Paul Szmal: And it is 8.40 on FLX Morning. We're sitting at 56 under clear skies for the moment. It's time for our Scholastically Speaking segment where we catch up with our friends from Finger Lakes Community College and today I'd like to welcome in our guest who is an assistant professor for computing sciences and a member of the FLCC internal think tank on a little something something that you may have heard of called AI. Dave Gadoo is here with us. Dave, good morning. How are you?
Dave Ghidiu: I'm doing well. Thank you. How are you doing?
Paul Szmal: I am doing great. Thank you, sir. And you know, AI is constantly being talked about. It's not going away anytime soon. And it seems like with every passing day, it's advancing and changing.
Dave Ghidiu: Oh, sure, sure, sure, sure. Absolutely. The velocity is just I've never seen anything like it before in technology. And back in June, FLCC launched something called the FLX AI Hub, which was an initiative to develop and share sound practices for the use of AI in education, business, government, even in community learning. What were some of the key principles that the group came up with?
Paul Szmal: So we the FLX AI Hub has four pillars. One of them is an internal and you mentioned the think tank and AI across the curriculum, which is how do we help learners of the college leverage AI? How do we help our faculty and staff figure out the best ways to use it? But the three pillars that are external are, I think, critically important for the community. The first one is just business and government. And you'd mentioned June 11th, we came up with the announcement for this, but the actual event was run with the Chamber of Commerce. And we had roughly 200 people from business, from government, from schools. And the pillar for specifically business and government is we want to provide workforce training. We know that 66% of employers won't hire people without AI skills. We know that there's a huge skill gap with AI. So we really want to be the front line for providing workforce training with AI.
We are developing an AI integration specialist micro-credential. So that's three or four courses where you can come in and learn. Everything there is to know about AI up until tomorrow. And just go back into companies and really start applying those concepts.
We also have our third pillar, the AI for community learning. And that pillar is really intended to help people in the community who have low or no usage in AI start to understand it. And we're going to offer free and low-cost courses for the community.
And the fourth pillar, the one that I'm really, really excited about, is the AI for the modern educator. And just to set the table, I was a high school teacher for eight years. I served on the Board of Ed for the district I'm in. And so I understand the challenges of AI and the challenges that come with teaching. So our AI for the modern educator, we're offering tiered training in micro-credentials. But one thing we're particularly excited about is that educators can learn their CTLE hours. So every educator in New York State has to have, I think it's 100 hours of professional development across five years. So we are developing a program, and I think it's like $99 for a year subscription. And we drop one course every month starting in September. And the course is hyper-relevant to AI in education. And the courses are only between one and three hours. So hopefully you'll be able to, even if you relied on this exclusively for the CTLE hours, that would be appropriate for the state. But we intend to just roll out courses that will help educators potentiate and amp up what they do in the classroom.
Paul Szmal: AI in the classroom, and especially I think in college as well, has become so prevalent because you hear stories all the time of students basically having AI write their papers, and then teachers having AI grade the same papers that AI wrote. Is this a problem that can be corrected?
Dave Ghidiu: It is. I tend to be very optimistic about technology, and I don't want to be Pollyannish. I do understand that there's a number of problems with AI, but we're in the wayfinding phase right now. There really is a spectrum. And I've been working with local school districts and local colleges and keeping an eye on what's happening worldwide and what's happening in SUNY and what's happening across the country. And the best advice I can give, there's a great book out there. So if there's any educators that want to kind of bone up on specifically this problem, there's a great book called The Opposite of Cheating. And it purports to be a book about AI, but it's really a book about instructional design.
One of their contentions is for learners to see the value in what they're doing, they need to have some kind of competence, some type of autonomy, but mostly they want to have relevance. So there's a term, David Wiley, who's a big thinker in open education, he calls it the disposable assignment. And I think that's kind of what you were alluding to. So I give an assignment to my learners that I know they don't want to do. They don't want to do it, but they do it. I don't want to grade it, and I do, and then they get it back and put it in the recycling bin. So we're using AI here at the college to really beef up what the assignments we're even thinking about doing in those experiences, because it really is a, it's liberating. You can use AI to do things we haven't been able to be able to do before.
So you can imagine, and I'm just going to use this as an example right now, that in a nursing program, maybe when there's patient assessments, you know, the learners will read, they might watch some videos and then take like a multiple choice quiz. And then there is the clinical hours where they actually have to have that. But now we have AI. So you can have this chatbot that's programmed specifically to have certain elements. And then the learners can interact with that either by typing or actually by talking. And then they get that experience for kind of defining what the element is.
So getting back to that book, the book is talking about like, listen, if you want to have meaningful engagement from your learners, you've got to put the pedal to the metal and give them worthwhile experiences. So I'm optimistic about AI doing that. And the other thing about your point, and that's an astute observation, that is, I mean, that's happening, you know, writ large in education. That's the biggest fear is that there are some colleges, I think it's the University of Texas in Austin, they're like, we're not even talking about policing AI anymore. That is off the table because we're beyond that. If we give learners authentic opportunities, we give them the skills to leverage AI appropriately. We connect those skills to what they'll be doing in the workplace. They're like, why wouldn't you do this? Why wouldn't you as a student want to engage in this? Because you see the value in it here and now. And then you see the downstream effects of it.
Paul Szmal: We're talking with Dave Gadoo, who is an assistant professor of computing sciences and a part of the FLCC's internal think tank on AI, which has different forms that people use, whether it's a chat, GPT, Gemini, Claude. There's a number of them out there and each one of them has their ups and downs, I would think.
Dave Ghidiu: They do, and, you know, I've been giving a talk all summer to different schools, colleges, conferences, and it's basically this slide. It has Claude and Gemini and Copilot and Meta and Perplex. It has all of them and there's arrows between them and they're all in a circle. And then there's this graphic that lights up that says you are here and it circles the best one. And I've been doing that. And every time I do the presentation, I have to change it because chat GPT dropped the latest version. Then Claude dropped the latest version. And I think I've gotten to the point where you're right, there is no right answer anymore. It's not there is a best one. I think part of AI literacy is understanding what the best tool for you is.
So the quick rundown is chat GPT and Gemini tend to be the best all around AI services. They can create images. They have great, thorough, deep research. They have remarkable interactions. The differentiator is the Google version, Google Gemini, their free tier allows you to do a little bit more. And then the other thing about Google, if you use Google Docs, Google Slides, Gmail, the integration is just out of this world.
Claude, which is made by a company named Anthropic, is really, really slick. If you want to have these deep conversations, you don't just want to answer, you want like a Socratic journey. And if you are in STEM, Claude is doing really wild things that will help you program. So in our AI for the Modern Educator, one of our courses is creating apps for your learners if you don't know how to code. And we will be using Claude for that because it can just make some really cool stuff. It can take your vision and make it into reality.
Perplexity is very factual based. It will give you attributions for every piece of content that it serves to you and every word that it serves to you. And then Meta AI, which formerly Facebook, that is very creative, especially their image generation. They just have tools that none of the other AI services have. And then there's the Microsoft Copilot, which is out there and it's integrated into the Microsoft suite. So if you prefer Word, Excel, PowerPoint, you might find value there. And some of the Microsoft Copilot models are actually using chat GPT under the hood anyhow.
Paul Szmal: And I wanted to, before we wrap up the conversation here, mention the once again, the AI for Educators course. It is a subscription based model that you referred to, Dave, and school districts can email Deborah Ortloff for customized pricing and to and or to deliver the content in person. And this, again, is an online at your own schedule course with one to three hours in length per class. Looks like this is a very well set up to tuck in nicely for educators who are, well, busy, but not too busy to be able to stay up on what's happening on the latest AI front.
Dave Ghidiu: Absolutely. And we recognize, I mean, we're all educators, too. We recognize just the how many responsibilities and the scheduling conflicts that come up with taking in-person classes. So that's why we've committed to not only one to three hours, but we never recycle courses because we know that one of our design principles is that AI changes every day. So next year we will be completely creating courses from scratch and they will address the latest and greatest AI topics and content.
Paul Szmal: All right, Dave, thanks so much for sharing all this information and breaking some of the AI down for us to understand what exactly is going on with it and where it's going.
Dave Ghidiu: My pleasure. And if I could just add heading over to flcc.edu slash AI, that's where you can read about the hub and the education component that we've been talking about.
Paul Szmal: Excellent. Excellent. Thank you, sir. Much appreciated. Have a great day.
Dave Ghidiu: You too. It is 8.51 on FLX morning.
