Coming April 2, 2024

A Teacher’s Guide to Conversational AI

By David A. Joyner

 

A Teacher’s Guide to Conversational AI explores the practical role that language-based artificial intelligence tools play in classroom teaching, learning experiences, and student assessment. Today’s educators are well aware that conversational and generative AI—chatbots, intelligent tutoring systems, large language models, and more—represent a complex new factor in teaching and learning. This introductory primer offers comprehensive, novice-friendly guidance into the challenges and opportunities of incorporating AI into K-12 schools and college classes in ways that are appropriate, nourishing to students, and outcomes-driven.

Opening with an informative overview of the foundational properties, key terminology, and ethical considerations of these tools, the book offers a coherent and realistic vision of classrooms that are enhanced, rather than stymied, by AI systems. This includes strategies for:

• designing assessments that are conducive to students’ beneficial use of AI while mitigating overreliance or dishonesty
• using AI to generate lesson examples for student critique or custom content that reinforces course principles
• leveraging chatbots as a co-instructor or a tutor, a guide during student-driven learning, a virtual debate or brainstorming partner, and a design project
• creating course content, lesson plans and activities, expanded language and accessibility options, and beyond

Through the depth of understanding and applied approach provided in these chapters, teachers and leaders in training and in service, alongside private tutors, college instructors, and other educators, will be better prepared to future-proof their efforts to serve new generations of learners.

Released October 25, 2022

Teaching at Scale

By David A. Joyner

 

Teaching at Scale explores the characteristics and parameters of large-scale online learning by identifying, in its perceived drawbacks, a wealth of educational opportunities in disguise. Scalable learning platforms have exploded in popularity over recent years, with MOOCS (massive open online courses), online degree programs, informal learning communities, and alternative credentials all drawing significant enrollments. But, as many educators are asking, are the challenges to delivering education at scale too great and the compromises too many? This book guides instructors to leverage their complex responsibilities—open-ended assessments at scale, individuated feedback to students, academic integrity in less controlled environments, and more—into significant assets. Informed by real-world institutional experience as well as key research in cognitive science and the learning sciences, each chapter provides practical strategies for educators and administrators seeking to solve problems and fulfill the high-quality, broad-access potential of large-scale instruction for lifelong learners.

Released September 14, 2021

The Distributed Classroom

By David A. Joyner and Charles Isbell

 

A vision of the future of education in which the classroom experience is distributed across space and time without compromising learning.

What if there were a model for learning in which the classroom experience was distributed across space and time–and students could still have the benefits of the traditional classroom, even if they can’t be present physically or learn synchronously? In this book, two experts in online learning envision a future in which education from kindergarten through graduate school need not be tethered to a single physical classroom. The distributed classroom would neither sacrifice students’ social learning experience nor require massive development resources. It goes beyond hybrid learning, so ubiquitous during the COVID-19 pandemic, and MOOCs, so trendy a few years ago, to reimagine the classroom itself.

David Joyner and Charles Isbell, both of Georgia Tech, explain how recent developments, including distance learning and learning management systems, have paved the way for the distributed classroom. They propose that we dispense with the dichotomy between online and traditional education, and the assumption that online learning is necessarily inferior. They describe the distributed classroom’s various delivery modes for in-person students, remote synchronous students, and remote asynchronous students; the goal would be a symmetry of experiences, with both students and teachers able to move from one mode to another. With The Distributed Classroom, Joyner and Isbell offer an optimistic, learner-centric view of the future of education, in which every person on earth is turned into a potential learner as barriers of cost, geography, and synchronicity disappear.

Released January 8, 2016

Introduction to Computing

By David A. Joyner

Introduction to Computing is the textbook companion to a series of courses built for Georgia Tech’s online CS1301: Introduction to Computing. The series is designed to take you from no computer science background whatsoever to proficiency in the basics of computing and programming, specifically in the popular programming language Python. Rated as one of the most in-demand and beginner-friendly programming languages, Python training will give you a solid foundation not only for Python code but for further studies in computer science.

The book is available for free at the download link below.