A growing number of colleges are giving their students and professors free access to pro versions of AI tools, even as some professors and students worry about potential negative consequences of the technology. Jeff traveled to Duke University to talk to Evan Levine, senior director of IT services and support, and Michael Faber, assistant director of the Innovation Co-Lab to hear their philosophy behind their DukeGPT initiative. And he chats with a student as well, Muke Akume.

If students are already prone to check out in school, it really doesn’t help to look over and see students secretly having ChatGPT do their work for them. The co-author of the new book on student disengagement in school, Rebecca Winthrop, is encouraging debate on how to adopt AI in a way that turns more kids into “explorers” rather than “passengers” in their learning.

A former university president is trying to reimagine college teaching with AI in mind, and this year he released an unusual video that provides a kind of artist’s sketch of what that could look like. For this episode, I talk through the video with that leader, Paul LeBlanc, and get some reaction to the model from longtime teaching expert Maha Bali, a professor of practice at the Center for Learning and Teaching at the American University in Cairo.

To suss out the best way to use AI in education, it’s important to figure out what makes ChatGPT and other new AI tools tick. After all, the ‘thinking’ that generative AI does is different than human thinking. That’s the argument of Mutlu Cukurova, who wrote a paper calling for building ‘hybrid intelligences’ that blends the strengths of humans and AI, rather than quickly replacing tasks that teachers and tutors do with AI models.

Teachers and students can't help wondering ... what are we doing here? What's the role of education when AI seems able to do tasks that once seemed uniquely human. The goal of Learning Curve is to inform a conversation about what it means to learn, whether AI could improve education, and which learning needs protecting amid the AI gold rush. Look for the first episode August 20.