rather than paying heed and participating in the class discussion.

So, all of my classes are conducted in PowerPoint and sometimes I get through all of my slides and sometimes not so much. I like to think that as educators we are flexible enough to go with the flow of the student dialogue. But here’s the thing, the evaluations from my last semester of my Ethics course told me several important things I need to incorporate into my teaching methods. Let’s start with the use of technology. It is generally felt that my use of PowerPoint is not leading edge. That doesn’t mean that people think the course is any less good because of that, but a criticism is a criticism and it deserves to be addressed. In fairness, there are more advanced teaching technology aides available, but I just haven’t seen the need for them. But that’s thinking like an old guy who doesn’t care about staying current and that’s something I never want to be. That’s when I came across a tech learning company that is, in essence, a collaboration platform.

This platform (which I will not name on a branded basis since I cannot fully endorse it until I actually use it on the battlefield of teaching) allows students to raise questions and respond to one another’s questions online. That, in and of itself, does not seem like much of an advantage since it seems like any other bulletin board functionality, one which could even be performed by the University supplied and mostly now ubiquitous Blackboard system that we used at Cornell and that we use currently at USD. Indeed, I’ll bet there are a whole lot of capabilities that Blackboard system has that I should learn more about and use, but this new platform seems very important to my class needs for several reasons.

To begin with, it has an AI (artificial intelligence) component where it rates the questions and responses from students based on a curiosity and quality index. That is a bit of a black box at this point, so I don’t fully understand the criteria it uses to make those judgements, but it’s less about being pinpoint accurate about quality and curiosity and more about evaluating the questions and responses on a threshold basis. That means that if they meet a 50 out of 100 threshold, then they qualify as a valid and point-worthy question or response. The actual score value is not used to grade the students, but is there to be seen by me and all the students, sort of a subjective bragging rights. Either a student is very insightful or very good at “gaming” the AI to get high marks, which is a fun attribute, but not essential. The essential piece is that it sets some sort of bar that all students must get across to get the points that they are doing a decent caliber of work. By the way, I can dial up the threshold as high or low as I want and can make this as rigorous as the the class and I want and as makes sense. I presumably do not want this course to all be about this Q&A platform, but rather, I want this to encourage and insure a high level of engagement by the students. It will be a fascinating teaching and learning experience I predict and certainly hope.

But in reviewing the functionality and operation of the system with the support team of this start-up, I found out something else. First of all, I now know that my support person holds a graduate degree in teaching. That alone was impressive to me. I am not dealing with a low-paid clerk or hipster. I am being supported by someone who is serious about teaching, and probably supplements their teaching income by moonlighting in this support capacity. That seems like a good thing for all of us as I have always said that teachers are woefully underpaid. I also like that I have some truly professional help in making the most of this process for my students.

The best element, and it may well be very specific to my goals for my students in the ethics course where I will be using this, is that these question and response sessions are moderated. That means that besides the fact that I will be able to monitor them, the system monitors them and flags questions or responses that are problematic and inappropriate. Those flagged questions and responses (flagged by the AI protocol) are handed to a live, in-person team to review. They are responded to accordingly to the questioner or responder with suggestions for modification. If they are appropriately and adequately modified, no harm or foul. If not, the student does not get points and the incident is noted for me, the instructor, to deal with.

In a business ethics course this seems inordinately valuable. I am trying to inculcate (as opposed to “teach”) students that they need to learn how to operate in the business world we live in and which is fraught with policy and ethical pitfalls. Having an objective system that throws penalty flags on their questions and responses to important ethical business issues seems to be an important way to raise awareness and train them in the delicate art of tiptoeing through the ethical minefield of business. I think of this platform as having the potential to train them to walk this narrow path as well as possible. I like calling it an Auto-Woke system because if it works well (time will tell), they will be stepping on dummy land mines in a safe environment rather than real land mines in a career-ending environment.