Dave Cormier

An Interview with Dave Cormier Teacher, Researcher and Author

With 25 years of experience as teacher, researcher and author, Dave Cormier is among Canada’s leading instructional imagineers. He is interested in how technologies change what it means to learn and to have learned. He is currently Director (interim), Curriculum Development and Delivery, Open Learning, Thompson Rivers University, British Columbia, Canada, and the author of Learning in a Time of Abundance: The Community is the Curriculum (John Hopkins University Press, 2024).

Q: How has AI impacted teaching and learning?

Dave: I think the most dramatic shift that I've seen in the last couple of years, especially with my own students (I teach in the Bachelor of Education program), is a kind of inadvertent anti-intellectualism — the idea that in getting a degree, they're very much in a negotiation position around a contract that they've signed to get an outcome that they're looking for: they want good grades and a pass. The learning process, for them, is perceived as a sequence of tasks that are part of that contract. It’s learning perceived more like digging a ditch with a shovel than becoming something new or more than you were before.

This has always been part of education. And I think it's a pendulum swing to some degree. There are a number of trends that influence it. In Canada, for instance, we've moved toward students securing an automatic scholarship based on their final grade in high school. This creates an environment where assessing a student is seen as potentially taking money away from their parents, if by assessment we mean giving somebody a grade lower than 100.

This is part of what has led to increasing rigidity inside the education system at all levels. I think the science of learning is contributing to this too. There’s certainly a place in our education system for the information-processing view of learning, but it tends to teach people how to be the best at obeying. The research in that end of education is often how quickly or how effectively can something solve a problem. Which is fine when we’re learning about problems that can be solved. This is what governments want to hear, because these people are coming to the governments with answers to solve their education problems. They see testing and grades as markers of success, not learning and student engagement.

“Students are now less interested in deep-learning and engaged learning and more interested in compliance and grades.”

There is an irony here: workforce-informed learning approaches, which is what governments say they want, are actually very collaborative and very constructivist. These approaches are decried by many science of learning folks (see Kirschner), and what we are doing in schools, colleges and universities is to take a very rigid contractual approach to the way we teach and assess students. When you take these trends as a package, I think they contribute to students now less interested in deep-learning and engaged learning and more interested in compliance and grades.

All that being said, in five years, I see us getting further down this path, supported by a range of AI-related interventions.

I don't see a pathway back from the “go to school to get a job” toward “go to school to learn, create and explore.” Given the seeming unwillingness of students to write, or read, or pursue ideas because they are interesting, we're going to end up with degrees or diplomas that look and feel very similar, with choice and creativity and imagination becoming less of a feature of higher education than it was just 25 years ago. And I do mean seeming. I think we’ve created the student body that we currently have.

I worry about how we can do pedagogy in the classroom given that range and breadth of unlearning that we still need to do. It takes me about a month to help my students unlearn their assumption that they are here to learn about a task or an approach or a step-by-step process — training. I need them to begin to see learning as exploration, creation, imagination understanding — as in “here's some things about yourself you need to understand.” I find it increasingly difficult to help students want to learn. They have been trained to want training.

Q: So, how does AI help here — or does it get in the way?

Dave: For the last 25 years or so, we've been slipping in terms of what our generic student assignments would do in terms of teaching students to do things. We have been encouraging them to use Google search and other sources online and they have become good at giving us back what we have already presented to them.

Now we've got a tool — GenAI (ChatGPT, Clause, Gemini, etc.) — that not only accesses all that information, but packages it into a neat little package tied up with a bow. Students can do less and get more. The only way these students are really going to learn and own their learning in five years is if we can convince them to want to. This is the opposite of the direction that we are seeing taken in many circumstances. Too often the decision is either “try and track AI and force them not to use it” or “let’s use AI to do the same assignments we were doing 25 years ago.” Neither of these solutions are going to encourage students to be creative in our classrooms (if that’s what we want).

Q: So what can instructors do?

Dave: Now you know there's a problem. Now can we talk about what we can do about it? And I'm going to tell you that the advice I would give you is the exact same advice I would have given you 20 years ago. We each need to set about building a classroom that students can care about learning in and come to it wanting to learn, understand, explore, engage and develop insight and understanding.

“The biggest thing Gen-AI does is it opens up this conversation.”

Q: How should we reimagine teaching, learning and assessment?

Dave: Some instructors will tell me that they have 400 students in a first-year course, which is true for all sorts of courses. We need to adjust and reimagine the work of learning for those students. There are pathways that universities can afford, though it's now much tougher, especially given the marketplace and given what governments have done to universities in terms of support and resources, which has to be part of this conversation. There's a pathway there, but it involves us imagining that students are responsible for their own work. They have to own and become responsible for their own learning. The biggest thing Gen-AI does is it opens up this conversation: How should we reimagine teaching, learning and assessment? It is a conversation we can no longer avoid. This takes us back to the purpose of a college or university education.

Q: Can you give an example of how an instructor could activate such a pathway?

Dave: So when you have a conversation with somebody about learning, inevitably they will talk about grades. And then if you ask them about how those get made, they sort of try to squirrel away from it because people don't want to admit that the whole system is a fabrication. As long as we have some formalized process we can blame, whether it be national accreditation, provincial accreditation, the curriculum, the faculty-approved syllabus, quality assurance regimes — then we can decide not to change. It helps us avoid challenging our thinking about teaching, learning and assessment and maintain “business as usual.” Yet Gen-AI developments are demanding we ask difficult questions about our work.

I talk a lot about effort-based grading, which some educators find confronting — they want conforming rubrics. I would far rather have a way of trying to judge how much work someone's doing than care about whether or not they have conformed to the compliance activity that I assigned. Having students conform to my will is not what I think education is.  We need to encourage and enable self-directed, engaged learning and teachers as coaches, mentors and guides.

“We need to learn how to sit down with people and connect with them beyond their desire for good grades and really create learning experiences that help them grow.”

Increasingly we need to talk about instructional design. How do we convince instructors and designer to do things to promote engaged learning? But for me, instructional design right now is pinning its hopes on the science of learning, pinning its hopes on research proving and somehow believing in a culture where people are actively not listening, engaging, seeking understanding and looking for meaning and purpose. We need to learn how to sit down with people and connect with them beyond their desire for good grades and really create learning experiences that help them grow. Instructional designers need to learn how to find out who their students are as people and help them get one step further down the road of their learning journey.

That's not what I see out there. What I see is here's a model like ADDIE, apply the model, do the thing. And I think we need to move away from this and move over to the humanities and way further away from the social sciences in terms of our approach to designing learning.

Q: Taking a long view – what do you see happening?

Dave: I think that larger view of the shifts that we've been making and the way that we relate to knowledge and the way that we access information to solve problems is changing, but how we teach and learn is not. Over the next 25 years, we need to see major shifts in what colleges and universities do and to focus more on developing engaged, imaginative, innovative, creative learners with purpose.

In short, we need to see our students very differently, teach them differently and assess them authentically. It's going to be tough, since so many instructors and students are locked into the training model of what we do. Its time to change.