Episode 120: Rise of the AI with Dr. Lee D. Lambert, Chancellor of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District
Dr. Lee D. Lambert is Chancellor of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District. Lambert is a visionary leader who has served as a senior-level community college executive for over two decades.
Prior to Foothill-De Anza, Lambert served as chancellor of Pima Community College in Tucson, Arizona, where he led a transformation of the college into Centers of Excellence in applied technology, health care, hospitality, information technology and cybersecurity, public safety, and the arts.
Dr. Lambert is a dynamic advocate for diversity, equity and inclusion, student success, and community engagement. He also believes and invests in employee professional development and growth to better serve students and the community.
AI’s Impact on Routine Tasks and Human Skills
Other than things that require physical labor can be replaced by AI. AI is going to be more efficient and effective on that side of the spectrum. When regarding professions such as lawyers and accountants where AI will also have an impact on those professions. The thing that is going to become critical is making sure that human skills to not replaced by AI. This includes communication, conflict resolution, creativity, and teamwork. How do we infuse the make that even more robust if an experience? Liberal arts is going to especially become more critical than ever because what is most important is what makes us human becomes more valuable. The augmentation of tech of AI and the emerging technologies in partnership with us as humans. We have to have the right educational foundation to optimize our human talents. For things like sound judgment and discretion, AI is not going to be able to make difficult decisions that only a human can make at this point.
AI in Education: Personalized Learning & Imparting Knowledge
Most of the time, professors are so busy with their tasks that they do not have a lot of time to help every student. They want to have more personalized teaching tailored to each student but due to time in their day, they cannot always make it happen. Sometimes the professor takes extra time to help the students in need too but that is not always the case. With AI, their time will be freed up so they can help. An instructor does have to teach and can work on personalizing learning for their students. AI allows you to scale that experience. You can take the AI and scale it to a thousand students. and then allow the teacher to have a greater impact. For example, when you are reading, you are getting immediate feedback and that is because the AI is learning the student’s understanding of the materials. Due to the interactions with the AI, the AI can ask key questions along the way to test comprehension. When it comes to writing, will the students be able to integrate what they have read into their writing? That is very hard for one faculty member to do for lots of students but AI can enable that.
Rethinking Education: Integrating AI and Immersive Learning
For the vast majority of people, there is no substitute for hands-on immersive learning, there is just getting in there and doing it. Through the process, there is trial and error. Learning does not happen in 50-minute blocks. Say one student has English class for 50 minutes then math for 50 minutes and so on. That is not how learning works. We need to structure learning in a different around a problem. The faculty helps the students understand taking different disciplines integrated around thinking about the problem. That is how we should think about the curriculum. Now that we think about the Power of AI, and then think about the role of the teacher, can we create that kind of learning, immersive experience? We already communicate with our fellow students and have conversations about things by constantly interacting and working in teams. We need to amplify that with AI as a companion to the teacher and then AI as a companion to the student. That way the students can learn better and the teacher can assist their students better.
Contact Dr. Lee D. Lambert
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lee-lambert-a3a51142
Learn more about the Foothill-De Anza Community College District
Website: https://www.fhda.edu/
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