I just posted a significant bit of analysis for #SentientSyllabus, a proof of concept for personalized assignments.

https://sentientsyllabus.substack.com/p/assignment-and-agency

In the eighties, Benjamin Bloom (the Bloom of #Bloomstaxonomy) reported that one on one instruction can boost #studentperformance by two sigma! Ever since then, we have been searching for ways to scale this for our current realities in #education - but no breakthrough has appeared. Why are we not teaching this way if the results are so compelling? Because, as Bloom said: "it is too costly for most societies to bear on a large scale".

With the arrival of #generativeAI that limit will change.

I have worked out a proof of concept for personalized #assignment design that needs only a spreadsheet and ChatGPT. The spreadsheet builds a prompt that students can customize, ChatGPT writes out the assignment. No specialized software, technology, or third party involvement are needed.

Of course, the results need to be vetted - but the improvement becomes part of the learning process, and overall the process hands agency for learning back to the student: the assignment becomes theirs.

The proof of concept is done from the perspective of a #ComputationalBiology course I taught last year - but adapting it to other fields of #higherEd should be trivial. There is nothing inherently #STEM like in the approach - #humanities, #writing, #languageLearning ... there is no reason why this would not also work for other levels of education.

The potential is remarkable.

I encourage you to boost and share - this will be valuable for educators at all levels, and it will give us very concrete ways to harness the new opportunities. The key is #Agency .

:-)