Brent Warner 0:00
What’s happening in the California community colleges around AI? There’s a lot happening right now, and we’ll do our best to break it down on this episode of the higher ed tech podcast.

Tim Van Norman 0:22
Well, welcome to today’s higher ed tech Podcast. I’m Tim Van Norman, the Interim Assistant Director of Technology Services at Irvine Valley College, an adjunct professor of business at Cypress College.

Brent Warner 0:32
And I’m Brent Warner, Professor of ESL here at IVC. We both enjoy integrating technology into the classroom, which is what this show is all about.

Tim Van Norman 0:40
Welcome. We’re glad you’re here with us. Woo.

Brent Warner 0:44
All right. So lots of stuff happening recently. Tim around the AI stuff, oh

Tim Van Norman 0:50
man, last week was the AI summit, the Future Summit that you guys were at. There’s just so many different things going on Absolutely. And every time we turn around, there’s another email that I get 20 times from different people asking if I know about it,

Brent Warner 1:07
yeah, I know it’s like, it’s always a little like, how do you respond to that? When you’re like, Yeah, I know. You know every, every time, but yeah, there’s, there’s just a lot going on people are trying to share, which is great. And so I was able to go up to the Future Summit, up in Santa Clara, and it was a, it was not super big. So Tim, we kind of last time we mentioned, well, maybe we do a show about this, about the futures summit alone, but we decided there’s just so many announcements going on that maybe we’ll just kind of squeeze it in a little bit closer. So it, it was probably, I have no idea how to count the numbers, but I would say about 500 people or so. And so it was kind of like a little bit close to medium ish size conference, I guess, right? Small to small to medium sized conference. But lots of action going on there, the futures Summit. This is the second one. And so it’s really kind of all about integrating AI into higher ed institutions. What we want to do? What do we not want to do? What do we want to think about? All of those kinds of things. And so I thought I would just kind of highlight a couple of the things that stood out to me as interesting. And if anybody wants to know more, you can always reach out to me for more information later. But Tim, unfortunately, you were not able to go this time.

Tim Van Norman 2:28
Yeah, I too busy working on my job that actually pays the bills instead of having fun. Yeah.

Brent Warner 2:36
And so anyways, I was able to go and the opening session, you know, was from Chancellor, Christian of the chancellor, state chancellor of the California Community Colleges. You know, she was great. She had a lot of, you know, she, she really seemed to have her head wrapped around a lot of the concepts and, you know, trying to see what’s going on. So I really appreciated, you know, she was leading with a positive vision of AI really kind of saying, like, hey, there are ways that we can work with these things. There are a lot of really cool opportunities. Are we keeping all of these things in mind? Because, you know, as we all know, it’s easy to go on the other side too, where it’s like, Hey, this is there’s problems here. There’s definitely problems and so, so for the most part, she was keeping it positive. And then, you know, I tried to balance out the sessions that I went to as best as I could. It’s, it’s always tricky. But there were a couple of ones that were great because they were kind of focused on humanities and AI. And so I know that that kind of continues to be a sticking point for many of us, who are, you know, humanities or humanities adjacent. And so it’s like, well, how do we use these things with our students? How do we understand? And so one of the sessions was with Fabiola Torres, and she’s, you know, her name pops up all the time. She’s great. Has a lot of really good insights on these things. And so, you know, they were really thoughtful about talking about ideas on ways that, you know, we can use AI in the humanities. And again, those those stories are out there in the world. And so I’m not going to get super into it right now, but it was useful to sit in and kind of hear different perspectives on those things. And then another one that was good. There were a number of presenters on it. They’re mostly, they were panels. So what they would do is, you would go into the room, they would have a panel of, you know, four or five people, and then they would discuss the topics. And so Rodrigo Gomez, who, who we had come speak at our school about a year ago. He, he was on that panel talking about policy, and they’re just kind of sharing out how different schools are building their policies, how classroom teachers might approach what they’re trying to do, and mix it. And Tim, that’s a lot of the conversation you and I have been having with our AI task force as well as like, Well, how do we. Deal with this, right? Because it moves so fast, and it, you know, things change so quickly, that by the time you really build a policy, it’s almost kind of too

Tim Van Norman 5:08
late, right? Absolutely, and we’re looking at it at a district level as well. It’s all of that all wrapped together so good. I’m glad we had, you had some insight from Rodrigo on that one, yeah,

Brent Warner 5:21
it was nice. And then the last one that I’ll mention here, it was just incredibly powerful. So there’s a professor, Safiya noble, and she interviewed a a journalist named Karen Howe, who used to be an engineer in Silicon Valley, and so kind of had an insider’s perspective. Now I will say it was pretty dark, because she she went the other direction and really talked about the problems, not so much the problems with AI, but with the corporations that are running AI. And so she has this book, I think it’s called empire of AI or something like that. But it was really, really really thoughtful, and really broke down what’s going on with like the corporations, and what they’re doing and how they’re, you know, in some ways, maybe selling snake oil and really trying to, you know, promote that this is the final solution for everything, and we’ll never have another problem again once we get it all sorted out, you know. And that’s how the companies kind of talk about it. The thing that I really, really liked, the the message that stuck, stuck with me is, you know, she was talking about how it’s, you know, essentially, really irresponsible of us to use large language models for small, simple tasks that can be done with without as much, you know, the level of training and the the and so she, she was basically advocating for small language models, which is another thing you and I have talked I have talked about quite a bit, but the idea was essentially, she said, Well, if you’re going to work, do you need to take a rocket to work? Or can you take a bicycle? Right? And when we talk about transportation, we don’t just say we need more transportation. We break it down, and we look at how we’re we’re actually needing that use of transportation, right? So she’s like, rockets versus bicycles, right? When do you need a rocket? Very, very rarely. When do you need a bicycle or, you know, a car or something like that. That takes away less energy out, you know, out of everything, a lot more often, right? And probably you need a car less often than we really think we do, right? We’ve trained ourselves for this, but it was just a fascinating thing, because she’s essentially saying, AI can do all of these things on a much, much, much lower impact, you know, to people, personally, to the environment, to all of these things. And so you don’t have to say that AI is not good. We have to say, are we using it in a way that’s ethical and responsible? And you know, do we have to be riding the rocket every time we want to do the tiniest little thing, or can we find other ways that work better? And so Tim, I think you and I will kind of be keeping that in mind as we keep building our ideas forward too.

Tim Van Norman 8:00
Absolutely, I love that. I love that it’s coming out at a larger conversation, yeah, as well. And we’re starting to hear a lot more about those small language models. Yeah. So one

Brent Warner 8:12
last thing, we’re going to jump to the next one, but we’ll say this announcement was made at the Future Summit. So, so our next topic here is about Google and the California Community Colleges. And Google came out on stage and made this announcement in front of everybody, and so we’re going to talk about how Google and the California Community Colleges are partnering.

Tim Van Norman 8:33
Yeah, it’s this whole thing. As I said. You know earlier, we’re constantly getting emails from people, Hey, have you seen this? And this was a huge one. No cost, access to cutting edge AI tools. Now this is something specific Google and the California Community Colleges. I haven’t heard if it’s happening other places, but that’s amazing all faculty and classified professionals will receive access to Gemin, the Gemini app with data protections, including FERPA compliance. That’s great. That alone is worth mentioning, all by itself, and there’s more to come.

Brent Warner 9:18
Yeah, yeah. So just being able to get all that stuff is really wonderful. The FERPA compliant side of it is super important. And so, so if you’re kind of like, hey, what tool should I use? And if you’re in the California Community Colleges, Gemini might be the option for you, because if you can get that depth of use, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of value to that. So next, especially

Tim Van Norman 9:39
because it includes notebook. Lm, yeah, yes, we know that it does, but it’s nice that they actually specifically mentioned notebook.

Brent Warner 9:48
Lm, yeah, so they said Just to follow up on that guided learning, custom AI prompts, the gems that they have in their deep research reports, notebook, LM, and more. So a lot of CU. Things inside of that absolutely Next up was no cost access to training. So I thought this is cool too, right? Like, they have all their like Google training courses in the past. You know, a lot of times Google is charged for their trainings, right? It’s like, Hey, you want to take this course, you want to get certified, you want to get whatever else it is. And so they’re offering a lot of these ones here. Tim, I see on this list, Google career certificates, AI, essentials, prompting essentials. You know, those are the type of things and and not only for faculty, but also for students, right? So, hey, anybody who’s saying, Hey, I recognize that I’m going to need some level of understanding of these things right there for you for free, I think that’s going to be really useful for a lot of people.

Tim Van Norman 10:43
Oh, absolutely, then specifically also for faculty and students. But curriculum integration, Google and the Chancellor’s Office collaborate with faculty to incorporate or integrate all these certificate programs and AI in the courses.

Brent Warner 11:01
Yeah, wow, yeah. So, so that way, like it could be its own course tied in, you, I don’t, I don’t know what all the fine details of that are, but, but, you know, we could see some really interesting opportunities. And then the last one here is faculty development. So enhanced faculty development, they’re saying here that, you know, we’ll get training programs, professional development resources and implementation playbooks for using all of these things. And so a lot of that is really, you know, going to be giving people opportunities to figure out what they’re doing with these things, how they can use them in the best ways. You know, many years ago, Google used to do this type of stuff for other Google tools, right? So if it was like using Google Classroom, or using, you know, Google assignments, Docs, all these things, right? Yeah, like learning how to use these things in education, and they were really, you know, quite valuable trainings. And they would show you how to go through them and kind of see what your ideas. But they were also, I will say that, you know, back then, Google was also quite good about, like, trying to be flexible to help teachers say, like, Hey, this is the idea, but plug it into your setting, not this is how to teach, right? Like, this is how, this is how you can use these tools. And so, you know, making the assumption that they’re kind of continuing on with that goal, this can, this can be really great for a lot of people as well,

Tim Van Norman 12:27
absolutely, and especially when we’re talking often about faculty who are teaching computer classes and and stuff. This is a way of getting up to date knowledge without going out and spending lots of money on a degree, which by the time you get it is out of date anyway.

Brent Warner 12:49
Yeah, that’s right. So that was a lot. That was kind of the big announcement from Google and the California Community Colleges. But there are still other things happening.

Tim Van Norman 12:59
Oh, absolutely. So Canvas, you know, hate to say, but we hard to have a conversation like this without at least getting Canvas involved a little bit. But we received information from the California Community Colleges also about evolving instructional technology tools in Canvas. So basically Canvas, we kind of mentioned this on, I believe it was our first episode, or this season, that Canvas was coming out with a bunch of new tools with regard to AI. But this is, this is an official announcement by the California Community Colleges, specifically, but they actually detail several of these tools. Like I said, some of them we’ve talked about before, but discussion summaries. That was one that I remember saying, I don’t know what it’s used for.

Brent Warner 13:53
Yeah, I don’t need it, but cool, okay, or

Tim Van Norman 14:00
not now for faculty, and it is available. Yeah? Smart Search, that one I love, lets you search through your whole class and for a phrase for even a single word, and it uses AI to try to identify maybe you didn’t say that particular phrase exactly that way, but maybe it’s something close. Yeah. And so it, it uses AI in there, again, available now for both you and your students.

Brent Warner 14:29
So let me, let me pause on this one, because if it’s doing what I what I hope it does, recognizing that it’s AI, it’s like it can be kind of loosely in the area of what you’re searching for. So if you’re saying, hey, you know someone out there, they made a mention of a book that that seemed really interesting, but I can’t remember where they talked about it. And then, ideally, it can scan your your page and say, Oh yeah, this was Tim Van Norman on, you know, September 15 and the and it. Is on this post that he wrote about it, and you’re like, okay, cool, I can just go find any I don’t have to have remembered any of those specific things, just kind of loosely what I was remembering. And I hope that’s, you know, I hope it works at that kind of a deep level.

Tim Van Norman 15:12
It’s trying to, yeah, whether it actually has hit that or not, that is kind of the direction it’s going. But it also, one of the beautiful things is, as a teacher, as a professor, you don’t want your whole class to be searchable by the students. You only want what they have access to. So they would not be able to see everything. They would only be able to see what you have given them access to. Also, it does not go into question banks, good quizzes and question banks.

Brent Warner 15:40
So there’s they’re using the AI, and they’re like, What are the answers to all the questions? Right? So exactly, but also files, maybe that you’ve uploaded, so if you have answer keys that you share out later, things like that, right?

Tim Van Norman 15:50
It’s not going through the files. It’s only going through pages, Discussions, Assignments, names of assignments, and stuff like that. But it is. I’ve already enjoyed working with it. You know, simply looking for color that I downloaded an OER from Canada, and I they spell color wrong.

Brent Warner 16:17
Don’t tell them that I know exactly.

Tim Van Norman 16:21
And so I searched for that, and it gave me every result, and I was able to just quickly go in and right click, open up in a new tab and find it really quick, yeah, that was really amazing, and saved me a whole ton of time doing stuff like that. So you can use it for just everyday work. You can use it for research stuff like that. It’s really, really useful.

Brent Warner 16:43
Very cool, yeah, so I know there are a couple of other tools inside of there too.

Tim Van Norman 16:48
Yeah. Conmigo, we’ve talked about that one before as well. So again, that is available right now. And if you want to create a rubric and stuff. It does not read your class, okay? All it does is go through and let you prompt it basically with what you’re looking for,

Brent Warner 17:11
yeah. So the conmigo thing, I’ll say, like, well, it’s definitely, was originally designed for K 12, right? And so, like, when you go in, it just feels kind of cute, right? And so, so it’s like, I think that’s probably why there hasn’t been a lot of pickup on the community college level or the higher ed level. You know, there’s a lot of just, like, stop showing me cutesy stuff, right? Like, let’s get down to business. I think is, is some of the attitude of higher ed teachers and so, but yeah, I mean, there some of those things can be useful. They’re just, you know, I mean to me, they’re rappers, they’re things that you can go ask, you know, just any, any AI chat bot to do, but it’s built in, and you can work with it there. So, and maybe there’s some future potential as well.

Tim Van Norman 17:55
Yeah, right, right. So the next three I want to talk about are coming. They’re not quite ready. The last ones were ready. Were out. The first one is the AI inbox, AI translation, so you can write in English, and your student can read it in Spanish, Chinese, whatever, whatever language they want. And the reverse is true. They can write it in their language, and you can read it in English, if that’s the way you that’s the way you want to do that. Really, it’s a great way to use AI when you’re in a class that is not teaching English,

Brent Warner 18:35
yeah, when English is a second language is not the intention, right? Yeah. So this is, I mean, you know this, this is something I’ve been warning about for a long time, like the English, the need to know a second language may or may not, hold a lot of weight for people in the near, near than we like to think future. And that is my job and my career. So part of it is devastating, and other parts are really interesting. So, but yeah, I mean, I You can’t deny that we’re moving towards a singularity of some sort, and so the ability there to translate, and, you know, get an accurate understanding of what you’re trying to say to your professor, that is going to matter for a lot of people much more than being able to control the language themselves and so. So yeah, those types of things are obviously coming, right?

Tim Van Norman 19:30
And that particular one can be turned on at the account level. It cannot be turned on in the individual class level, which kind of makes sense, because you’re it’s an inbox message. It’s not part of the course. The next one that I’m going to talk about can be turned on at the course level once it’s turned on at the account level. And that is course AI translation, so it literally will take your course, and for the student who wants to see it in. Farsi, for the student who wants to see it in Russian, they can have that course that you were teaching in French show up in their language. And so it goes back to that same exact same thing that you were talking about. But this is not using they can do the same thing in Chrome anyway, right? But this is using another level and actually integrating that directly into Canvas, hopefully at a more advanced level than that. But again, for a business class like I teach, that’s not a big deal. For a language class, you’ll want to probably turn that off once, once we get to the point where we’re turning it on at all,

Brent Warner 20:41
right, right, right, yeah. Okay, cool. Anything else from that one?

Tim Van Norman 20:47
So the last, the last one I wanted to talk about is the Ignite AI icon assistant. It’s going to show up all over the place. We don’t know exactly where. We don’t know how to turn it on. It like I said, it’s coming. It’s not yet available. We don’t know what it’s going to do, but this is what Canvas is really pushing to have happen. So we will see.

Brent Warner 21:10
Yeah, this is the partnership with open AI, right?

Tim Van Norman 21:14
Is that? Is that the one we’re talking about here, our understanding at the moment? Yes.

Brent Warner 21:17
So, you know, I mean, there’s definitely push back on this right, because it’s like, Well, does open AI get access to student information through that? Are they feeding on it, right? All of these types of things. And so we’ll have to see how people really respond once they start seeing or like, how well they market what this is. You know, I don’t know that we’re all going to want an AI coming in on every page, helping students answer every single thing. Like, sometimes sitting with the challenge is part of the work, right? And so we’ll have to see what that looks like. And, you know, I think they’ve done, you know, Canvas maybe, but like, it’ll definitely the state level. Like, you know, how much control do we have over these things that becomes important, and then schools determine whether or not they want to turn these things on or off based on that, right? And so we have avoided turning a lot of things on because we don’t just want to turn things on willy nilly and see, like, just see what happens. Right? It’s like, we want to make sure that we’re, we’re thinking them through thoughtfully, too, and that, you know, the information is protected, etc,

Tim Van Norman 22:20
right? And that’s part of why we use sandbox courses a lot, is we can turn it on for a sandbox course and let you play with it and see what it looks like, but it won’t affect your students, right? So we do that quite a bit.

Brent Warner 22:34
Okay, so Tim, we’ve got one last quick announcement back from Google again, and well, yeah, we can just share what this is. This came out. There are emails going around about it. So what do we got here?

Tim Van Norman 22:47
Google, Gemini Pro for education. So this is using for students. Specifically, it’s using their personal Gmail account. Up until October 6, they can sign up for a free one year, unlimited chats, Image Uploads, quiz generations, additional access to the 2.5 pro model, deep research and audio overviews, plus two terabytes of storage, but again, only for students, and the offer ends October 6, 2025 but theoretically, it’s for a year. We have no idea, by the way, if this is going to become a huge cost in the future or anything like that. So this is not a recommendation, or, Hey, this is free. But it’s really interesting that Google is putting this out for for students directly.

Brent Warner 23:48
Yeah, well, I will say so. If you take the the pessimist perspective and some of the conversations that were happening at the at the at the summit there, that is because they want the free, fresh human data that’s typing in, and that’s more training information for them. So they’re actually getting very well paid through that, which is, you know, something that they weren’t getting otherwise. If you want the optimist perspective, then it’s saying, hey, you know, we can play with things and explore what’s going to happen in education and learning with students, and it doesn’t, you know, cost us any more out of our pocket than we have right now. And so you know, depending on your perspective of the day, that your perspective du jour, we’ll see how you feel about it every day. But right now, free, we don’t know, like you said, what it’ll cost in a year if they’re going to start slapping purchases on those. And that’s kind of like the, you know, your first year is free, and then after that, that type of thing. So we’ll see

Tim Van Norman 24:46
how it goes. They have said, currently, they’re saying that it’ll cost $20 a month, okay, after the first year. So which is along the lines of others, yeah, it’s on par. But notice I said currently, because so. Months ago, I was looking at one set of numbers for some software, and it went up like five bucks a month between in the last six months. So we will see.

Brent Warner 25:10
Yeah, so lots of things happening with AI at the state level. Take a look around. If you’re in the California Community Colleges, go out and find this information, see how they apply to you and to your school, what you’re trying to do, and you know, we’ll be here talking about it as we actually get access to some of these things and explore with them.

Tim Van Norman 25:32
Absolutely. Thank you for listening today. For more information about this show, please visit our website, at the higher edtech podcast.com

Brent Warner 25:43
as always, we do want your feedback, so please go to the higher edtech podcast.com and let us know your thoughts

Tim Van Norman 25:48
for everyone at IVC that’s listening. If you need help with technology questions, please contact IVC technical support. If you have questions about technology in your classroom, please stop by Library 204, or contact me. Tim Van Norman AT T van norman@ivc.edu

Brent Warner 26:04
and if you want to reach out to me about the show, you can find me on LinkedIn at Brent G Warner. I’m Tim Van Norman and I’m Brent Warner, and we hope this episode has helped you on the road from possibility to actuality. Take care everybody.