By SUSAN JONES

There’s been plenty of movement and discussion lately on artificial intelligence in education.

The Learning Sciences & Emergent Technology Hub at Pitt wants to make sure that movement is in the the right direction for real learning.

The hub began about 2.5 years ago as  collaboration between the University Center for Teaching and Learning, the School of Computing and Information, the Learning Research and Development Center, the Institute for Learning, Health Sciences IT and the Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences’ English Department.

Recently, the Broadening Engagement in STEM Center from the Dietrich School was added to the group.

Jennifer Iriti, co-chair of the hub and assistant vice chancellor for research education and evaluation strategy, said the hub was the vision of former LRDC Director Chuck Perfetti, former Teaching Center Director Mike Bridges and SCI Dean Bruce Childers.

They saw that AI and other emerging technologies were “rolling out at a very, very rapid pace,” Iriti said, and knew these technologies were likely to disrupt education in many ways, on different levels.

“And all three felt that it was really important that as these emergent technologies come into mainstream, that there’s some brains working on keeping what we know about how humans learn, learning sciences principles, human development principles at the center of how we negotiate and adapt how these emergent technologies are going to live within our teaching and learning here at Pitt in particular.”

Since then, the hub has held an IDEA Lab on generative AI, as part of the Year of Discourse and Dialogue, and produced a generative AI competency framework that is appropriate for higher ed.

Now, organizers want to go a step further, with the help of a Pitt Momentum Funds teaming grant that Iriti and others were awarded last year. Iriti, Childers and John Radzilowicz, the Teaching Center’s director of pedagogy, practice, & assessment, serve as co-chairs of the hub.

The latest project is designed to scale up some of the work happening in pockets around the University and create a space “where people come together around a shared problem of practice, and we codesign solutions,” Iriti said.

Over the past five months, the Momentum Funds have allowed the team to gather lots of data, from national research and hyper local. “What can we learn about conditions here at Pitt around generative AI? And in particular, what are the problems of practice and the opportunities that folks see around generative AI in teaching here?” she said. This has involved doing surveys and interviews with students and faculty.

An April 22 event will bring together educators, learning scientists and technologists to start to address some of these problems of practice. “Co-Designing Teaching for a Gen AI World, Together” — from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. April 22 at Alumni Hall’s Connelly Ballroom — will be the kickoff event for ongoing work on generative AI issues.

In addition to people at the university level, this convening will try to break down silos between high school and college. Teams from regional high schools will be invited to participate in the April 22 event and in subsequent problem solving.

“What’s been happening is that K-12 is trying to figure this stuff out around generative AI in the classroom on their own, higher ed is trying to figure it out, and we think it’s really important for the region for us to have a more linkages and coherence across that pathway between high school and college, to support students in their transition, so that what they encounter at the high school level around generative AI practices and policy and literacy isn’t just abruptly different when they come to our doors at Pitt,” Iriti said.

The “Co-Designing Teaching” event will feature general information in the morning about goals of the project, learning science principles and key problems of practice the researchers have identified.

“Then by the midday, we will invite people to choose a problem of practice that they want to work on,” she said, with each group having a learning scientist and technologist. “We’re not going to put people in groups. The idea is they’re going to locate themselves in a space that they would like to invest some blood, sweat and tears in trying to solve, and that would bring value to their classrooms or their organizations.”

Once these groups are formed, they’ll have six months to come up with ideas and solutions to their specific problem of practice.

One really common problem is with writing, which instructors use as a process to help students develop their thinking and as a product to show what students have learned. Now, instructors are “no longer sure, is it person or machine producing this content. And so it upends a lot of how you have to design and implement your course.”

Another issue is when students use AI in their research to search for sources. If they don’t know how the AI tool they’re using operates then it’s hard to evaluate the results that they’re being given.

Iriti said some people in Pitt’s English department have been working on innovative solutions to this.

“We’re not advocating generative AI or AI all the time,” she said. “We actually take a more deliberate stance in that we have to think about what the learning goals are, and using learning sciences principles and principles of human development, determine if any AI tools are appropriate, and what advantages or disadvantages could come from engaging with them in different ways.”

Some of ideas for solutions are going to fail, Iriti said, “but there’s a lot of learning to be had within a failure, like what didn’t work? Why didn’t it work? And that gives us some direction of new angles to take, new solutions to try. Other groups might have found some good success, but need to sort of tweak or refine what they tried. … And others may have found heck, this worked great.”

After the ideas are tested, the results will be packaged and made available more broadly at Pitt and with high schools in the region.

“We’re really excited to build on and extend the work that lots of other folks at Pitt have been doing for some time,” Iriti said. “There’s so much great work, and we hope that work will be elevated and extended through this work. We see this as complementary and extending it as another venue for getting down in the weeds now and trying to solve some problems.”

Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.

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