Episode Transcript
Brent Warner 0:00
What happens when the state chancellor’s office asks faculty, staff, and administration to build with AI during the summer? We’re looking at the chancellor’s innovators program using PlayLab. This is the Higher Ed Tech Podcast, Season Eight, Episode One.
Tim Van Norman 0:27
Welcome to today’s Higher Ed Tech podcast. I’m Tim Van Norman, the interim assistant director, technology services at Irvine Valley College, an adjunct professor of business at Cypress College,
Brent Warner 0:37
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 0:45
Welcome. We’re glad you’re here with us. So, episode one of season eight.
Brent Warner 0:50
Wow. Who who would have known we made it so far?
Tim Van Norman 0:53
Yeah, absolutely. And no, it’s it’s been good. And end of summer. Yep. As we’re recording this, our professional development week has started, and wow, yeah, things are already moving. This has been a busy summer. I barely, barely thought at all about what we’d be doing now.
Brent Warner 1:17
Yeah, we’re even we’re even a week late on this episode, so we’re going to be slightly off schedule for a little bit, but we’ll be okay. Everybody’s okay. All right, so well, I guess very briefly, Tim, did you have a nice summer?
Tim Van Norman 1:30
Absolutely, I did not take any vacation. I went to a conference, and I went to InstructureCon. Oh, good, good, yeah. That was a great conference to go to, and had a great time, and so how about you? Traveling a little bit, and yeah,
Brent Warner 1:43
did some traveling. I went to Japan. I went to Chicago, and this-I don’t know how much this will affect the show, but I am-I’m on leave this semester for other projects and stuff. Not nothing bad. Nothing bad at all. But but you know. So my my ability to talk to classes directly in this semester is going to be somewhat theoretical. Not necessarily tied to direct classes for the next 10 episodes, I guess.
Tim Van Norman 2:17
Well, but hopefully this will give you a little bit of a mental break and prepare you for whatever is coming in the future.
Brent Warner 2:24
Yes, yes. So we’re looking forward to all of that stuff coming up and whatever happens. But Tim, so this summer you and I were both selected to join the Chancellor’s Innovators Program. Can you briefly explain what that
Tim Van Norman 2:43
is? That’s a great question because I I walked into it going, oh, this is an opportunity to play with Play Lab and learn about Play Lab. Yes, that was what it was, but they’ve Play Lab has been doing lots of different programs. This was a four week program meeting on Mondays from six to seven or six to six to six to eight. I think it was
Brent Warner 3:09
a couple hours. Anyway,
Tim Van Norman 3:10
it was a couple hours. But what it was doing is the idea was: can we build apps? Could we build systems? Can we build trainings that were that can be reused not for us, for the chancellor’s office, for for all community colleges?
Brent Warner 3:30
Yeah,
Tim Van Norman 3:31
and so kind of trying to create a library of apps, trainings, all kinds of different things, even concepts that could be used with regard to AI, which was really neat, because we weren’t trying to look for how do I solve my class problem. It’s how do I solve this bigger problem, and we’re going to talk about some of those here in a bit. So
Brent Warner 3:56
yeah,
Tim Van Norman 3:57
I loved the program. They were more
Brent Warner 3:59
macro level, like it was like so. So and for me too, because you know I’ve spent a lot of time building little things small for my class, and it’s like okay, let’s talk about what what we need at a bigger level, what we can do, and so lots of things to explore. We’re gonna basically today’s episode is to share what several of those ideas were. But one of the cool things about working with Play Lab too is that they’re not like you must be in Play Lab at all times, right? And and in fact, there were quite a lot of other cool tools that we were playing with. Some tied in, some kind of totally separate. But I think we should at least share them briefly because some of them are quite useful. So, Tim, did you play with Granola very much?
Tim Van Norman 4:40
I didn’t, but you had. I heard a bunch about it myself. I typically use Zoom, but what do I do when I’m in Zoom, but it’s not my meeting,
Brent Warner 4:52
right?
Tim Van Norman 4:52
And I want to get notes, so I really liked that. And by the way, that’s also without adding an AI bot to. The
Brent Warner 5:00
meetings, meeting, yeah.
Tim Van Norman 5:02
So that’s what I really liked about that concept.
Brent Warner 5:05
Yeah. So granola basically is is a meeting follower, but it’s run on your computer instead of in an app separately, or like in in the meeting app, right? And so, so one, it’s it’s all private. My my understanding is it’s meant to be totally in your computer and just what it’s doing there. I think if I if I understand that correctly, and then but two like anytime you log into a meeting, whether it’s Zoom or Google Meet or whichever one, it’s like hey you’re in a meeting. Do you want to you want to support you with taking notes on it, right? And so it kind of just floats there, and then you can interact with the notes again later. So that concept of the notes thing is not totally new, but the other part is I like how it works. So,
Tim Van Norman 5:47
and the price was really good too.
Brent Warner 5:49
Yeah, it’s free,
Tim Van Norman 5:50
not unlimited. Everything free, but it actually it looked like it’s designed to be free for the most part for people who who aren’t going to need the ultimate history and all of that? So it was a really it’s a really neat package. So granola,
Brent Warner 6:08
yeah. A couple other ones. They had cursor. Cursor was talked about. I what was cursor?
Tim Van Norman 6:16
So cursor. First of all, I’ve seen ads for cursor, and I’m like yeah okay somebody’s swearing at something I don’t know but or or you know they’re typing on a computer whatever whatever that is but it actually is an app builder for building apps
Brent Warner 6:33
yes
Tim Van Norman 6:34
so basically you it’s designed to work and create agentic AI. So you build an app that will tie into another app that you build in it, and you build this basically agentic system, and modularize your different apps, and it does the work for with you, and that was really impressive. I’ve been looking at a couple of projects, and if a couple things free up, I’m intending to start playing with Cursor myself because it’s got some really cool. It’s got some really cool aspects, especially as I’m looking more and more into Agentic AI. It’d be a really nice tool to play with for sure.
Brent Warner 7:24
And then just very briefly, you know, people were also using Claude a lot inside of here and bringing Claude back and forth into Play Lab, which was cool. And then one of the little apps that was built in Play Lab, but was also cool, was called Bot Forge, which is meant to like help you build apps inside of play, like like to understand it. It’s a app again, same kind of thing, like an app that helps you build apps, and so it’s understand what it’s trying to do, and so help college, you know, faculty write, equip, test, and refine their Play Lab bots. So I like that. You know, there’s a lot of cool things just outside of all of this that you can play with.
Tim Van Norman 8:04
Absolutely, and Bot Forge. I love the fact that we’re literally in a meeting. The person put it in there, and you said, Tim, why don’t you just try to type in what we’re trying to do here? And we massaged the prompt just slightly, and boom, it just started writing
Brent Warner 8:20
it. Yeah, I
Tim Van Norman 8:21
was very impressed with that, and and that’s the type of thing a lot of PlayLab stuff is going for. That is
Speaker 1 8:27
to
Tim Van Norman 8:28
be able to help you write better apps.
Brent Warner 8:32
Yeah,
Tim Van Norman 8:32
not prompt better, but write better apps.
Brent Warner 8:35
Yeah, yeah. So today, though, like we said, what we’re really trying to talk about is some of the ideas that other teachers were coming up with inside of here. So at the end of it, everybody kind of had like a little mini presentation. We’re not going to be able to cover all of them, but we wanted to just kind of get a sense of the ideas of what people are coming up with, and then and then with an understanding that you know if if you’re in the California Community Colleges, you will have access to these at some level, right? Some of them are still being developed a little bit, or or at least it might be an inspiration for you. But the intention of all of this is to make them fully available for faculty, staff, admin, and students, of course, and so that these can be you know resources that you can start with that are kind of like apps that are already built, and then of course with Play Lab you can do these remixes where you can kind of take the prompt that’s already built and then change it and customize it to your needs. So, so Tim, let’s jump into sharing a few of these, and we’re gonna have to move quick, but we’ll get some some thoughts on these.
Tim Van Norman 9:41
So the first one here we’re talking about is the student AI literacy module. So not necessarily an app, but in Canvas, can we create a module that can be used in every school, tweaked for that school, but used everywhere to teach AI literacy? Because that’s one of the big struggles that we’ve got right now is some people think they’re literate and have no idea. Many people, especially students, don’t think they’re literate and they’re right. So how do we get that? How do we get them past that point and actually get them to understand AI, be literate in using AI?
Brent Warner 10:21
Yeah, and then I like I kind of like what they did inside of here too. So it is like a Canvas module, right? It’s just like your kind of standard Canvas module. But then they’re also integrating the chat bot into it, so so you will do parts of the activity are is actually working with AI as you’re learning to explore with AI. So so that’s kind of cool. And then connected to that, Tim, we talked about this one pre-show. Was the online readiness tutorial? I really liked this one, so it was a professor Greg Bayer. Bayer, sorry, Greg. I I always forget how to pronounce his last name, but but I think he’s down at Cuyamaka, and basically what what he had done in the past was he had built modules for students to show how ready they are for online, and he has the research showing like, hey, this has actually made a difference for students and their success in online learning, right? And so then what he’s doing is he’s now creating an AI edition or version of that, so that students can then have you know timely interactive feedback as they’re going through and learning about what they need to know for teaching or sorry for learning online.
Tim Van Norman 11:34
Yeah, this is something we had a system. I don’t know. I think it was old eight years ago, when I started using it, and we wound up shutting it down because it wasn’t accurate anymore. Was talking about using Flash and how important it was to use Flash and stuff like that. And so, and this really sounds like a great alternative to something that’s that old is to have something that can literally be updated constantly.
Brent Warner 12:02
Yeah, yeah, I really do like that part, and that’s a big, big thing that’s going to be with AI. Is like, oh, files got updated on this website. That means the the app and the feedback inside of there will also be updated every time. So that’s great. Right. Yeah. So that so that was a couple like student facing ones. We also had some teacher facing ones.
Tim Van Norman 12:21
Yeah. So we’ve got the plug-and-play AI PD series. So again, this one isn’t an app, but it’s basically professional development series, putting it together so that it can be rolled out on every campus. Part of the Innovators program was to make it available so that everybody could use it, yeah, and that’s exactly what this is about. Is can we design something that yes, it’d have to be tweaked for Irvine Valley College a little bit, but tweaked, not rewritten. And the AIPD series is a great idea for that.
Brent Warner 12:58
And I really liked how this one too was like from a small college, if I recall correctly, they’re like we haven’t gotten a lot of support for all this stuff, and we know that there are other one other small colleges out there that also are kind of in the same place. So you know, you and I, Tim, obviously we’re quite deep in this, and so, but there’s there are so many people that really you know are still kind of needing their first levels of help and like getting themselves started and having a resources, and so I’m really glad that they were building this. So like it kind of showed the full spectrum of like you know kind of first steps to like deep divers, right?
Tim Van Norman 13:33
Well, and this is something that we would probably be interested in rolling out some of that here as well at IVC because it helps, the idea is to have something that’s overarching and consistent and stuff like that. And it’s always better when you don’t have just spots of information; you have something that’s curated. Yeah, and so it was a great idea. Along those lines, counseling. This was when it was kind of interesting to get into a very specific area. They were looking at doing a counseling community of practice. So have counselors get together and talk about what do we need, what can we do, how can we make life better using AI, better for us, better for our students. What tools do we can we use, and just working together as a community of practice to try to to try to enhance everybody, right? Not just one group of people, one small group of people in one college.
Brent Warner 14:35
Yeah, and so and I like that too because it’s like, hey, all of those counselors, right? Like, might feel like they’re not part of the conversations around these things, right? And it’s like, oh no, we have our little group and we’re able to do these things. So I like that, and I think we need to see more of that. In fact, there are there were other groups that were kind of trying to build their own communities of practice for like a specific group. We’re not going to talk about all of them because that’s. Kind of more of like a a roadmap on how to get people together, right? And you know, each each group might have to figure part of that out, or they could use a structure inside of here on how to do that. But but but they are really cool that there is a number of people doing communities of practices as well. But we also have a number of actual apps that were built, Tim. So so this first one-did you see this? The the UCPIQ the Personal Inquiry Questions Counseling app.
Tim Van Norman 15:29
That looked really interesting as well. Kind of want to play with it once it comes out. The idea being, how do we help students prepare their application essay, not write it, but prepare it and and find their data to to put into the essay for a UC application?
Brent Warner 15:54
Right.
Tim Van Norman 15:55
That’s amazing.
Brent Warner 15:56
And I think it’s really about like eliciting because so many of these students you’ve seen them, and you know we see them, you know, in the writing centers and these types of places, and they’re like, I just don’t know what to write about. I don’t know what to do, and it’s like that that blank canvas fear thing, you know. It’s like, what do I do? What do I do? What do I do? And like, this can really help people kind of get the first steps and figure out what to do, and also interact with counselors on those conversations as they’re going through it, right? And so they’re like, “Okay, this is the direction that I want to go, or no, and like, but it’s still fully focused on the student. So I like that they were really, you know, like, yes, it’s AI, and yes, there’s things that’s gonna like, you know, it’s gonna be responding to you, but it’s not doing it for you. It’s trying to elicit an understanding for yourself on which directions you want to go, and I think a lot of times students just don’t know where to get started with that. So I really like that they’re building that,
Tim Van Norman 16:46
Especially because what I see a lot is students decide to write their own prompts.
Brent Warner 16:52
Yeah,
Tim Van Norman 16:53
and so it’s their work is only as good as the prompt that they do. This is let’s get rid of the student having to do prompts at all. Let’s help them get to that next stage without them having to figure out how to ask themselves a question to get there.
Brent Warner 17:09
Yes, yes, yes, exactly. Okay, so the next one is ours. Absolutely. And are we going to be selfish and take a little bit more time to talk about ours than we are for the other ones. Probably just a bit.
Tim Van Norman 17:23
We understand it better. (laughter)
Brent Warner 17:25
Yeah, the language around this – So the course assignment scheduler is what we called it. We have to be very careful about maybe that language is not the best. Maybe we need to retitle it. But the idea is for chairs of large departments. So if you’re in a large department and you’ve got you know 7080, 90 faculty members to place into classrooms all around campus to try to fit their modalities, to try to fit their availability, to try to fit all of these things. For those of you out there who chair large departments, you understand the stress and the time that goes into all of this. So what we wanted to do is we wanted to build an app that uses spreadsheet data to help assign courses, you know, much much quicker, like like at the click of a button. And so, so the idea is, every semester, at least in our department, we we send out an inquiry form. We say, hey, what’s your availability? You know, what days do you want to teach? What time? All these things, and then it comes into a Google form, and then we want to pull that information out, align it against the room utilization schedule, right? So, what rooms are do we have available to us? What what classes are we putting into those times? And then have the AI figure out the best way to slot the people into those those classes, with an understanding that you know part time faculty can only have a certain amount of units and all all those other bits. And so it’s really a hardcore logic tree data game, right? Of putting and placing things. So there’s no real predictive elements to this, and in fact, one of the one of the interesting things about this one is this is exactly the time when you say, hey, you know, what is the flexibility in AI? Like when you’re playing with Play Lab, you can do that like 70% 60% thing. You’re supposed to put it down to 0% right? Like absolutely no creativity in this at all. Just do the math and figure out the best places to put these people based on the standards that we’re giving you.
Tim Van Norman 19:27
And the other part is some of the LLMs work better than others on this too.
Brent Warner 19:34
That’s right.
Tim Van Norman 19:34
So figuring out what LLM would work well was is another interesting twist that, and it will continue to change.
Brent Warner 19:42
That’s right. Yeah, you have to keep an eye on it. So, but the idea then, and you can set it up in a couple of different ways, is like give me you know the schedule that gives the best spread for everybody, the ones that you know prioritize this and this, right? And so it can give you it like it will go in. And it will give you as a couple of different options, and say this: this you do it this way, do it this way. And then we also built it in a way to say, if you’re unsure, don’t place them yet. Let the chair who is actually talking to the bot have a conversation and talk about where they might want to move those people. And then, of course, it still all does come out as a spreadsheet. So the chair themselves would still then overview everything at the end and go, no, I’m going to move this person and this person. But even getting 80% of the way there, I mean, you know, I mean, it’s it’s 40, 50, 60 hours of work depending on what you know, like the whole process all the way through. So lots of time saved here, hopefully, and we’re we’re working on getting that up there too. Next is the program review assistant. Program review! (laughter)
Tim Van Norman 20:51
Isn’t that supposed to be a bad word? (laughter)
Brent Warner 20:52
Yeah. If your if the if the hairs on the back of your neck just stood up and you’re like, oh my god, like your trauma is coming in on you. I just thought it was so cool. One of these professors, basically, you know, it’s to help faculty and admin complete program review with aligning with the plan, standards, and data. All of these things is just a lot of work, right? And when you go through, you make sure that, like, hey, are we living up to the standards that we set for it? Are we are we matching the expectations? Are we get audited, are we going to be caught with all these things, right? So, program review is like this whole big thing that nobody talks about until you’re doing program review, and then it’s like the only thing you talk about. And so, so I really like this. Lots of lots of work to be kind of guiding you through it and making sure that you’re covering everything that you need, and so I think that will help a lot of people, like especially those. It’s like you know there are people who are really fine with good with fine data and digging, you know, getting fine tuned on all those things. And then there’s other people who are really big people, big picture people, and they’re like, I don’t remember what did I do, what’s going on, right? And so, so especially for those people, and I can sometimes be one of those people too. And it’s like, okay, like keep me on track here and make sure that I’m covering all the all the points that I need to have.
Tim Van Norman 22:12
Especially when it’s tedious like that. So that absolutely, that was an amazing one. I’m definitely interested in how that finalizes.
Brent Warner 22:21
Yeah.
Tim Van Norman 22:22
That’s going to be very interesting.
Brent Warner 22:24
We’ll follow up on that one for sure.
Tim Van Norman 22:25
So, one that I really thought was very interesting as well is it’s called the pedagogical suite, and so the idea here is a bot that will help you choose the right bot to use.
Brent Warner 22:40
I like it, yeah.
Tim Van Norman 22:42
And so instead of you having to know all of the bots that are possible, you start asking it questions. You start ask asking questions, answering questions, whatever to get you to the one that you might actually use and need for that environment.
Brent Warner 23:01
Yeah, so it can basically bring up a link, and it’ll be like, oh, you’re you’re wanting to figure out your financial aid stuff. Here’s the bot that’s going to take you to that, right? You’re wanting to do this. Oh, this will take you to that, right? And so it’s basically just bringing up links for what you’re asking about, right? But it’s really smart because it’s like, okay, like that’s how people would want to interact with it, right? It just go to one source, almost you know, the the most basic fundamental place, and it will carry you to where you’re trying to go. So I do like that.
Tim Van Norman 23:28
And frankly, it helps answer the big question that I’ve got when I see all of these libraries of hundreds of bots or apps. What do I want? Yeah, how do I know if that’s what I want to do, and so if you design an app, you can get it put in here, and that will help get help the next person actually find figure out that that’s what they want to do.
Brent Warner 23:52
Yeah, yeah. And then just very briefly, and sorry for those of you who were in the cohort with us, if we didn’t talk about your one, we like we said we couldn’t quite get to everyone, but hopefully they’re generally covered. But the last one we did want to mention here, which I thought was cool, was an AI fit check for classified professionals. So basically, you know, it’s like, hey, we talk about this as faculty now a lot. Like, be careful about uploading. Like, what information are you doing? Is it a good idea to use AI in this case or not? Not. I still hear faculty talk about this too. They’re questioning it, but also like a lot of classified are like, wait, is it okay for me to do this with AI? Like, what what might be the problems? What might be the threats inside of here? And so I really like that they just built a bot that can kind of help you make sure you’re checking those things, right? Oh, hey, I’m I’m going. You know, I don’t know. I’m I want to help my student. I want to help this student figure out what to do in this situation. Oh, is it okay to talk about that or put it into AI? Oh, don’t put their personal information in here, right? And so things like that could be really helpful.
Tim Van Norman 24:54
Well, as also there are certain things that AI doesn’t do well. So, can you avoid using AI for that? You do that work, but there’s other things AI does extremely well.
Brent Warner 25:08
Right?
Tim Van Norman 25:08
Why not have it do that? And so, having a little guidance on what fits which criteria.
Brent Warner 25:14
And also then it helps the people using it. Like they need that less and less the more they understand it, right? The more and more they understand it, so it’s like, oh, yeah, that’s right. Like I need contextual knowledge of the institution of things that people have been doing in the last month or whatever, right? That’s not going to be any information that AI will have anywhere. But you could talk about it, right? And so then it could go, okay, well, it would be then better for you to do this part, not for AI, right, and so, so again, you know, depending on your level of expertise here, like that might be more or less useful, but but there are large groups that are still wanting that help and support and making sure that they’re doing things appropriately. So, lots of cool things here. Now, Tim, we have to be fair. There, there’s still kind of this is still in progress a little bit. Like the the the program is done, but some of the bots are still going to be finalized. And then I believe that the chancellor’s office is going to be kind of releasing the library or releasing access to all of these things and many more. So so we’re talking about it now. We’re just trying to get some some ideas going and think about things that you can do with these tools, but not all like the links we will provide as soon as they are public, I guess.
Tim Van Norman 26:28
Exactly. Yeah, and and we have to figure out what that means too.
Brent Warner 26:31
Right. Right. Yeah. There’s there’s there’s still some bits going on here. So this is this is like exploration in progress right now as we’re talking about it, so so, anyways. But there’s a lot of cool stuff going on. Nobody is resting on their laurels. There’s explorations and fun stuff happening, and so I just want to encourage everybody to you know take a look and see what’s out there. And and the state is providing you know a lot of access to useful and and and ground up you know, grassroots builds. So I really like that a lot too.
Tim Van Norman 27:05
Thank you for listening today. For more information about the show, please visit our website at thehigheredtechpodcast.com.
Brent Warner 27:14
As always, we want your feedback, so please go to thehigheredtechpodcast.com and let us know your thoughts.
Tim Van Norman 27:21
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 contact me, Tim Van Norman at tvan Norman at ivc.edu.
Brent Warner 27:34
And if you want to reach out to me about the show, you can find me on LinkedIn at @BrentGWarner.
Tim Van Norman 27:39
I’m Tim Van Norman,
Brent Warner 27:41
and I’m Brent Warner, and we hope this episode has helped you on the road from possibility to actuality. Have a good new year, everybody!
What happens when the state chancellor’s office asks faculty, staff, and administration to build with AI during the summer? We’re looking at the chancellor’s innovators program using PlayLab. This is the Higher Ed Tech Podcast, Season Eight, Episode One.
Tim Van Norman 0:27
Welcome to today’s Higher Ed Tech podcast. I’m Tim Van Norman, the interim assistant director, technology services at Irvine Valley College, an adjunct professor of business at Cypress College,
Brent Warner 0:37
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 0:45
Welcome. We’re glad you’re here with us. So, episode one of season eight.
Brent Warner 0:50
Wow. Who who would have known we made it so far?
Tim Van Norman 0:53
Yeah, absolutely. And no, it’s it’s been good. And end of summer. Yep. As we’re recording this, our professional development week has started, and wow, yeah, things are already moving. This has been a busy summer. I barely, barely thought at all about what we’d be doing now.
Brent Warner 1:17
Yeah, we’re even we’re even a week late on this episode, so we’re going to be slightly off schedule for a little bit, but we’ll be okay. Everybody’s okay. All right, so well, I guess very briefly, Tim, did you have a nice summer?
Tim Van Norman 1:30
Absolutely, I did not take any vacation. I went to a conference, and I went to InstructureCon. Oh, good, good, yeah. That was a great conference to go to, and had a great time, and so how about you? Traveling a little bit, and yeah,
Brent Warner 1:43
did some traveling. I went to Japan. I went to Chicago, and this-I don’t know how much this will affect the show, but I am-I’m on leave this semester for other projects and stuff. Not nothing bad. Nothing bad at all. But but you know. So my my ability to talk to classes directly in this semester is going to be somewhat theoretical. Not necessarily tied to direct classes for the next 10 episodes, I guess.
Tim Van Norman 2:17
Well, but hopefully this will give you a little bit of a mental break and prepare you for whatever is coming in the future.
Brent Warner 2:24
Yes, yes. So we’re looking forward to all of that stuff coming up and whatever happens. But Tim, so this summer you and I were both selected to join the Chancellor’s Innovators Program. Can you briefly explain what that
Tim Van Norman 2:43
is? That’s a great question because I I walked into it going, oh, this is an opportunity to play with Play Lab and learn about Play Lab. Yes, that was what it was, but they’ve Play Lab has been doing lots of different programs. This was a four week program meeting on Mondays from six to seven or six to six to six to eight. I think it was
Brent Warner 3:09
a couple hours. Anyway,
Tim Van Norman 3:10
it was a couple hours. But what it was doing is the idea was: can we build apps? Could we build systems? Can we build trainings that were that can be reused not for us, for the chancellor’s office, for for all community colleges?
Brent Warner 3:30
Yeah,
Tim Van Norman 3:31
and so kind of trying to create a library of apps, trainings, all kinds of different things, even concepts that could be used with regard to AI, which was really neat, because we weren’t trying to look for how do I solve my class problem. It’s how do I solve this bigger problem, and we’re going to talk about some of those here in a bit. So
Brent Warner 3:56
yeah,
Tim Van Norman 3:57
I loved the program. They were more
Brent Warner 3:59
macro level, like it was like so. So and for me too, because you know I’ve spent a lot of time building little things small for my class, and it’s like okay, let’s talk about what what we need at a bigger level, what we can do, and so lots of things to explore. We’re gonna basically today’s episode is to share what several of those ideas were. But one of the cool things about working with Play Lab too is that they’re not like you must be in Play Lab at all times, right? And and in fact, there were quite a lot of other cool tools that we were playing with. Some tied in, some kind of totally separate. But I think we should at least share them briefly because some of them are quite useful. So, Tim, did you play with Granola very much?
Tim Van Norman 4:40
I didn’t, but you had. I heard a bunch about it myself. I typically use Zoom, but what do I do when I’m in Zoom, but it’s not my meeting,
Brent Warner 4:52
right?
Tim Van Norman 4:52
And I want to get notes, so I really liked that. And by the way, that’s also without adding an AI bot to. The
Brent Warner 5:00
meetings, meeting, yeah.
Tim Van Norman 5:02
So that’s what I really liked about that concept.
Brent Warner 5:05
Yeah. So granola basically is is a meeting follower, but it’s run on your computer instead of in an app separately, or like in in the meeting app, right? And so, so one, it’s it’s all private. My my understanding is it’s meant to be totally in your computer and just what it’s doing there. I think if I if I understand that correctly, and then but two like anytime you log into a meeting, whether it’s Zoom or Google Meet or whichever one, it’s like hey you’re in a meeting. Do you want to you want to support you with taking notes on it, right? And so it kind of just floats there, and then you can interact with the notes again later. So that concept of the notes thing is not totally new, but the other part is I like how it works. So,
Tim Van Norman 5:47
and the price was really good too.
Brent Warner 5:49
Yeah, it’s free,
Tim Van Norman 5:50
not unlimited. Everything free, but it actually it looked like it’s designed to be free for the most part for people who who aren’t going to need the ultimate history and all of that? So it was a really it’s a really neat package. So granola,
Brent Warner 6:08
yeah. A couple other ones. They had cursor. Cursor was talked about. I what was cursor?
Tim Van Norman 6:16
So cursor. First of all, I’ve seen ads for cursor, and I’m like yeah okay somebody’s swearing at something I don’t know but or or you know they’re typing on a computer whatever whatever that is but it actually is an app builder for building apps
Brent Warner 6:33
yes
Tim Van Norman 6:34
so basically you it’s designed to work and create agentic AI. So you build an app that will tie into another app that you build in it, and you build this basically agentic system, and modularize your different apps, and it does the work for with you, and that was really impressive. I’ve been looking at a couple of projects, and if a couple things free up, I’m intending to start playing with Cursor myself because it’s got some really cool. It’s got some really cool aspects, especially as I’m looking more and more into Agentic AI. It’d be a really nice tool to play with for sure.
Brent Warner 7:24
And then just very briefly, you know, people were also using Claude a lot inside of here and bringing Claude back and forth into Play Lab, which was cool. And then one of the little apps that was built in Play Lab, but was also cool, was called Bot Forge, which is meant to like help you build apps inside of play, like like to understand it. It’s a app again, same kind of thing, like an app that helps you build apps, and so it’s understand what it’s trying to do, and so help college, you know, faculty write, equip, test, and refine their Play Lab bots. So I like that. You know, there’s a lot of cool things just outside of all of this that you can play with.
Tim Van Norman 8:04
Absolutely, and Bot Forge. I love the fact that we’re literally in a meeting. The person put it in there, and you said, Tim, why don’t you just try to type in what we’re trying to do here? And we massaged the prompt just slightly, and boom, it just started writing
Brent Warner 8:20
it. Yeah, I
Tim Van Norman 8:21
was very impressed with that, and and that’s the type of thing a lot of PlayLab stuff is going for. That is
Speaker 1 8:27
to
Tim Van Norman 8:28
be able to help you write better apps.
Brent Warner 8:32
Yeah,
Tim Van Norman 8:32
not prompt better, but write better apps.
Brent Warner 8:35
Yeah, yeah. So today, though, like we said, what we’re really trying to talk about is some of the ideas that other teachers were coming up with inside of here. So at the end of it, everybody kind of had like a little mini presentation. We’re not going to be able to cover all of them, but we wanted to just kind of get a sense of the ideas of what people are coming up with, and then and then with an understanding that you know if if you’re in the California Community Colleges, you will have access to these at some level, right? Some of them are still being developed a little bit, or or at least it might be an inspiration for you. But the intention of all of this is to make them fully available for faculty, staff, admin, and students, of course, and so that these can be you know resources that you can start with that are kind of like apps that are already built, and then of course with Play Lab you can do these remixes where you can kind of take the prompt that’s already built and then change it and customize it to your needs. So, so Tim, let’s jump into sharing a few of these, and we’re gonna have to move quick, but we’ll get some some thoughts on these.
Tim Van Norman 9:41
So the first one here we’re talking about is the student AI literacy module. So not necessarily an app, but in Canvas, can we create a module that can be used in every school, tweaked for that school, but used everywhere to teach AI literacy? Because that’s one of the big struggles that we’ve got right now is some people think they’re literate and have no idea. Many people, especially students, don’t think they’re literate and they’re right. So how do we get that? How do we get them past that point and actually get them to understand AI, be literate in using AI?
Brent Warner 10:21
Yeah, and then I like I kind of like what they did inside of here too. So it is like a Canvas module, right? It’s just like your kind of standard Canvas module. But then they’re also integrating the chat bot into it, so so you will do parts of the activity are is actually working with AI as you’re learning to explore with AI. So so that’s kind of cool. And then connected to that, Tim, we talked about this one pre-show. Was the online readiness tutorial? I really liked this one, so it was a professor Greg Bayer. Bayer, sorry, Greg. I I always forget how to pronounce his last name, but but I think he’s down at Cuyamaka, and basically what what he had done in the past was he had built modules for students to show how ready they are for online, and he has the research showing like, hey, this has actually made a difference for students and their success in online learning, right? And so then what he’s doing is he’s now creating an AI edition or version of that, so that students can then have you know timely interactive feedback as they’re going through and learning about what they need to know for teaching or sorry for learning online.
Tim Van Norman 11:34
Yeah, this is something we had a system. I don’t know. I think it was old eight years ago, when I started using it, and we wound up shutting it down because it wasn’t accurate anymore. Was talking about using Flash and how important it was to use Flash and stuff like that. And so, and this really sounds like a great alternative to something that’s that old is to have something that can literally be updated constantly.
Brent Warner 12:02
Yeah, yeah, I really do like that part, and that’s a big, big thing that’s going to be with AI. Is like, oh, files got updated on this website. That means the the app and the feedback inside of there will also be updated every time. So that’s great. Right. Yeah. So that so that was a couple like student facing ones. We also had some teacher facing ones.
Tim Van Norman 12:21
Yeah. So we’ve got the plug-and-play AI PD series. So again, this one isn’t an app, but it’s basically professional development series, putting it together so that it can be rolled out on every campus. Part of the Innovators program was to make it available so that everybody could use it, yeah, and that’s exactly what this is about. Is can we design something that yes, it’d have to be tweaked for Irvine Valley College a little bit, but tweaked, not rewritten. And the AIPD series is a great idea for that.
Brent Warner 12:58
And I really liked how this one too was like from a small college, if I recall correctly, they’re like we haven’t gotten a lot of support for all this stuff, and we know that there are other one other small colleges out there that also are kind of in the same place. So you know, you and I, Tim, obviously we’re quite deep in this, and so, but there’s there are so many people that really you know are still kind of needing their first levels of help and like getting themselves started and having a resources, and so I’m really glad that they were building this. So like it kind of showed the full spectrum of like you know kind of first steps to like deep divers, right?
Tim Van Norman 13:33
Well, and this is something that we would probably be interested in rolling out some of that here as well at IVC because it helps, the idea is to have something that’s overarching and consistent and stuff like that. And it’s always better when you don’t have just spots of information; you have something that’s curated. Yeah, and so it was a great idea. Along those lines, counseling. This was when it was kind of interesting to get into a very specific area. They were looking at doing a counseling community of practice. So have counselors get together and talk about what do we need, what can we do, how can we make life better using AI, better for us, better for our students. What tools do we can we use, and just working together as a community of practice to try to to try to enhance everybody, right? Not just one group of people, one small group of people in one college.
Brent Warner 14:35
Yeah, and so and I like that too because it’s like, hey, all of those counselors, right? Like, might feel like they’re not part of the conversations around these things, right? And it’s like, oh no, we have our little group and we’re able to do these things. So I like that, and I think we need to see more of that. In fact, there are there were other groups that were kind of trying to build their own communities of practice for like a specific group. We’re not going to talk about all of them because that’s. Kind of more of like a a roadmap on how to get people together, right? And you know, each each group might have to figure part of that out, or they could use a structure inside of here on how to do that. But but but they are really cool that there is a number of people doing communities of practices as well. But we also have a number of actual apps that were built, Tim. So so this first one-did you see this? The the UCPIQ the Personal Inquiry Questions Counseling app.
Tim Van Norman 15:29
That looked really interesting as well. Kind of want to play with it once it comes out. The idea being, how do we help students prepare their application essay, not write it, but prepare it and and find their data to to put into the essay for a UC application?
Brent Warner 15:54
Right.
Tim Van Norman 15:55
That’s amazing.
Brent Warner 15:56
And I think it’s really about like eliciting because so many of these students you’ve seen them, and you know we see them, you know, in the writing centers and these types of places, and they’re like, I just don’t know what to write about. I don’t know what to do, and it’s like that that blank canvas fear thing, you know. It’s like, what do I do? What do I do? What do I do? And like, this can really help people kind of get the first steps and figure out what to do, and also interact with counselors on those conversations as they’re going through it, right? And so they’re like, “Okay, this is the direction that I want to go, or no, and like, but it’s still fully focused on the student. So I like that they were really, you know, like, yes, it’s AI, and yes, there’s things that’s gonna like, you know, it’s gonna be responding to you, but it’s not doing it for you. It’s trying to elicit an understanding for yourself on which directions you want to go, and I think a lot of times students just don’t know where to get started with that. So I really like that they’re building that,
Tim Van Norman 16:46
Especially because what I see a lot is students decide to write their own prompts.
Brent Warner 16:52
Yeah,
Tim Van Norman 16:53
and so it’s their work is only as good as the prompt that they do. This is let’s get rid of the student having to do prompts at all. Let’s help them get to that next stage without them having to figure out how to ask themselves a question to get there.
Brent Warner 17:09
Yes, yes, yes, exactly. Okay, so the next one is ours. Absolutely. And are we going to be selfish and take a little bit more time to talk about ours than we are for the other ones. Probably just a bit.
Tim Van Norman 17:23
We understand it better. (laughter)
Brent Warner 17:25
Yeah, the language around this – So the course assignment scheduler is what we called it. We have to be very careful about maybe that language is not the best. Maybe we need to retitle it. But the idea is for chairs of large departments. So if you’re in a large department and you’ve got you know 7080, 90 faculty members to place into classrooms all around campus to try to fit their modalities, to try to fit their availability, to try to fit all of these things. For those of you out there who chair large departments, you understand the stress and the time that goes into all of this. So what we wanted to do is we wanted to build an app that uses spreadsheet data to help assign courses, you know, much much quicker, like like at the click of a button. And so, so the idea is, every semester, at least in our department, we we send out an inquiry form. We say, hey, what’s your availability? You know, what days do you want to teach? What time? All these things, and then it comes into a Google form, and then we want to pull that information out, align it against the room utilization schedule, right? So, what rooms are do we have available to us? What what classes are we putting into those times? And then have the AI figure out the best way to slot the people into those those classes, with an understanding that you know part time faculty can only have a certain amount of units and all all those other bits. And so it’s really a hardcore logic tree data game, right? Of putting and placing things. So there’s no real predictive elements to this, and in fact, one of the one of the interesting things about this one is this is exactly the time when you say, hey, you know, what is the flexibility in AI? Like when you’re playing with Play Lab, you can do that like 70% 60% thing. You’re supposed to put it down to 0% right? Like absolutely no creativity in this at all. Just do the math and figure out the best places to put these people based on the standards that we’re giving you.
Tim Van Norman 19:27
And the other part is some of the LLMs work better than others on this too.
Brent Warner 19:34
That’s right.
Tim Van Norman 19:34
So figuring out what LLM would work well was is another interesting twist that, and it will continue to change.
Brent Warner 19:42
That’s right. Yeah, you have to keep an eye on it. So, but the idea then, and you can set it up in a couple of different ways, is like give me you know the schedule that gives the best spread for everybody, the ones that you know prioritize this and this, right? And so it can give you it like it will go in. And it will give you as a couple of different options, and say this: this you do it this way, do it this way. And then we also built it in a way to say, if you’re unsure, don’t place them yet. Let the chair who is actually talking to the bot have a conversation and talk about where they might want to move those people. And then, of course, it still all does come out as a spreadsheet. So the chair themselves would still then overview everything at the end and go, no, I’m going to move this person and this person. But even getting 80% of the way there, I mean, you know, I mean, it’s it’s 40, 50, 60 hours of work depending on what you know, like the whole process all the way through. So lots of time saved here, hopefully, and we’re we’re working on getting that up there too. Next is the program review assistant. Program review! (laughter)
Tim Van Norman 20:51
Isn’t that supposed to be a bad word? (laughter)
Brent Warner 20:52
Yeah. If your if the if the hairs on the back of your neck just stood up and you’re like, oh my god, like your trauma is coming in on you. I just thought it was so cool. One of these professors, basically, you know, it’s to help faculty and admin complete program review with aligning with the plan, standards, and data. All of these things is just a lot of work, right? And when you go through, you make sure that, like, hey, are we living up to the standards that we set for it? Are we are we matching the expectations? Are we get audited, are we going to be caught with all these things, right? So, program review is like this whole big thing that nobody talks about until you’re doing program review, and then it’s like the only thing you talk about. And so, so I really like this. Lots of lots of work to be kind of guiding you through it and making sure that you’re covering everything that you need, and so I think that will help a lot of people, like especially those. It’s like you know there are people who are really fine with good with fine data and digging, you know, getting fine tuned on all those things. And then there’s other people who are really big people, big picture people, and they’re like, I don’t remember what did I do, what’s going on, right? And so, so especially for those people, and I can sometimes be one of those people too. And it’s like, okay, like keep me on track here and make sure that I’m covering all the all the points that I need to have.
Tim Van Norman 22:12
Especially when it’s tedious like that. So that absolutely, that was an amazing one. I’m definitely interested in how that finalizes.
Brent Warner 22:21
Yeah.
Tim Van Norman 22:22
That’s going to be very interesting.
Brent Warner 22:24
We’ll follow up on that one for sure.
Tim Van Norman 22:25
So, one that I really thought was very interesting as well is it’s called the pedagogical suite, and so the idea here is a bot that will help you choose the right bot to use.
Brent Warner 22:40
I like it, yeah.
Tim Van Norman 22:42
And so instead of you having to know all of the bots that are possible, you start asking it questions. You start ask asking questions, answering questions, whatever to get you to the one that you might actually use and need for that environment.
Brent Warner 23:01
Yeah, so it can basically bring up a link, and it’ll be like, oh, you’re you’re wanting to figure out your financial aid stuff. Here’s the bot that’s going to take you to that, right? You’re wanting to do this. Oh, this will take you to that, right? And so it’s basically just bringing up links for what you’re asking about, right? But it’s really smart because it’s like, okay, like that’s how people would want to interact with it, right? It just go to one source, almost you know, the the most basic fundamental place, and it will carry you to where you’re trying to go. So I do like that.
Tim Van Norman 23:28
And frankly, it helps answer the big question that I’ve got when I see all of these libraries of hundreds of bots or apps. What do I want? Yeah, how do I know if that’s what I want to do, and so if you design an app, you can get it put in here, and that will help get help the next person actually find figure out that that’s what they want to do.
Brent Warner 23:52
Yeah, yeah. And then just very briefly, and sorry for those of you who were in the cohort with us, if we didn’t talk about your one, we like we said we couldn’t quite get to everyone, but hopefully they’re generally covered. But the last one we did want to mention here, which I thought was cool, was an AI fit check for classified professionals. So basically, you know, it’s like, hey, we talk about this as faculty now a lot. Like, be careful about uploading. Like, what information are you doing? Is it a good idea to use AI in this case or not? Not. I still hear faculty talk about this too. They’re questioning it, but also like a lot of classified are like, wait, is it okay for me to do this with AI? Like, what what might be the problems? What might be the threats inside of here? And so I really like that they just built a bot that can kind of help you make sure you’re checking those things, right? Oh, hey, I’m I’m going. You know, I don’t know. I’m I want to help my student. I want to help this student figure out what to do in this situation. Oh, is it okay to talk about that or put it into AI? Oh, don’t put their personal information in here, right? And so things like that could be really helpful.
Tim Van Norman 24:54
Well, as also there are certain things that AI doesn’t do well. So, can you avoid using AI for that? You do that work, but there’s other things AI does extremely well.
Brent Warner 25:08
Right?
Tim Van Norman 25:08
Why not have it do that? And so, having a little guidance on what fits which criteria.
Brent Warner 25:14
And also then it helps the people using it. Like they need that less and less the more they understand it, right? The more and more they understand it, so it’s like, oh, yeah, that’s right. Like I need contextual knowledge of the institution of things that people have been doing in the last month or whatever, right? That’s not going to be any information that AI will have anywhere. But you could talk about it, right? And so then it could go, okay, well, it would be then better for you to do this part, not for AI, right, and so, so again, you know, depending on your level of expertise here, like that might be more or less useful, but but there are large groups that are still wanting that help and support and making sure that they’re doing things appropriately. So, lots of cool things here. Now, Tim, we have to be fair. There, there’s still kind of this is still in progress a little bit. Like the the the program is done, but some of the bots are still going to be finalized. And then I believe that the chancellor’s office is going to be kind of releasing the library or releasing access to all of these things and many more. So so we’re talking about it now. We’re just trying to get some some ideas going and think about things that you can do with these tools, but not all like the links we will provide as soon as they are public, I guess.
Tim Van Norman 26:28
Exactly. Yeah, and and we have to figure out what that means too.
Brent Warner 26:31
Right. Right. Yeah. There’s there’s there’s still some bits going on here. So this is this is like exploration in progress right now as we’re talking about it, so so, anyways. But there’s a lot of cool stuff going on. Nobody is resting on their laurels. There’s explorations and fun stuff happening, and so I just want to encourage everybody to you know take a look and see what’s out there. And and the state is providing you know a lot of access to useful and and and ground up you know, grassroots builds. So I really like that a lot too.
Tim Van Norman 27:05
Thank you for listening today. For more information about the show, please visit our website at thehigheredtechpodcast.com.
Brent Warner 27:14
As always, we want your feedback, so please go to thehigheredtechpodcast.com and let us know your thoughts.
Tim Van Norman 27:21
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 contact me, Tim Van Norman at tvan Norman at ivc.edu.
Brent Warner 27:34
And if you want to reach out to me about the show, you can find me on LinkedIn at @BrentGWarner.
Tim Van Norman 27:39
I’m Tim Van Norman,
Brent Warner 27:41
and I’m Brent Warner, and we hope this episode has helped you on the road from possibility to actuality. Have a good new year, everybody!
We’re back in the new school year and to kick things off Brent and Tim are discussing how community college faculty, staff, and admin are building macro-level AI bots to help improve workflows and help students. The state chancellor’s office worked with Playlab this summer and scope of projects was impressive. Listen in as Brent and Tim share some of the projects people worked on and how you can use those ideas on your campus.