Episode Transcript
Brent Warner 0:00
What does administration see for the future of tech? We’re interviewing IVC Vice President of Instruction, Rick Miranda to find out. This is the higher ed tech podcast season seven, Episode 11. You
Tim Van Norman 0:20
Tim, welcome to today’s higher ed tech Podcast. I’m Tim Van Norman, the Interim Assistant Director of Technology Services at Irvine Valley College and Adjunct Professor of Business at Cypress College.
Brent Warner 0:34
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 0:42
Welcome. We’re glad you’re here with us.
Brent Warner 0:44
Alright, so Tim, how was your break?
Tim Van Norman 0:50
Busy, lot of traveling. I wound up driving one way across the United States and then flying back.
Brent Warner 0:56
So you sent me a text. I’m like, Hey, what are you up to? And you’re like, I’m driving to Pennsylvania, and I said, Ugh – Wow. Okay, so I
Tim Van Norman 1:04
How about yours?
Brent Warner 1:05
Yeah, I drove to my sofa. That’s about it. So all my plans got canceled by the rain so, but we are here with our VPI. Rick, Miranda, Rick, how are you?
Rick Miranda 1:17
I’m doing well. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I’m sorry you got rained out and sorry you had to drive 2000 miles. But, you know, life’s about choices.
Brent Warner 1:29
Yes, So Rick, we have actually, Tim and I, since you joined the school, and that’s been quite a few years,
Rick Miranda 1:39
three and a half years now, so I’m in my fourth year.
Brent Warner 1:42
Yeah. So we’d always said, Hey, we got to get Rick on the show, and for whatever reasons, it kind of didn’t happen. And so sorry it took so long, but we are very happy to have you here today.
Rick Miranda 1:52
Better late than never. You know. You had to learn to trust me and think, Who is this guy?
Brent Warner 1:56
That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. So Rick, we wanted to talk to you today about, kind of your vision for technology, you know, on campus, and we’re happy to kind of keep it focused on our campus, but you might have bigger visions or other ways to talk about things, and so we’re just, you know, we’re looking for an open conversation. I think a lot of people who listen to the show might not have not going to hear from their VPI all the time, or, you know, not always get the insights of what’s going on. You know, we have people that listen on our campus and, you know, they, they know you but we just kind of want to give a chance to really see, like, well, which, which direction are you moving things? What are the things that you’re thinking about as you’re kind of guiding and leading the school, and we just wanted to have an open conversation around that. So it’s a little bit loose, but, but we’ll start with that question, perfect.
Rick Miranda 2:49
It’s a it’s a very broad question. Tell us everything about future of my vision. Well, let me start with again, first. Thank you. And a little bit of background, as some of you have, well, I know you have heard me joke. I wasn’t born an administrator. I was born out of the classroom myself, not as many years as some, but I spent, you know, between a tenure track faculty of eight years plus, you know, doing the road show of a part time faculty for a couple years, I spent the better part of a decade in the classroom, and I think that’s important, especially for a Vice President of Instruction or anybody’s leaving any form of instruction and supporting and leading together, not just as a pinnacle, but side by side faculty and our classified professionals. I had the opportunity when I started as a faculty to step into a college that had a Title Five grant a Department of Ed Title Five grant on educational innovation. And when I stepped in for the first year, the veteran faculty, who were just maybe five years out of retirement, close to retirement, didn’t understand what that technology meant. And you know, it was unfortunate for a little while, my first year, it was lions and tigers and bears. Oh, my, I better do what the trainers are telling me instead of finding my own voice. But after the first year, I started to embrace these technologies. And these technologies led this is back in 2004 and five, some of the first iPhones, the first generation, the first iPads. We were creating, what we would call ztc OER today, and students would come to my classes, and I was in the sciences, let’s say, for a physiology class as an example. And yes, we had books. We were required to have books in the bookstore, and I hope many of our students purchase them. And I would never say don’t, but. What I did was said, How many of you have a device like this, if not? How many of you can see this rack in the corner of our classroom? And I put all material there, all of the materials from, let’s say, a physiology lab or an anatomy lab with all the slide pictures, pictures of all the anatomical models. Everything we did, I started to essentially digitize and build, build our own learning management system at the time, and that learning management system, I found was a bit clunky, and so we quickly adopted Moodle. We put our own server in, and at the time, even our own IT DID NOT, was not in favor. Who’s going to take care of this? Who? How come? No, no, no, no, we’re not going to put in the rack. So I bought one myself and put in my own office and just jacked into one of the ports. As you can imagine, that wasn’t something that our IT department looked on favorably once they figured out what I was doing and and one of the other math faculty. We were the two, a math faculty myself, or the two that really went gung ho on this. My point in telling you all this is a little bit of the history, my own history and my own, I would say, willingness to adopt new technologies and see what’s out there, because our students were becoming more mobile and more digital themselves, and the traditional ways of how classes were delivered have merit, but they didn’t always meet the equitable opportunities and needs of our students, because some of our students, even then, needed to be away from campus. Couldn’t always be at their own home office. They couldn’t be in our library there, and they were taking their course with them on their digital device. So I immediately started to adopt those technologies and move forward and continue to move forward. And as I said, there was a few faculty who were close to retirement. They all jumped on board eventually, and saw what was needed and why, as a few of us demonstrated, what’s out there. So again, I think I’m telling you this not because I felt I was a pioneer, because I learned from others at the time, but I was willing to adopt new technologies on basically, for our students, seeing who our students were at that time and where they were going, not always what I believed was easy for me, or I hate to say this, but not always the right thing, because at the time, that wasn’t the way I learned, you know. And my professors didn’t learn that way. So you know, biochemistry and the sciences, you know, since Darwin, this is the way you do it, you know. But who says you know? So there was a little bit of that going on, but I became an adopter of technologies and looked at them as tools for all these years. And I say tools, but I think it’s beyond tools now, because now, as we get to things like agentic AI in that they are, dare I say, and I know others will push back colleagues, they are a digital colleague for my learning environment as well. So that’s kind of just a big, broad brush stroke of why I have a belief in technologies and a drive to meet the students where they are at and what these, what we would traditionally call tools, how they can become learning partners going forward.
Tim Van Norman 8:53
Thank you, and that’s part of why we wanted to have you come on, is because we’ve heard that background and wanted to share that with our listeners, especially those at Irvine Valley, because not everybody necessarily has heard that background from you, and I think that’s important to understand the context that you bring to to this discussion and and I love that you mentioned things like agentic AI. So right now I’m hearing agentic AI, and every time I hear it, it’s somebody saying something negative, and that has been the case in a lot of ways. And yet I know that very little in life is completely negative. There are things, but there’s always, almost always, there’s something else on the other side. And I think that’s why you brought even brought up the term in what you were just talking about, in looking as you’re looking at the future and looking at it, but so thinking about agenda. AI specifically, what are your thoughts? Is it the great evil? Or, you know, let’s dig into a light subject like that.
Rick Miranda 10:10
Let me be honest with both of you and your listeners, until I don’t know, a month or so ago, two months ago, I had never even used the term agentic AI. I think both Brent and I were a webinar person. I don’t remember where we are. I heard, I heard somebody use that. Maybe it was in the the convening that we had at Santa Clara. I don’t remember, but what is that? Future Summit, yeah. Future Summit, yeah. Thank you. So I dug into that quite a bit after and what that really means. And I think if you spend time looking at the ideas and some basic I would even say layman terms of agentic AI, and I use layman not to say that we don’t have the anybody has the capacity to understand the technical term, but I think it’s important that we all find a common a common working definition of what it means and what it produces. Right? If we think about AI as a as a in itself. You know, it’s a simple algorithm. It’s been around for 40 plus years. There’s nothing new about AI out there as far as the algorithm, right? But what then we started hearing five years ago, maybe a little more, a little less, depending on what circles you’re in. You know, Gen AI as just they, they call it just generative. At that one point in time, it’s like, well, no, it’s doing something new. And then, you know, growth from that is really where it probably came from, the agentic piece, right? What does that really mean? Well, the way I look at it now, and for me to work with these terms, it’s not my term that I’ve came up with. There’s a difference between but I’m using the assistive AI and agentic AI, the assistive AI, is simply doing a task, finding an answer. It is like many of us who teach, and the three of us have taught, and you two still teach. It’s that. It’s that rote memorization process of it all. It’s the lowest form of learning, not that it’s not important, because you have to start somewhere. But that’s all that assistive piece is. It’s basically a glorified search engine. You know, you look for it, there’s my answer. Great. Write the answer down. It assisted me in finding some answer or completing a quick task. There’s nothing wrong with that, depending on what you’re going to use it for as a task, but that agent tech piece, the way I’m operating with it myself now, it allows me to own an outcome. You know, I’m gonna let that sit there. Owning an outcome. And any of us in our roles, in our capacities in life, what does it mean for us to own an outcome? That outcome means that we should have some planning. We should have some thinking. We should have some reflection on these outcomes of what we do in that agentic piece is now querying, as we know, creating a prompt, not for a simple answer, but how do I use my agentic AI, my learning buddy, as I called it, earlier, to say, Look, I am developing with these thoughts. Okay, give me some a road map. Great. Now let me critically evaluate what I’m seeing in this road map. Now, let me ask this next question of myself. Okay, I’m not asking of it, but this is where the learning piece comes in, that we all have to get to that point. No matter what our constituency title may be, here at IVC, we’ve branded ourselves, and I hope people truly believe it. We are all educators. So how are we going to help people learn to take that next step and critically evaluate an outcome and answer, and to build in an iterative, step by step reflective process. So that’s how I’m looking more as a the agentic piece, more of the outcome that I had a human had control over.
Brent Warner 14:19
So I think one of the things that comes up as a with the agentic AI, right? I’ve had my own concerns around it, certainly with, like, you know, students using it and not really even checking in to do anything, right? Like, hey, just tell the browser what to do, and it’s going to go in and do all the multiple steps and click through all the things for you, right? And it’s like, you can clearly see where, obviously that’s problematic. But then, on the other hand, I was sitting there going, well, I shared this example out with some other people before I was sitting there and I had a vocabulary assignment for my students, and they all wrote their vocabulary words and their own definitions on Google Slides. And I said, Hey, you know it’s going to be a lot of work for me to go through every. Slide and every student definition, and pull them all out and then put in. I said, Hey, actually, agent, I think I was using Google one or one of them, and I just Oh, no, it was perplexity. But I said, Hey, go in here. Look at this slide. Pull out all the vocabulary words, pull out the students definitions, and then turn it into a file that I can upload into Kahoot and give them as a give my students a, you know, practice quiz, using it right to me, I’m sitting there going, and it did it in you know, a minute, right? And it’s like, and I also asked it, this is just a cool extra part. I said, create distractor questions and answers based on the other vocabulary words that students have used, but inside of here as well, right? And so it was all based on student choice words, and it did a really great job of it in a minute. And it would have taken me a couple of hours, probably, to sort all those parts and get them thematically done and everything. And so I’m sitting here saying there are places where this is wonderful, right, and then there are other places where this has no business.
Rick Miranda 15:59
B but let me, let me break in what you described. You could not ask if you didn’t understand what to ask, you couldn’t accomplish if you did not know what to ask for, you didn’t know how to critically evaluate your own prompt and evaluate the answer that it gave you. That’s That’s what I feel. That’s where the level of education is going to. If we’re not doing it and you’re not doing it yet, that’s where it’s going to. That’s going to be the crux going forward. And we’ve all said, myself included, oh, our students in here on mastery or critical evaluation, critical thinking. I don’t know that we have all been trained to truly evaluate that in higher ed, you know, and I’m not saying that this tool will do it exactly for us, but we have to apply those same critical thinking skills on the outcomes using a Gen agent. Sorry, genetic. Ourselves as we’re expecting of our students, you know? Yeah, I think that’s true of both our students and ourselves.
Tim Van Norman 17:12
It feels like that’s the difference between having something be a tool and be a cheat. Yeah, and the reality is, as a tool, what you described Brent is a tool. Would you have learned much more by you going through the three hours of effort to do that? Then you learned by simply having the the AI do that work for you? Right? Maybe a little, but not a whole lot, but you also had to think about it and think about the process, and that’s where it’s a tool. And what we see, I think, the fear that I see in a lot of faculty is somebody using it, not as a tool, but as an answer. This is giving me my answer, because I happen to type something in and not doing that critical thinking that I that you’re talking about, so I like what you’re talking about.
Rick Miranda 18:10
Rick, yeah, well, so it also reminds me of, you know, we’ve done this all of us, you know, when I was faculty, yeah, you can turn an assignment. Show me a work. Show me. Show me the work. Show me part of it. You know, when I taught cell bio, they were required to understand some basic statistics, you know, down to standard deviations and that kind of, you know, good stuff like that, and standard error. And they had to learn how to do it all by hand, the calculations. And my students like, why do we have to do this by hand? I have a calculator and blah, blah, blah, I said, until you show me how the black box works and that you can critically think, if you didn’t have it in front of you, I’m going to test you on it by hand. But once I tested you on it, and I did in a class, in an exam, they had to do that as part of it, then it’s like, oh, okay, I see it as a whole. The class has it. Go ahead and use the calculator now. Go ahead and use Excel. Put it in there, you know. But we had to start with that base level of show the work, show the work. Show the work, you know. And so whether you’re using paper and pencil or now using this, you know, zeros and ones in this new medium. You know you still have to maybe show, ask the questions around an assignment plan. Show a plan how you’re going to approach an assignment, right? Break the work into steps, if you need to monitor progress and pacing. You know, reflect on what worked and what didn’t. You know, those are all just implementation and critically evaluate reflection pieces after you use the tool. Because tell you what, you could put me in the barn bin at Home Depot and say, Yeah, I can get all these fancy tools. And everything’s there, and I can read how it does it, and it doesn’t mean that the chair I’m going to make is going to work, right? You know, I can put all the tools in front of them if I don’t know how to stop and think, oh, no, this is a router versus this is a chisel. I’m being facetious too much, but you know what I mean? And some might say, Well, no, it’s easy. You know, the problem is these tools, they can go buy a chair, sure, you can go buy the chair and turn it in, but if you ask for show me your journey as you built the chair, what tool did you use and why? What was the challenges with the tool? That’s still part of that critical evaluation, that critical thinking, to get to that point. I don’t it’s a lot of work, but I don’t think we should be as fearful as people believe with these tools. We what is fearful for me is if we don’t meet the students where they’re at for their future, not our current lives, not our past and not our future, but their future. Because when you talk to and I’ve had the opportunity to talk to through our career Ed advising bodies, you know, we have 20 some times eight students to eight industry people. We have nearly 100 industry leaders out there who are saying, there’s competencies now around these AI tools, and this is our expectation. And those expectations of competencies are they know how to use a tool. They know how to critically evaluate, because any one of them has base knowledge, the rote memorization, but they want to know, can you critically evaluate and use these tools to get a program or an outcome now, so if we’re not willing to do that yet, it’s going to be a hard career for some of us.
Brent Warner 21:45
Yeah, can you talk to that just for a minute? Rick, because I think that’s one of the things that I’ve appreciated, is you kind of have had a soft touch in, you know, guiding people to say, like, thinking about these things, right? Not like, Hey, you have to use this, right? That’s what some of the schools are doing, other schools are doing, you know, never used That’s right, and it’s like, and then, of course, we know that, like, we have some people on campus that are real, you know, let’s go explore these things. And other people who will say, like, I am really opposed to this, but I feel like, at least in my experiences working with you, that you have a, you know, a good approach on maybe guiding people towards opening their thinking about it a little bit, what both ways. And I don’t think you’re kind of pushing one side or the other necessarily, although you know you’re, you’re interested and you wanting to see those things happening, but, but I wouldn’t say that you’re like, you know, pushing people to do things that they’re not wanting to do, but trying to, I will. I guess that’s what I’m asking. Is like, what? How do you approach resistant faculty who are saying, like, hey, this stuff has no value, versus, you know, maybe over ambitious faculty who are going too far with things. How are you dealing with the conversations that way?
Rick Miranda 23:01
For me, it’s, let me start with the simple question I ask myself, and often I can ask faculty directly, but not all the time. So again, that’s that soft touch and indirectly, is what are you afraid of? What is it that you’re really afraid of? Is it Are you afraid that your value and self worth in higher ed is going to be diminished. Are you afraid that your role is going to be, you know, farmed out to technology? Are you afraid that you are creating a future generation who does not how to think. So you have to start with what’s the fear, right? What’s the fear? Just like I told you about tools, the fear is, I’m afraid to use these tools to build this chair. Okay? Well, let me show you how to use the tools, because now you can create a whole household of furniture. You know, that would be great, right? So I start with that. I will ask people, What worries you? What are you afraid of? What do you need? What’s happening in you know, with you and your class, in this case, or not even class, it could be more of a business operation. So I start with there. Now to your point, though, some will use these tools. And I think, as anybody will, they’ll look at these as ways to maximize their time and effort for pay, right? I can do everything and have 160% load. Remember, I was a faculty, so I’m not picking on anybody. I remember these go and if I can just duplicate this over and over, and never change this question. I only use the same question semester after semester, year after year, my time and effort, you know, goes down, and my pay, then time and effort on investment goes up. So there are those. So these tools can be used for nefarious well. The income increases, if you will. But I hate to say that, because it is that 1% that ruins it for the other 99% of the individuals in higher ed that really have the passion. So I’m really speaking to that 1% now, the other thing, though, is, so how do you pull them back? You talk to them. What are you doing? You’re not talking. Students will tell me, that’s how, when I have those conversations, students come to the table with that, but the other one is no names, but I’ve had faculty who said, I don’t believe in it, this and that. And I basically said, tell you what. Challenge me. I will send you wherever you want to get training to see it. And somebody challenged me. I think they ended up in Indiana somewhere last semester, and oh, I the office of instruction, my budget covered them to go and and do these things and come back and learn from others in their field of what these tools are. So it’s more of a grassroots. I can’t have anybody take the blue pill or the red pill, okay, but what I can do is say, let me tell you what these pills can do. But more importantly, let me tell you what they’re going to mean to the community around you and their future. It comes down to, what are we doing for our students in the future, right? And if you really look at some of these tools now, around this, these the I’ll just boil it down to AI will support how learning is designed for some instances, with faculty, but not what faculty teach. You still own it. You still have all I don’t want to call it power, but I’m going to call it power. You still have all the power that you’ve ever had to build the courses, the curriculum, the assessments, the authentic way you want, just just new tools, you still have that power. So what are you afraid of? Are you afraid that you just don’t know the tools and where to start? It’s okay. Call it out. It’s all right. And I’ll leave you with as a matter of fact statement. I will be in April, leading a panel that I’m building, the whole panel, questions and everything, with another colleague from Las Positas College at the chief instructional officers annual conference, or semesterly conference in this in the spring, all around agentic AI. And what that is about is resources. What are the resources? If you don’t know, what’s out there, it makes it harder, you know, and it’s, it’s like we talked about for our strategic enrollment management ourselves. We need to simplify it for our students to get through the system. Equally, we need to simplify it for each other to find the tools and resources to learn and utilize in the classroom. So that’s basically we’re going to be working on. What are the resources? Because they’re scattered, and so let’s talk about that to support and it’s to support other it’s based on supporting other VPs of instruction, but when it comes down to it, it’s really to support their faculty and their students. We just have to keep both all constituents in mind, because, you know, it really scaffolds down to the core, you know, our students. So that’s kind of my approach. I have the conversation I’m open. And as you know, both of you know I don’t. I don’t feel I do. And I’m sure some may see it this way. I don’t start conversations and hearing ideas from people or having these with my arms crossed. I start with my arms open, and let’s hear and let me understand, and let’s have some reflective conversation and and as you said, I will, I will push back. Well, tell me why, but I just use more growth mindset language, you know, tell me why. What are your thoughts on that? Why do you think that? Well, have you thought those are all things that keep the conversation open for both of us, for both of us, because the other way is, if I come in with a set belief, my heels dug in thinking I knew who you were based on something I heard in the wind about you and how you use these tools and what you’ve said, That conversation is done. So that’s kind of my approach.
Tim Van Norman 29:14
Rick, wow, thank you. I we truly appreciate you coming on, and I can see that we’re we’re remiss in having it be three and a half years. Hopefully it’s going to be a whole lot shorter than that before the next one. This has been really this has been really good. I love getting the thought you haven’t gone and talked about, oh, this tool is better than that tool or anything like that. But that’s not what this is about. This is about understanding and looking at what really is happening and what makes more sense and the thought behind the tool, rather than having it be the answer to all, whatever it might be the answer to. So thank you for your time. Oh. And we’ll definitely have you back soon. We can, we can get into more things than agentic AI, but definitely, oh, I have more thoughts, like, there’s more for that too.
Rick Miranda 30:10
Yeah, I have more thoughts, trust me. You know, I didn’t even get into what this means. These tools mean from the student, other than, you know, economic mobility in the future. But how do the students use it? Where’s the equity piece and such? So I do have more thought. I wish your listeners drove further, because I have another hour to go.
Brent Warner 30:27
That’s I was gonna say. I was like 30 minutes. We’re just getting started. We got a lot, a lot more to talk about. But well, thank you. Really appreciate your time. Thanks so much
Rick Miranda 30:37
Anytime. Thank you both.
Tim Van Norman 30:40
Thank you for listening today. For more information about the show, please visit our website, at the higher ed tech podcast.com
Brent Warner 30:47
as always, we do want your feedback, so please go to the higher tech podcast.com and let us know your thoughts for
Tim Van Norman 30:53
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, 213, or contact me. Tim Van Norman AT T van norman@ivc.edu
Brent Warner 31:06
and if you want to reach out to me about the show, you can find me on LinkedIn at Brent G Warner.
Tim Van Norman 31:12
I’m Tim Van Norman
Brent Warner 31:13
and I’m Brent Warner, and we hope this episode has helped you on the road from possibility to actuality. Take care everybody.
What does administration see for the future of tech? We’re interviewing IVC Vice President of Instruction, Rick Miranda to find out. This is the higher ed tech podcast season seven, Episode 11. You
Tim Van Norman 0:20
Tim, welcome to today’s higher ed tech Podcast. I’m Tim Van Norman, the Interim Assistant Director of Technology Services at Irvine Valley College and Adjunct Professor of Business at Cypress College.
Brent Warner 0:34
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 0:42
Welcome. We’re glad you’re here with us.
Brent Warner 0:44
Alright, so Tim, how was your break?
Tim Van Norman 0:50
Busy, lot of traveling. I wound up driving one way across the United States and then flying back.
Brent Warner 0:56
So you sent me a text. I’m like, Hey, what are you up to? And you’re like, I’m driving to Pennsylvania, and I said, Ugh – Wow. Okay, so I
Tim Van Norman 1:04
How about yours?
Brent Warner 1:05
Yeah, I drove to my sofa. That’s about it. So all my plans got canceled by the rain so, but we are here with our VPI. Rick, Miranda, Rick, how are you?
Rick Miranda 1:17
I’m doing well. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I’m sorry you got rained out and sorry you had to drive 2000 miles. But, you know, life’s about choices.
Brent Warner 1:29
Yes, So Rick, we have actually, Tim and I, since you joined the school, and that’s been quite a few years,
Rick Miranda 1:39
three and a half years now, so I’m in my fourth year.
Brent Warner 1:42
Yeah. So we’d always said, Hey, we got to get Rick on the show, and for whatever reasons, it kind of didn’t happen. And so sorry it took so long, but we are very happy to have you here today.
Rick Miranda 1:52
Better late than never. You know. You had to learn to trust me and think, Who is this guy?
Brent Warner 1:56
That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. So Rick, we wanted to talk to you today about, kind of your vision for technology, you know, on campus, and we’re happy to kind of keep it focused on our campus, but you might have bigger visions or other ways to talk about things, and so we’re just, you know, we’re looking for an open conversation. I think a lot of people who listen to the show might not have not going to hear from their VPI all the time, or, you know, not always get the insights of what’s going on. You know, we have people that listen on our campus and, you know, they, they know you but we just kind of want to give a chance to really see, like, well, which, which direction are you moving things? What are the things that you’re thinking about as you’re kind of guiding and leading the school, and we just wanted to have an open conversation around that. So it’s a little bit loose, but, but we’ll start with that question, perfect.
Rick Miranda 2:49
It’s a it’s a very broad question. Tell us everything about future of my vision. Well, let me start with again, first. Thank you. And a little bit of background, as some of you have, well, I know you have heard me joke. I wasn’t born an administrator. I was born out of the classroom myself, not as many years as some, but I spent, you know, between a tenure track faculty of eight years plus, you know, doing the road show of a part time faculty for a couple years, I spent the better part of a decade in the classroom, and I think that’s important, especially for a Vice President of Instruction or anybody’s leaving any form of instruction and supporting and leading together, not just as a pinnacle, but side by side faculty and our classified professionals. I had the opportunity when I started as a faculty to step into a college that had a Title Five grant a Department of Ed Title Five grant on educational innovation. And when I stepped in for the first year, the veteran faculty, who were just maybe five years out of retirement, close to retirement, didn’t understand what that technology meant. And you know, it was unfortunate for a little while, my first year, it was lions and tigers and bears. Oh, my, I better do what the trainers are telling me instead of finding my own voice. But after the first year, I started to embrace these technologies. And these technologies led this is back in 2004 and five, some of the first iPhones, the first generation, the first iPads. We were creating, what we would call ztc OER today, and students would come to my classes, and I was in the sciences, let’s say, for a physiology class as an example. And yes, we had books. We were required to have books in the bookstore, and I hope many of our students purchase them. And I would never say don’t, but. What I did was said, How many of you have a device like this, if not? How many of you can see this rack in the corner of our classroom? And I put all material there, all of the materials from, let’s say, a physiology lab or an anatomy lab with all the slide pictures, pictures of all the anatomical models. Everything we did, I started to essentially digitize and build, build our own learning management system at the time, and that learning management system, I found was a bit clunky, and so we quickly adopted Moodle. We put our own server in, and at the time, even our own IT DID NOT, was not in favor. Who’s going to take care of this? Who? How come? No, no, no, no, we’re not going to put in the rack. So I bought one myself and put in my own office and just jacked into one of the ports. As you can imagine, that wasn’t something that our IT department looked on favorably once they figured out what I was doing and and one of the other math faculty. We were the two, a math faculty myself, or the two that really went gung ho on this. My point in telling you all this is a little bit of the history, my own history and my own, I would say, willingness to adopt new technologies and see what’s out there, because our students were becoming more mobile and more digital themselves, and the traditional ways of how classes were delivered have merit, but they didn’t always meet the equitable opportunities and needs of our students, because some of our students, even then, needed to be away from campus. Couldn’t always be at their own home office. They couldn’t be in our library there, and they were taking their course with them on their digital device. So I immediately started to adopt those technologies and move forward and continue to move forward. And as I said, there was a few faculty who were close to retirement. They all jumped on board eventually, and saw what was needed and why, as a few of us demonstrated, what’s out there. So again, I think I’m telling you this not because I felt I was a pioneer, because I learned from others at the time, but I was willing to adopt new technologies on basically, for our students, seeing who our students were at that time and where they were going, not always what I believed was easy for me, or I hate to say this, but not always the right thing, because at the time, that wasn’t the way I learned, you know. And my professors didn’t learn that way. So you know, biochemistry and the sciences, you know, since Darwin, this is the way you do it, you know. But who says you know? So there was a little bit of that going on, but I became an adopter of technologies and looked at them as tools for all these years. And I say tools, but I think it’s beyond tools now, because now, as we get to things like agentic AI in that they are, dare I say, and I know others will push back colleagues, they are a digital colleague for my learning environment as well. So that’s kind of just a big, broad brush stroke of why I have a belief in technologies and a drive to meet the students where they are at and what these, what we would traditionally call tools, how they can become learning partners going forward.
Tim Van Norman 8:53
Thank you, and that’s part of why we wanted to have you come on, is because we’ve heard that background and wanted to share that with our listeners, especially those at Irvine Valley, because not everybody necessarily has heard that background from you, and I think that’s important to understand the context that you bring to to this discussion and and I love that you mentioned things like agentic AI. So right now I’m hearing agentic AI, and every time I hear it, it’s somebody saying something negative, and that has been the case in a lot of ways. And yet I know that very little in life is completely negative. There are things, but there’s always, almost always, there’s something else on the other side. And I think that’s why you brought even brought up the term in what you were just talking about, in looking as you’re looking at the future and looking at it, but so thinking about agenda. AI specifically, what are your thoughts? Is it the great evil? Or, you know, let’s dig into a light subject like that.
Rick Miranda 10:10
Let me be honest with both of you and your listeners, until I don’t know, a month or so ago, two months ago, I had never even used the term agentic AI. I think both Brent and I were a webinar person. I don’t remember where we are. I heard, I heard somebody use that. Maybe it was in the the convening that we had at Santa Clara. I don’t remember, but what is that? Future Summit, yeah. Future Summit, yeah. Thank you. So I dug into that quite a bit after and what that really means. And I think if you spend time looking at the ideas and some basic I would even say layman terms of agentic AI, and I use layman not to say that we don’t have the anybody has the capacity to understand the technical term, but I think it’s important that we all find a common a common working definition of what it means and what it produces. Right? If we think about AI as a as a in itself. You know, it’s a simple algorithm. It’s been around for 40 plus years. There’s nothing new about AI out there as far as the algorithm, right? But what then we started hearing five years ago, maybe a little more, a little less, depending on what circles you’re in. You know, Gen AI as just they, they call it just generative. At that one point in time, it’s like, well, no, it’s doing something new. And then, you know, growth from that is really where it probably came from, the agentic piece, right? What does that really mean? Well, the way I look at it now, and for me to work with these terms, it’s not my term that I’ve came up with. There’s a difference between but I’m using the assistive AI and agentic AI, the assistive AI, is simply doing a task, finding an answer. It is like many of us who teach, and the three of us have taught, and you two still teach. It’s that. It’s that rote memorization process of it all. It’s the lowest form of learning, not that it’s not important, because you have to start somewhere. But that’s all that assistive piece is. It’s basically a glorified search engine. You know, you look for it, there’s my answer. Great. Write the answer down. It assisted me in finding some answer or completing a quick task. There’s nothing wrong with that, depending on what you’re going to use it for as a task, but that agent tech piece, the way I’m operating with it myself now, it allows me to own an outcome. You know, I’m gonna let that sit there. Owning an outcome. And any of us in our roles, in our capacities in life, what does it mean for us to own an outcome? That outcome means that we should have some planning. We should have some thinking. We should have some reflection on these outcomes of what we do in that agentic piece is now querying, as we know, creating a prompt, not for a simple answer, but how do I use my agentic AI, my learning buddy, as I called it, earlier, to say, Look, I am developing with these thoughts. Okay, give me some a road map. Great. Now let me critically evaluate what I’m seeing in this road map. Now, let me ask this next question of myself. Okay, I’m not asking of it, but this is where the learning piece comes in, that we all have to get to that point. No matter what our constituency title may be, here at IVC, we’ve branded ourselves, and I hope people truly believe it. We are all educators. So how are we going to help people learn to take that next step and critically evaluate an outcome and answer, and to build in an iterative, step by step reflective process. So that’s how I’m looking more as a the agentic piece, more of the outcome that I had a human had control over.
Brent Warner 14:19
So I think one of the things that comes up as a with the agentic AI, right? I’ve had my own concerns around it, certainly with, like, you know, students using it and not really even checking in to do anything, right? Like, hey, just tell the browser what to do, and it’s going to go in and do all the multiple steps and click through all the things for you, right? And it’s like, you can clearly see where, obviously that’s problematic. But then, on the other hand, I was sitting there going, well, I shared this example out with some other people before I was sitting there and I had a vocabulary assignment for my students, and they all wrote their vocabulary words and their own definitions on Google Slides. And I said, Hey, you know it’s going to be a lot of work for me to go through every. Slide and every student definition, and pull them all out and then put in. I said, Hey, actually, agent, I think I was using Google one or one of them, and I just Oh, no, it was perplexity. But I said, Hey, go in here. Look at this slide. Pull out all the vocabulary words, pull out the students definitions, and then turn it into a file that I can upload into Kahoot and give them as a give my students a, you know, practice quiz, using it right to me, I’m sitting there going, and it did it in you know, a minute, right? And it’s like, and I also asked it, this is just a cool extra part. I said, create distractor questions and answers based on the other vocabulary words that students have used, but inside of here as well, right? And so it was all based on student choice words, and it did a really great job of it in a minute. And it would have taken me a couple of hours, probably, to sort all those parts and get them thematically done and everything. And so I’m sitting here saying there are places where this is wonderful, right, and then there are other places where this has no business.
Rick Miranda 15:59
B but let me, let me break in what you described. You could not ask if you didn’t understand what to ask, you couldn’t accomplish if you did not know what to ask for, you didn’t know how to critically evaluate your own prompt and evaluate the answer that it gave you. That’s That’s what I feel. That’s where the level of education is going to. If we’re not doing it and you’re not doing it yet, that’s where it’s going to. That’s going to be the crux going forward. And we’ve all said, myself included, oh, our students in here on mastery or critical evaluation, critical thinking. I don’t know that we have all been trained to truly evaluate that in higher ed, you know, and I’m not saying that this tool will do it exactly for us, but we have to apply those same critical thinking skills on the outcomes using a Gen agent. Sorry, genetic. Ourselves as we’re expecting of our students, you know? Yeah, I think that’s true of both our students and ourselves.
Tim Van Norman 17:12
It feels like that’s the difference between having something be a tool and be a cheat. Yeah, and the reality is, as a tool, what you described Brent is a tool. Would you have learned much more by you going through the three hours of effort to do that? Then you learned by simply having the the AI do that work for you? Right? Maybe a little, but not a whole lot, but you also had to think about it and think about the process, and that’s where it’s a tool. And what we see, I think, the fear that I see in a lot of faculty is somebody using it, not as a tool, but as an answer. This is giving me my answer, because I happen to type something in and not doing that critical thinking that I that you’re talking about, so I like what you’re talking about.
Rick Miranda 18:10
Rick, yeah, well, so it also reminds me of, you know, we’ve done this all of us, you know, when I was faculty, yeah, you can turn an assignment. Show me a work. Show me. Show me the work. Show me part of it. You know, when I taught cell bio, they were required to understand some basic statistics, you know, down to standard deviations and that kind of, you know, good stuff like that, and standard error. And they had to learn how to do it all by hand, the calculations. And my students like, why do we have to do this by hand? I have a calculator and blah, blah, blah, I said, until you show me how the black box works and that you can critically think, if you didn’t have it in front of you, I’m going to test you on it by hand. But once I tested you on it, and I did in a class, in an exam, they had to do that as part of it, then it’s like, oh, okay, I see it as a whole. The class has it. Go ahead and use the calculator now. Go ahead and use Excel. Put it in there, you know. But we had to start with that base level of show the work, show the work. Show the work, you know. And so whether you’re using paper and pencil or now using this, you know, zeros and ones in this new medium. You know you still have to maybe show, ask the questions around an assignment plan. Show a plan how you’re going to approach an assignment, right? Break the work into steps, if you need to monitor progress and pacing. You know, reflect on what worked and what didn’t. You know, those are all just implementation and critically evaluate reflection pieces after you use the tool. Because tell you what, you could put me in the barn bin at Home Depot and say, Yeah, I can get all these fancy tools. And everything’s there, and I can read how it does it, and it doesn’t mean that the chair I’m going to make is going to work, right? You know, I can put all the tools in front of them if I don’t know how to stop and think, oh, no, this is a router versus this is a chisel. I’m being facetious too much, but you know what I mean? And some might say, Well, no, it’s easy. You know, the problem is these tools, they can go buy a chair, sure, you can go buy the chair and turn it in, but if you ask for show me your journey as you built the chair, what tool did you use and why? What was the challenges with the tool? That’s still part of that critical evaluation, that critical thinking, to get to that point. I don’t it’s a lot of work, but I don’t think we should be as fearful as people believe with these tools. We what is fearful for me is if we don’t meet the students where they’re at for their future, not our current lives, not our past and not our future, but their future. Because when you talk to and I’ve had the opportunity to talk to through our career Ed advising bodies, you know, we have 20 some times eight students to eight industry people. We have nearly 100 industry leaders out there who are saying, there’s competencies now around these AI tools, and this is our expectation. And those expectations of competencies are they know how to use a tool. They know how to critically evaluate, because any one of them has base knowledge, the rote memorization, but they want to know, can you critically evaluate and use these tools to get a program or an outcome now, so if we’re not willing to do that yet, it’s going to be a hard career for some of us.
Brent Warner 21:45
Yeah, can you talk to that just for a minute? Rick, because I think that’s one of the things that I’ve appreciated, is you kind of have had a soft touch in, you know, guiding people to say, like, thinking about these things, right? Not like, Hey, you have to use this, right? That’s what some of the schools are doing, other schools are doing, you know, never used That’s right, and it’s like, and then, of course, we know that, like, we have some people on campus that are real, you know, let’s go explore these things. And other people who will say, like, I am really opposed to this, but I feel like, at least in my experiences working with you, that you have a, you know, a good approach on maybe guiding people towards opening their thinking about it a little bit, what both ways. And I don’t think you’re kind of pushing one side or the other necessarily, although you know you’re, you’re interested and you wanting to see those things happening, but, but I wouldn’t say that you’re like, you know, pushing people to do things that they’re not wanting to do, but trying to, I will. I guess that’s what I’m asking. Is like, what? How do you approach resistant faculty who are saying, like, hey, this stuff has no value, versus, you know, maybe over ambitious faculty who are going too far with things. How are you dealing with the conversations that way?
Rick Miranda 23:01
For me, it’s, let me start with the simple question I ask myself, and often I can ask faculty directly, but not all the time. So again, that’s that soft touch and indirectly, is what are you afraid of? What is it that you’re really afraid of? Is it Are you afraid that your value and self worth in higher ed is going to be diminished. Are you afraid that your role is going to be, you know, farmed out to technology? Are you afraid that you are creating a future generation who does not how to think. So you have to start with what’s the fear, right? What’s the fear? Just like I told you about tools, the fear is, I’m afraid to use these tools to build this chair. Okay? Well, let me show you how to use the tools, because now you can create a whole household of furniture. You know, that would be great, right? So I start with that. I will ask people, What worries you? What are you afraid of? What do you need? What’s happening in you know, with you and your class, in this case, or not even class, it could be more of a business operation. So I start with there. Now to your point, though, some will use these tools. And I think, as anybody will, they’ll look at these as ways to maximize their time and effort for pay, right? I can do everything and have 160% load. Remember, I was a faculty, so I’m not picking on anybody. I remember these go and if I can just duplicate this over and over, and never change this question. I only use the same question semester after semester, year after year, my time and effort, you know, goes down, and my pay, then time and effort on investment goes up. So there are those. So these tools can be used for nefarious well. The income increases, if you will. But I hate to say that, because it is that 1% that ruins it for the other 99% of the individuals in higher ed that really have the passion. So I’m really speaking to that 1% now, the other thing, though, is, so how do you pull them back? You talk to them. What are you doing? You’re not talking. Students will tell me, that’s how, when I have those conversations, students come to the table with that, but the other one is no names, but I’ve had faculty who said, I don’t believe in it, this and that. And I basically said, tell you what. Challenge me. I will send you wherever you want to get training to see it. And somebody challenged me. I think they ended up in Indiana somewhere last semester, and oh, I the office of instruction, my budget covered them to go and and do these things and come back and learn from others in their field of what these tools are. So it’s more of a grassroots. I can’t have anybody take the blue pill or the red pill, okay, but what I can do is say, let me tell you what these pills can do. But more importantly, let me tell you what they’re going to mean to the community around you and their future. It comes down to, what are we doing for our students in the future, right? And if you really look at some of these tools now, around this, these the I’ll just boil it down to AI will support how learning is designed for some instances, with faculty, but not what faculty teach. You still own it. You still have all I don’t want to call it power, but I’m going to call it power. You still have all the power that you’ve ever had to build the courses, the curriculum, the assessments, the authentic way you want, just just new tools, you still have that power. So what are you afraid of? Are you afraid that you just don’t know the tools and where to start? It’s okay. Call it out. It’s all right. And I’ll leave you with as a matter of fact statement. I will be in April, leading a panel that I’m building, the whole panel, questions and everything, with another colleague from Las Positas College at the chief instructional officers annual conference, or semesterly conference in this in the spring, all around agentic AI. And what that is about is resources. What are the resources? If you don’t know, what’s out there, it makes it harder, you know, and it’s, it’s like we talked about for our strategic enrollment management ourselves. We need to simplify it for our students to get through the system. Equally, we need to simplify it for each other to find the tools and resources to learn and utilize in the classroom. So that’s basically we’re going to be working on. What are the resources? Because they’re scattered, and so let’s talk about that to support and it’s to support other it’s based on supporting other VPs of instruction, but when it comes down to it, it’s really to support their faculty and their students. We just have to keep both all constituents in mind, because, you know, it really scaffolds down to the core, you know, our students. So that’s kind of my approach. I have the conversation I’m open. And as you know, both of you know I don’t. I don’t feel I do. And I’m sure some may see it this way. I don’t start conversations and hearing ideas from people or having these with my arms crossed. I start with my arms open, and let’s hear and let me understand, and let’s have some reflective conversation and and as you said, I will, I will push back. Well, tell me why, but I just use more growth mindset language, you know, tell me why. What are your thoughts on that? Why do you think that? Well, have you thought those are all things that keep the conversation open for both of us, for both of us, because the other way is, if I come in with a set belief, my heels dug in thinking I knew who you were based on something I heard in the wind about you and how you use these tools and what you’ve said, That conversation is done. So that’s kind of my approach.
Tim Van Norman 29:14
Rick, wow, thank you. I we truly appreciate you coming on, and I can see that we’re we’re remiss in having it be three and a half years. Hopefully it’s going to be a whole lot shorter than that before the next one. This has been really this has been really good. I love getting the thought you haven’t gone and talked about, oh, this tool is better than that tool or anything like that. But that’s not what this is about. This is about understanding and looking at what really is happening and what makes more sense and the thought behind the tool, rather than having it be the answer to all, whatever it might be the answer to. So thank you for your time. Oh. And we’ll definitely have you back soon. We can, we can get into more things than agentic AI, but definitely, oh, I have more thoughts, like, there’s more for that too.
Rick Miranda 30:10
Yeah, I have more thoughts, trust me. You know, I didn’t even get into what this means. These tools mean from the student, other than, you know, economic mobility in the future. But how do the students use it? Where’s the equity piece and such? So I do have more thought. I wish your listeners drove further, because I have another hour to go.
Brent Warner 30:27
That’s I was gonna say. I was like 30 minutes. We’re just getting started. We got a lot, a lot more to talk about. But well, thank you. Really appreciate your time. Thanks so much
Rick Miranda 30:37
Anytime. Thank you both.
Tim Van Norman 30:40
Thank you for listening today. For more information about the show, please visit our website, at the higher ed tech podcast.com
Brent Warner 30:47
as always, we do want your feedback, so please go to the higher tech podcast.com and let us know your thoughts for
Tim Van Norman 30:53
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, 213, or contact me. Tim Van Norman AT T van norman@ivc.edu
Brent Warner 31:06
and if you want to reach out to me about the show, you can find me on LinkedIn at Brent G Warner.
Tim Van Norman 31:12
I’m Tim Van Norman
Brent Warner 31:13
and I’m Brent Warner, and we hope this episode has helped you on the road from possibility to actuality. Take care everybody.
To kick of 2026, we sit down with Irvine Valley College’s Vice President of Instruction, Rick Miranda to talk about approaching the conversation around Agentic AI and his broader vision for tech in the future of higher education.
We often talk about the teacher’s perspective, but today we get to dig into the thinking of administration. Tune in to think about alternative approaches to these tricky conversations!