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  • Hacker News
  • - 2. Guiding Principles

    - 2.1. Be humble

    - 2.2. Be bold

    - 2.3. Put humanity front and center

    - 2.4. Lean into learning

    - 2.5. Teach with intentionality

    - 2.6. No one size fits all

    - 2.7. Augmentation not automation

    - 2.8. Think beyond the classroom and the campus

    - 3. Recommendations

    - 3.1. Adapt educational processes for an AI-aware world

    - 3.1.1. Revisit course goals

    - 3.1.2. Ensure durable learning through new course policies, structures, and forms of assessment

    - 3.1.3. Emphasize experiential and project-based learning

    - 3.1.4. Build structured in-person social learning into subjects

    - 3.1.5. Preserve and expand out-of-class research and career experiences

    - 3.1.6. Reconsider grades and incentives

    - 3.1.7. Expand in-person spaces for labs and in-person evaluation

    - 3.1.8. Provide AI use policies, with justification

    - 3.1.9. Exercise caution with AI detectors and online exam platforms

    - 3.1.10. Support responsible experimentation in the curriculum

    - 3.2. Center people, community, and the residential experience

    - 3.2.1. Define and communicate the value of residential education

    - 3.2.2. Strengthen social connection and personal wellbeing

    - 3.2.3. Encourage instructor disclosure around their own AI use

    - 3.2.4. Teach effective, responsible, and ethical use of AI

    - 3.2.5. Recognize and mitigate negative impacts of AI

    - 3.2.6. Acknowledge AI use in theses and other research work

    - 3.3. Build processes, teams, and tools for continuous reflection, iteration, and improvement

    - 3.3.1. Establish an ongoing AI and education committee

    - 3.3.2. Create school/college- or department-level AI Leads

    - 3.3.3. Fund AI Fellows and an AI Implementation Team

    - 3.3.4. Create an AI Pilot Fund

    - 3.3.5. Provide ongoing training and instructor support

    - 3.3.6. Develop metrics

    - 3.3.7. Ensure equitable technology access

    - 3.3.8. Protect sensitive data and preserve model choice

    - 3.3.9. Establish privacy, logging, and auditing policies

    - 3.3.10. Monitor AI costs and environmental impact

    - 4. Conclusion

    by reagle
  • Was expecting something more concrete with a set of deliverables that can actually be acted on.
    by zerolayers
  • "Since AI excels at tasks like coding and some types of design, instructors can now assign projects that are much more ambitious." --> it's quite true.

    For example, we never had time to learn well for example CI/CD in my years.

    It's something that takes time to build (feedback loop is around 10 to 20 min for pipelines, instead of 1 min when coding something), and become quite costly for trial and error in term of time.

    But it's now 60% of my work as DevOps Engineer, and a big part of other devs/lead devs work. They are a lot of good and bad practices.

    We could imagine a class to learn about how to build proper CI/CD pipelines and experiment --> philosophies, different patterns, testing different caching strategy, etc

    by ygouzerh
  • I do like that they're open to reconsidering the grading paradigm wholesale. I taught at a boot camp for a while and our highest-placed cohorts were the ones to whom we gave neither grades nor certificates. They plainly understood the game was between them and an eventual interviewer, not them and the school or instructor.
    by beej71
  • There's no magic rule that you have to give grades. A few colleges don't and MIT doesn't for the (I think) first term.
    by ghaff
  • "Be bold" by saying nothing of any interest. I have to agree that this is basically just fluff.

    Anyone put it into pangram yet?

    by phasefactor
  • 97% human-written
    by 16bitvoid
  • This is a bunch of fluff. I hope at least the snacks and lunches during the discussions were good.

    "Guiding principles: Be bold. Be humble. Put humanity front and center. Lean into learning. Teach with intentionality. No one size fits all."

    "Recommendations: Adapt educational processes for an AI-aware world. Center people, community, and the residential experience. Build processes, teams and tools for continuous reflection, iteration, and improvement"

    by testfoobar
  • What human writes, "This is not a moment for patches and duct tape."

    Is that AI or just horribly clichéd writing?

    by jsrozner
  • > This is a bunch of fluff.

    Accurate description.

    by jceg
  • They have to do something. There's a cheating epidemic right now everywhere.

    I think the axis of AI in Ed should be, use it to super-charge learning, while assessment should be impossible to outsource to AI.

    Verbal exams.

    by dpweb
  • It's going to be difficult not to be "fluffy" as no one really knows the true impact and what's going to happen. And it's especially challenging for universities as voices questioning the value of higher education will only grow louder.
    by rpaik
  • They have always dressed it up as concerned humanitarianism. They did it already with large donations in the past:

    https://www.philanthropy.com/news/can-a-350-million-gift-cha...

    All concerns, while the real goal is stated right in the article:

    "With this new approach, he says, experts in many fields can gain a deeper understanding of AI so they can better harness it. Meanwhile, computing experts are gaining greater exposure to the work of their counterparts in other fields. That exposure is giving the technologists a better understanding of how to create and train AI tools to better serve others."

    I'm sure they will have many meetings about future meetings.

    by 123h-asdg
  • I don't agree? By the time you get to the specific policy sections (3.x.x) there are concrete changes outlined in bold, several of which are requests for the institute to invest large amounts of resources changing the current teaching process. Even the non-bolded text occasionally contains real insights, like this gem from the end of 3.1.9:

    > Students should not feel policed. Durable change will require instructors to be as clear as possible about their expectations and students to understand AI misuse as an unacceptable deviation from shared peer norms and community values rather than a violation of an arbitrary bureaucratic rule.

    by cptroot
  • I thought the recommendations in section 3 were substantiative. That is move away from time-bound exams and move towards semester length project portfolios.

         >"In the era of AI, some traditional learning goals may merit rethinking; for example, do the majority of our students need to be able to write complex programs by hand?"

     >"quick, high-stakes evaluations embody the opposite of the signal we want to convey to them right now."

     >"We urge instructors to consider forms of assessment that are less vulnerable to AI, and more valuable for learning, such as oral exams, semester portfolios, and out-of-class assignments paired with in-class conversations. This likely means resources such as TAs and class time will become more central to evaluation."
    by rawgabbit
  • Yes, but as a K-12 administrator, I sadly have to tell you this is just about one of the more substantive things I have seen.

    Yes, it's 95% fluff, but there is a real admission here that the guidance really ought to accept that there will be a whole host of tasks/assignments that kids engage in where the assumption SHOULD be that they basically will leverage AI, and that for their own benefit, resources should be set aside to promote experiences -- both in the context of assessments but also even in the social sphere -- there the influence of AI will be very purposefully prevented.

    That is an actual stake in the ground, I think (as far as it goes in context like this). I think I would have been hard-pressed to have predicted that there would be such a revolutionary technology where the explicit ask of MIT faculty would be to prevent its influence in the school.

    by ChicagoBoy11
  • You can think what you like about MIT, but at least they're giving it some thought, however perfunctory it may seem. Many German universities prefer to try and ignore the issue and hope for the best.
    by UJ-FLD-ScrTr
  • How is this interesting? Sincerely?

    Tell us more about how MIT giving AI some thought compares superiorly to 'many German universities', and please tell us more about which German universities and in which circumstances.

    by ncr100
  • This seems to have touched a nerve, based on the number of downvotes.

    In this particular case that makes the message more trustworthy for me ;-)

    by DataDive
  • I mostly think about what they did to Aaron Swartz.
    by CalRobert
  • I think you can tell who still has the ability to read long form content by whether they thought this was full of fluff or decently actionable. I think the bolded parts of section 3 are definitely not fluff. I found the document pretty interesting.
    by losvedir
  • Yes, only MIB (Massachusetts Institute of Bureaucracy) alumni have the capacity of understanding such an august publication!
    by 21wa
  • It can be both full of fluff and have actionable take aways.

    This is dozens of pages long and reading it thoroughly will net you maybe a dozen useful sentences. That ratio is the problem people are complaining about.

    by phasefactor
  • I'm surprised at the negative comments here. I'm about halfway done reading the report - I think it's clear, well written, and quite frankly the opposite of fluff.

    A document like this isn't going to magically "solve" the use of AI in higher education. The purpose is to define a shared understanding of the situation across a large, complex organization, and set an initial direction and general shape for actions to take.

    It contains clear, specific observations of how AI is organically changing the reality of education. And, in my opinion, fairly clear high-level guidance on what MIT as an entity wants to do about AI, and what individual departments and faculty should decide on their own.

    A document like this doesn't need to be revolutionary, it may feel like fluff because no specific item in it is particularly surprising or groundbreaking, but the value is in having the entire document as a whole. And it is a lot more comprehensive and well thought out than what most companies can put out.

    by alex_c
  • I think this has been going on well before AI or LLMs: "A fundamental danger, as we’ve discussed, is that AI can allow students to bypass learning. Equally concerning is that students may internalize a transactional model in which assignments are outputs, teachers are evaluators, peers are optional, and knowledge (or an MIT degree) is an optimizable commodity to be acquired or produced as efficiently as possible."
    by us-merul
  • Ok, but did AI and LLMs make the cheating easier, faster, harder to detect? Whatabout the past doesn't change the problems now.

    "My leg already had a cut on it. No need to worry about the new stab wound in my chest!"

    by miltonlost
  • > In a listening session with instructors, we learned that some were considering using AI agents as research assistants instead of hiring undergraduates as UROPs.

    If researchers at a well funded institution like MIT are seriously considering replacing hiring undergrads with LLMs, I can just imagine how researchers at schools with less funding are open to it. I never did research as part of my undergrad (something I regret, but I likely wasn’t in the headspace for it back then) but my friends who did view it as a core part of their education and deeply helpful for future opportunities. I really hope schools come up with a policy to help discourage this.

    by JLO64
  • If you know how to use an agent, and I do, you can have do in minutes what would take a undergrad all summer to do.

    But undergrad research has always served two roles: getting my work done and the pleasure of giving the best students the chance to go beyond the curriculum, which is designed for the average student.

    I think the impact of AI on undergrad research opportunities will be zero. The bigger impact is reduced science funding. I have directed lots of PhD student grant funding to undergrads who deserved it. I don’t see myself doing that in the near future.

    by cs_throwaway