Reflections from the LARC AI Innovation Summit

Last month, I had the privilege of speaking at the LARC AI Innovation Summit. I joined a panel on workforce readiness for college students in an increasingly AI-driven world. LARC, an organization made up of community college professors and administrators from Los Angeles County, organized this event to spark dialogue about how AI can be incorporated constructively into education. About 300 educators attended the event, and it was clearly an enthusiastic and engaged crowd.

The summit highlighted a critical challenge: The vast majority of the educators in attendance were not yet familiar with generative AI tools. This reality became clear during the keynote session from AI literacy advocate Jen Garcia, when a quick show of hands revealed that most attendees had little or no experience using AI in their regular work and life. This moment set the tone for the event, underscoring the pressing need to equip educators with the knowledge and skills needed to adapt to this transformative technology.

While many speakers celebrated the amazing potential for AI to enhance the classroom experience, I felt compelled to emphasize the need for balance. With all its promise, AI also requires oversight and direction from people who are not so excited about its possibilities that they ignore the potential concerns. I highlighted the importance of holding large language model (LLM) developers accountable for the ethical sourcing of training data and ensuring the credibility of their outputs.

These concerns led me to introduce Credtent.org, an independent content registry that promotes transparency and ethical practices in AI training. The audience seemed to appreciate the straight talk on how we should be both excited and concerned about how AI will impact students, teachers, schools, and education.

Practical Strategies for Educators

Our panel was focused on workforce readiness for students going out into a world now going through the Age of AI. However, how are we going to get students ready for this world if we don’t equip educators with actionable strategies to bring AI into education? I shared some ways Credtent has been advising educators in the last two years.

I love these visualizations composed while the panel was in motion.

Using AI to Learn About AI
I encouraged teachers to leverage tools like ChatGPT to explore and better understand the technology themselves. If you ask it, ChatGPT will tell you all about what it can do, how it functions, and will even help you with prompting. Most people miss that last point — you can ask ChatGPT to optimize your prompt before processing it.

I noted that the more these educators used AI for repetitive tasks, research, and optimization of their work, the more they will understand how students are using these tools to get their homework done. Banning its use will only make some students work harder to hide their use and it will harm their learning experience.

Incorporating AI into Lesson Plans
Instead of restricting AI, I urged professors to embrace it by creating assignments that require students to use AI thoughtfully. For instance, tasks might involve prompting ChatGPT to draft an essay, followed by analyzing its output for strengths, weaknesses, and factual accuracy.

Credtent made this specific recommendation to a professor at Georgetown University for a graduate level course and it worked well. Instead of worrying about how AI will compose papers, educators can instead lean into these tools’ capabilities, use critical thinking skills to evaluate the output, and set a higher standard for the work expected from students.

The author addressing the audience at the AI Innovation Summit.

By focusing on the skills students really need and acknowledging that AI can take care of boring tasks that don’t matter too much (MLA formatting, for example), educators can zero in on enriching students’ experience. That allows for more focus on creativity, thoughtful parsing of the details of their study, and recognizing how their studies affect their future prospects and the world.

Fostering Critical Thinking
The rise of AI tools means educators and students alike must focus more on how to critically evaluate and validate AI-generated content. This shift helps prepare students for real-world scenarios where AI will play a central role. The work world they are going into will expect they have some facility with AI tools, so they need to be prepared to use them to enhance their work, not to do their jobs for them. I’ve often quoted AI pioneer Dr. Maya Ackerman (founder of Wave.AI) as saying that we need to lean in on the synergy of working with AI tools and stay away from slacking off and letting the AI do our work for us. Much like Cliff Notes of old, you might sneak by with just reading that thin volume instead of the entire book you were assigned, but who pays the price of this slacking off? The student who fails to experiencing the work as art and not just themes and motifs. Similarly, if students use AI to get by, they will suffer from never learning the skills they need to succeed in life and work.

If they master AI use, they can focus on the areas where we still need the spark of a human being: Critical thinking, finding natural, human connections and applying empathy to the actions we take in life.

Embracing AI in Education

The full panel, with our moderator and the head of LARC.

When I spoke on the panel, I emphasized the inevitability of AI’s presence in our classrooms and workplaces. This is not just a technology bubble that will burst; AI is already altering modern work. To ensure students are prepared for a workforce shaped by AI, educators must embrace this technology, integrate it into their methods, and advocate for its ethical development. We were happy to see dozens of educators come to our booth to learn more about Credtent.

The LARC AI Innovation Summit served as a reminder that we are at the beginning of a new era in education. By acknowledging the gaps, sharing strategies, and holding tech developers accountable, we can ensure that AI becomes a tool for empowerment rather than disruption.

The work ahead is clear: The next generation depends on how well we prepare them to thrive alongside AI in a changing world where jobs, white-collar and blue-collar alike, will be forever changed by this transformative technology.