S2.E6 | Dr. Dwayne Wood | Instructional Design that Meets the Moment

From Military Leadership to Instructional Design: Dr. Dwayne Wood on AI, Education, and Rethinking Grading

In this episode of KeyBARD, host Thembi Duncan interviews Dr. Dwayne Wood, an educator, instructional designer, and military veteran with over 22 years of experience in the U.S. Army. Now a leader in instructional design and curriculum development, Dr. Wood shares how his military background shaped his approach to education, leadership, and mentorship.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

✅ How military leadership naturally cultivates teaching skills
✅ Why Dr. Wood challenges traditional grading systems
✅ The role of AI in education and its impact on instructional design
✅ How discipline fuels innovation in learning and development
✅ Dr. Wood’s journey from the Army to instructional design

About Dr. Dwayne Wood:

Dr. Dwayne Wood is a distinguished educator, instructional designer, and curriculum developer who specializes in creating engaging learning experiences for adult learners. His expertise spans instructional design, AI in education, and innovative assessment strategies.

Want to be a guest on KeyBARD? Send Thembi a message on PodMatch: https://www.podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/1740803399472257afce75768

KeyBARD is produced, written, and hosted by Thembi Duncan.
Theme music by Sycho Sid.

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Transcript

Dr. Dwayne Wood: I fully believe any non-commissioned officer in any of the services already has a background in education. They just don't know it yet.

Thembi: Hello. Hello and welcome to KeyBARD. I'm Thembi, bringing you compelling conversations and content about technology, education, and the arts.

Instructional design is such an interesting practice. The title itself seems to be a straightforward explanation of what an instructional designer does, right, design instruction, but whenever I talk about it with family and friends, they usually respond with, okay, but what is it exactly? And to be honest, when I first started studying it, I wasn't entirely sure how to describe it either. I just knew that in my years of working as a teaching artist, that maybe I was kind of already doing it in some way without realizing it, but I wanted to understand it on a deeper level. So I went back to study it. 

Well, now I can describe it. Instructional design is a research backed methodology for creating meaningful and effective learning experiences. It's about design, development and delivery, figuring out how people learn best and then shaping their education accordingly. Simple, right? 

And that's what I explore in this conversation with Dr. Dwayne Wood, with a background in military service and education. Dr. Wood brings a unique perspective to instructional design. So we talk about how discipline fuels innovation, how AI is changing the way we teach and learn, and we talk about why he is not a fan of traditional grades and a lot more. 

So let's get into it with Dr. Dwayne Wood.

Dwayne Wood is a distinguished educator and instructional designer, renowned for his proactive approach and innovative curricula designs with a rich background in military service and a profound commitment to empowering others. He brings a unique perspective to the world of education. 

His expertise lies in creating highly effective and engaging pedagogical methods, designing effective and engaging curricula, creating learning materials tailored to diverse audiences, and designing educational experiences for adult learners. Welcome, Dwayne.

Dr. Dwayne Wood (00:02:18): Thank you. Thank you for having me on and having this conversation.

Thembi: I'm so happy to have you. Let's jump in. So you have had a fascinating journey from military service and then becoming an educator and a researcher. And I want to talk a little bit about that. What pulled you from the military to the field of education and how did the military shape how you work in the education world?

Dr. Dwayne Wood (00:02:41): I think a lot about any many career service members that stay in, I did 22 years and I know people do more and more, and that becomes your life when you're ready to transition, when it's time to transition, you have this kind of moment of what am I going to do when I grow up? What am I doing next? Because a lot of the skills that we develop in the service don't necessarily translate, especially depending on what kind of career field or whatever you're doing. 

But I would say there's a lot of intangible skills that do translate to any career field. And for me, what it came down to, I was a non-commissioned officer, so I'm working with soldiers in the tactical realm. And what resonated with me was the teaching, mentorship, coaching aspect of being a non-commissioned officer. And it took me a little bit to reflect on that's what I want to do, so how do I do that right after I transition?

And it's being an educator, being a teacher, being part of that process and helping learn. Because you find out when you're an NCO and you're training and you're working with your troops and you see the light bulbs go off, that was what you did it for. And that intrinsic reward was what kind of propelled me I think, into the what am I going to do after I retire from the service and education was it. 

And I was like, I've already been doing it. And so it was just an easier translation and I think a lot, I fully believe any non-commissioned officer in any of the services already has a background in education. They just don't know it yet. They just haven't thought about it. Right. What they're doing, one of their major functions in life is training, mentorship, coaching of those soldiers that they've been charged with.

Thembi (00:04:34): What branch were you in?

Dr. Dwayne Wood: So I was in the Army.

Thembi: Okay, so you were in the army. And so when you left the army, were you already in the mind frame? You talked about the transferable skills. Were you already in the mind frame of education at that point? Were you already looking for opportunities before you left?

Dr. Dwayne Wood (00:04:51): I was, and I got lucky. And what, I mean, I got lucky is my last assignment in the Army. I was a military history science instructor for the army, so I was doing that in uniform already and then I transitioned as a civilian to do the same thing. That made it easy for me. A lot of transitioners don't have that. 

Again, I fell into it. It was kind of lucky, but it was just aligned with what I had already decided before getting out of uniform that that's what I was going to do and that's what I was going to pursue. What it came down to then was what aspects am I going to look at or am I going to specialize in or what I'm going to do? 

I mean, I started K through 12 and I learned that I really wasn't suited really for that, and I really wanted to get into the higher education or the adult learning aspect, training aspect of education, and that led me to instructional design in those aspects. 

So that's where that path took me. And then I started taking jobs. I started taking not only instructor jobs and teaching jobs, but instructional design jobs to gain that experience and just see where I was at and that's where I liked being and just really enjoyed and found that spark.

Thembi (00:06:08): What's something funny is that you said that you started K through 12, right? And then you said, no, this isn't for me. I'm going to move on to adult learners. And then you aimed for that approach. And I think as a director I think about creating a sketch of you, and this is probably so far from you, but I am think of this hilarious sketch of this full army gear fatigues like yelling at the kids to get 'em in order, get 'em in step, and the kids are like, ah. And then you realize, wait a second, I'm not really, this is not really my target audience. Let me go with the adults. Because in a lot of cases, adult learners need that. Not to say we need to be yelled at, but we need, as a part of andragogy, when you're learning about how adults learn, we need to understand what our purpose is. We need to feel connected to the learning and we need that motivation.

Dr. Dwayne Wood (00:06:56): And I think you're right, and when I reflect on this more and more, when I think back on why did I end up making that choice or where I went and what I found was my philosophy when I thought of my leadership and my teaching philosophy, where is that aligned? 

It was more towards the adults because adults come to any kind of education or training with experience and my background and what I was comfortable with and I like doing was how do I mold that experience to produce new learning? When you're working in a through 12 environment, they don't have that experience to use.

You have to produce that experience if you're going to use it because they just don't have it. An adult learner generally comes, how is this going to impact me and how am I going to use this? Is this a benefit to me? 

So that level of motivation was for me why I wanted to be there where in K through 12 you had to provide the motivation and it was more extrinsic versus intrinsic. So there's a lot of difference there and how you approach to produce the learning outcome that you're trying to achieve. So the adult side was just better aligned with me coming out of the service and deciding what I was going to do.

Thembi (00:08:10): So let's talk about artificial intelligence, also known as ai. So I talk to people all the time who are just like, oh, AI is crazy. It's taking over. It's so scary. But a lot of times I find when I get into the granular aspects of ai, people don't realize that there are many different types of ai and that AI itself as a concept continues to evolve. And so I'm wondering if you can start by explaining to us what is generative artificial intelligence, which we'll talk about today.

Dr. Dwayne Wood (00:08:43): Yeah, so you're absolutely right. If you just say artificial intelligence, that is such a broad category. Everything from self-driving cars to, yeah, I tend to think more in generative ai. In the educational though, there's other ais that can be applied, predictive and analytic and stuff on the backend of some educational stuff. 

But when I think of, I'm thinking again, student facing type technologies that are out there that are influencing our education system. Generative AI is those ais that we're very familiar with. There are text generators, text to image, text to video. They can produce all these different things. 

And just to name a few, to give you some context chat, DBT is kind of like the big one out there, right? That's a text generator. Also, it's been integrated now with their image generator dolly. So you can actually use the same one to produce an image.

And then there's a bunch of other ones out there. Perplexity is a text generator. You've got stable diffusion, that's a text to image. There's a bunch of text to video. The text to video is getting better and better.

 The rapid pace of these changes is a little difficult because just like three or four months ago, I was playing with a text video generator, and I was like, it just produced a lot of text heavy slides and put it into a sequence. I was like, that's not really helpful to me what I'm trying to do. But now you can do almost full stop animation and it's only a few months later. That's what we're kind of talking about, this generative ai. 

And you mentioned when you started, and we kind of talked about this, is it's almost looked at as doom and gloom. It's going to replace me as a teacher...

Thembi (00:10:21):

Or just the scariness. People are scared because they're like, now, especially when we're talking image and video, people are saying, okay, now I'm starting to lose my sense of what's real and what's not, and that scares them.

Dr. Dwayne Wood (00:10:33): Yeah, I think there is, and that's why when we talk about this topic, if we look at the news, we pull the news and we look at it, we get one or the other almost. It's terrible. It's doom and gloom. We need to shut this thing down, not use it, or we get this is the greatest thing in the world. And I would say both of those are wrong.

It's somewhere in the middle. I get questions all the time from other colleagues and other folks ask, how do I integrate this new technology? Or how do I even approach what I'm doing? Because I know students are using AI or generative ai. How do I approach this? 

And my answer is, well, it depends. What are your learning objectives? What are you trying to achieve? What's your audience? What does your audience, there's all these things we need to factor in to see how that tool could fit. And I say could, because that might not be the answer. It could be a non-technology thing that we need to do that needs to be the answer to produce the better learning outcome. 

It's taking this student first approach, I need to achieve these learning outcomes. What does a student need to do to achieve those learning outcomes? And using that as a guide, when you're putting stuff together and when you're trying to design this learning experience for them or this learning activity to produce that outcome, you got to take that approach. 

Now, we also have to be aware of the big things that we worry about with generative AI is cheating.

My traditional assessment is an essay, and if I prompt it correctly in the system, I can produce that essay. And you wouldn't know that Chat GPT produced it and I would get a decent grade, but it's not a reflection of actual my cognitive effort. So I'll say, yes, yes, that's a concern, but my question would be to you, why are we still using an essay as an artifact for learning?

Thembi (00:12:19): Yeah, yeah. Going back to the whole, yeah, I like that. Going back to the initial question. 

Dr. Dwayne Wood (00:12:24): Yeah, exactly. And now I think we have to look at how we do things. Not necessarily we're going to change because all the techniques and stuff that we use currently are still valid, but we have to apply them. And what I mean by this, we have to have a less focus on the product now and a more focus on the process.

So how do we do that in a classroom? That becomes the question. You can say that, yes, stop focusing on the product. And I say, not stop focusing. The product still has a play. We still need to have a product. But there's less emphasis, I think, and more emphasis on the process. Then we can actually see the learning happening during the process. 

And we have techniques already in place that we do this formative type assessments. Just the teacher in the classroom observing their classroom is a way to watch the process. But one of the ways that I'm looking at it is because a lot of the ways that I find myself is in the asynchronous, blended environment, online asynchronous environment, that's a little harder because you're not with the student. It's all any times how do you do things? 

And one of the things I'm finding is working, and again, this is also kind of new that we're kind of experimenting with this, right? And testing it and trying to figure out, and

Thembi (00:13:42): It's changing as we learn. Once we learn how it works, then it changes again.

Dr. Dwayne Wood (00:13:46): Yeah. That's one of the challenges in instructional design is keeping up with the technology as it progresses, break up your product into processes and then look at those processes and use this, I'm going to use this word, a cognitive forcing function. 

So basically you use a model or technique that has the student still apply those critical and creative thinking processes, even though they're working with AI to produce the product. Okay,

Thembi (00:14:19): You are aware that they're working with AI

Dr. Dwayne Wood: And that's okay...

Thembi: Okay, but yeah.

Dr. Dwayne Wood: Yeah. It's being one of the findings, working with students that are going to use AI, just being completely transparent.

Thembi: I like that.

Dr. Dwayne Wood (00:14:34): Hey, I know you're using it by all means, use it. And then have the discussion about what is the proper and responsible use within those specific context. One colleague shared a technique that they're doing, and I thought it's actually fantastic. I just adopted it and started using it, is we put in instructions that say, this is how you would use ai, a generative AI tool to accomplish this piece of the task. 

And we give them basically the guardrails. And there's some assignments we'll say, don't use, we don't want you to use it here. So again, being completely transparent and being able to have that discussion with your students and use that for teaching moments because it's not a fear, it's a concern. 

The concern is that we become over reliant and it starts to replace critical and creative thinking. That's a concern. So it's like how do we use this to actually improve critical thinking? And there's definitely ways, and there's a lot of people doing a lot of great things out there to kind of tackle that issue, but I just don't want to lose that skillset.

Thembi (00:15:53): Right. Well, I was going to say, it seems like we have an old paradigm of assessments in place still as the technology just skyrockets in a forward direction and folks are not making that connection that now that we have this technology, we have to change how we run assessments. We have to change how we even consider what are the skills. 

There was a big push for the 21st century skills over the past 10, 15 years in terms of education, and now it's like, okay, but 21st century skills need to be different. Now, I would say that 21st century skills now need to include the ability to create effective prompts for generative AI because it's a tool.

It's like a kitchen knife. You can cut up vegetables for your dinner. You also can cut finger off. Both of those things have two different outcomes, but it's not the kitchen knife's fault. And I think that's interesting. It's an interesting thing to think about.

Dr. Dwayne Wood (00:16:53): I really like that analogy. Thank you. Do you mind if I use that? 

Thembi: It's all yours. 

Dr. Dwayne Wood: Yeah, that's good. That's kind of triggered with me a little bit, some things there, but you're right. How do we adjust, and I read this paper not too long ago and it's only a couple years old. I think the paper, it's called The Arms Race Between assessments and technologies. We're in that phase now where we're lagging behind our defensive, which is the assessment, but offensive capability is increasing. 

So now we feel like we got to increase our defense, which now becomes to, oh, we're going to have these AI detection tools and we're going to have these policies that say you just can't use it. And I don't think those things work. It's like telling your teenager that they can't go to do something. What are they going to do now? Right? They're going to go do it.

Thembi (00:17:43): They're going to do it, right?

Dr. Dwayne Wood: Yeah, exactly. So I think we have to approach it, and I'm not saying we just open the gates.

We have to approach it in a way that we find that spot where I say this all the time, and sometimes it can be hard to articulate this, but we need it to augment our thinking, not replace our thinking, because that's where this capability for using these AI tools really comes into play is that if I can help you with better achieve a learning outcome by using this tool, yes, I want to use it, but we have to definitely be aware of the pitfalls and how to mitigate those. 

There's always going to be a risk, just like that kitchen knife, there's a risk. How do we mitigate that? Well, we mitigate that by teaching you the proper technique for using a knife and how it's used when it's used, all that stuff we would use before you pick up the kitchen knife instead of doing dicing your onion, right? Because

Thembi (00:18:40): Right. But in paying attention, I think that's the biggest part. It's paying attention. If you look away, you're looking at something else and you're not paying attention, that's when things get dicey.

Dr. Dwayne Wood: That's great. I like that. And to extend that analogy, informational literacy, having those skills to understand and have the skills when this system produces something that you can look at and go, how do I verify? How do I know that what the information this thing is producing is just not making it up and having those skills to do that. 

I like to say when I was doing a lot of research and everything, we had to go to the library and use a card catalog, and there wasn't a lot of sources. I mean, so you kind of were like, okay, I can...

Thembi (00:19:29): You're limited to the building you were standing in.

Dr. Dwayne Wood: Yeah, exactly. Now, fast forward a couple decades and look where we're at, where you have unlimited information access at your fingertips on your phone, but not all of it's good. 

So it's a completely different skillset in evaluating information and how do you know that the information is relevant, credible, so forth. That's a skillset, and we can use AI to do that. The other concern I have with some of these tools is bias.

Well, I got a bunch of concerns, but bias is one of the big ones and not only the bias that's in the training database. So if you're thinking it off, how these tools think of this huge amount of data behind the system that it's using to recognize patterns and build these statistical models, right? 

And there's going to be bias in that data already because humans produced it, right? Yes. So there's already going to be bias and humans produce the algorithms that's running this stuff too. There's going to be some bias there, but just your prompt that you put in is going to inject bias because the system is going to produce what you ask it for. It's the ultimate yes person. 

So you already injected confirmation bias just by how you asked the, so that's what I mean. That's part of information literacy is confirmation.

How do you mitigate confirmation bias? Our politicians are great at confirmation bias. They only find the stuff that supports their position. So that's a concern. The other concern I have has to do with access and use because we already have a digital divide. We already have this difference between the haves and have nots. And if we really think of education as an inherent, right? 

Well, now as we progress, does access technology become an inherent, right? It becomes a question I think we really need to look at. And right now, if you have internet access, you can get to an AI tool. There's a bunch of 'em that are free. They're maybe not as powerful as somebody that has a subscription, produces a little bit of divide. 

But imagine if they start going full commercial and they're all paid for, I think that makes another digital divide or a larger digital divide because now we have a difference between people that have access to these tools and people that don't. And now we again, create another divide. 

And then what I mean by use is we see this in schools already. You have schools that are better funded so they have better education outcomes and something that aren't, well, what if that better funded school now starts teaching the skills to use this AI technology in the workplace and on life and stuff, but the more underfunded schools can't afford it, they're still trying to, they're barely getting along within their resource constraints. They can't add that. 

So again, that creates, this is a bigger picture I think that we need to look at because again, in my mind, education is an inherent right and should be equal for all. And so there's a lot of questions when we say that. How do we achieve that?

Thembi (00:22:43): Yeah, how do we make that happen in real life when we know that in our society, that's already a challenge, right? Yes. Historically, we're already so far behind equity and access and now we have to fight even harder for that. I think what's interesting about what you said, you talked about access and right to use, and that's important because we should have equal and equitable access to technology. We don't, but we should. 

And maybe there's an element of there are people talking about and fighting for the protection and not, and AI not going too far. But what about just simply fighting for the right to have access to this technology? It's very interesting. I also think about, oh, go ahead.

Dr. Dwayne Wood (00:23:26): No, no, I was just going to agree. I think you're going down like this. I think about this a lot and it's a hard question, especially the way just how we operate. And I think it's so far from where we're at now that sometimes it's hard to think of how do we get there? 

And it's just got to be some incremental change. Probably it's not going to be, and again, this technology is so new. I mean, what was it? Chat GBT didn't come out until November of 23. It's not even two years later. And you see how far it's come. They're still developing policies. It wasn't, I think this year the Department of Education just published a AI guide for K through 12 educators,

Thembi (00:24:06): Which is sorely needed.

Dr. Dwayne Wood: Absolutely.

Thembi: But look at how long it's been since it's existed. And when you talk about the digital divide now, you can talk about educators who have access to certain things and can introduce things to their students versus educators who don't have access or just don't know how things are used. 

And I think, so you as an instructional designer though, I'd like to know how instructional designers can use ai. And I'd also like for you to just explain what an instructional designer is. Because when I talk to people about instructional design and they're like, okay, but what is that? I don't know if you get that sometimes.

Dr. Dwayne Wood (00:24:45): No, it's a fair question. And because instructional design as a field is not that old, really, we can go back to World War II as the advent of formalized instructional design. And that's because the US government found themselves in a need to train large amounts of people quickly and efficiently. 

We talk about the instructional design methodologies. One is the most popular one in industry standard pretty much is Addie, which it's A-D-D-I-E. Each letter stands for a phase of the process. The US military developed that as part of their process to figure out how they were going to do this and train these large amounts of people. 

So that's where it comes down to is this efficient structured way to develop training or educational processes to achieve your outcomes. Whatever you determine your outcome is or your objective, whatever you're trying to achieve. So it's a systematic way to do that.

There's a lot of challenges because a lot of times in the adult education realm, the instructional designer is not the teacher. They're not the instructor, they're not the mentor. They develop the curriculum based upon basic instructional design methodologies, instructional strategies, theory and so on and so forth. And then they produce it in a package that somebody else could use to produce that learning outcome. 

And one of the challenges there is there's a lot of nuances to teaching, and I'm a firm believer that if you're an instructional designer, I want you to be a teacher also because then you pick up on some of those nuances and you can use that information in your design when you're thinking through. 

The other thing that's kind of important is you really have to understand the student when you're putting things together. I cannot emphasize how important it is to understand the target audience when you're going through your process and designing. Because a lot of times I think folks focus on what's the demographics, how old they are. Yes, there's some things that matter there, but what really matters is what's that population's barriers, challenges. 

To give you an example, I had a student instructional design. They made this fantastic instructional video. It was in high def 10 80. It was really good. And then the question was, you say your audience is going to watch this at home. Do they have internet bandwidth to actually see that high def video? The answer was no.

Thembi (00:27:14): Wow.

Dr. Dwayne Wood:That's not a tool you want to use. So you have to think of the best is not always the right.

Thembi: It's interesting that you say that because I think about how a lot of times in instructional design as well as I dare say also curricular design and also lesson planning, K 12 as well, people start with an idea of like, oh, this will be so much fun. 

Or I did this when I was a kid, or I enjoyed this when I was in this training, so I want to do this activity with my learners. They'll really love that. I remember learning something from that, but they're not thinking, like you said, maybe your student got excited about making that beautiful 1080p video, but wasn't at all thinking about the end user's experience and was really only thinking about their own experience and what they enjoy. 

People will come to me about that. Like, oh, I want to do a program with kids and I want them to do this kind of thing because I really enjoyed that. And I'm like, okay, well, who are the kids? Let's talk to the kids first and foremost, because what draws them in? What engages them? So that's a really good point.

Dr. Dwayne Wood (00:28:23): Something similar that I see happen all the time in instructional design too, is that somebody's excited about a specific access. So they jump right into the, let's put this activity together, let's do this. There's no analysis done upfront because part of the analysis is how does this activity or what I'm thinking align with larger goals? 

So in a K through 12 environment, it's how am I meeting a state standard, and then how is that measured and what am I doing is aligned with meeting that goal and learning and development or whatever it might be. 

Because we want to tie business goals to ROI return on investment, right? We're worried about the bottom line there. So we have to be able to do that analysis and understand that part of the analysis and learning and development side. 

So in the corporate side is also training education really the solution or is it something else? Is it process or is it culture that could be encountering why we're seeing a gap and a gap analysis, task analysis, all this stuff happens. Well advanced of trying to put something together, but it's not as fun. 

So people skip it, and I think there's a misconception that has to be a really long and detailed and onerous process. It doesn't have to be honestly.

You can be just sitting down at your desk and thinking through what the students were doing and the objectives they put together. Like, oh, hey, yeah, okay. I started to see some patterns here and understanding there's a gap somewhere and how do I address that gap? That's all it takes when you do an analysis. 

The other piece that's really missing, I see it all the time, is evaluation. How do we know what we did is helping to achieve the objective? Because we don't collect the data or if we collect the data, we don't analyze it. And if we analyze it, we don't look at it and say, how do we change what we've been doing to reflect the data? 

So it's that data driven decision making process that has to be in there. Now, again, it doesn't have to be this super formal process and using all these crazy statistical methods. It can be just collecting data and looking at it and going, okay, I can see some patterns here. I can start to understand it. 

And we tend to overemphasize quantitative data, at least in my mind, and that's just the number and the number tells you what happened, but it doesn't tell you the story. You need that qualitative aspect. And when I work with other educators, I said, you're the qualitative sensor. 

You're in the classroom, you're working with the students, you're collecting data all the time. Just reflect on it, and that will help you augment that quantifiable data to produce a better understanding of what's going on, so then you can inform your decision making for future. It's just complete cycles. It's going to keep, and we're not as good as that. 

Some places do better and others, but that's got to happen and it's got to be in place. And a lot of it comes down to time and resources. Having the time and resources to do that. Again, it doesn't have to be that super long process and all that statistical data and stuff, and to bring a little bit more full circle, there are AI tools out there that can help in that. Help in that means we just have to be careful with student data, protecting it. We've got to be aware of privacy and security and protect it, right? That's important. 

And so we have to be definitely aware of that before we jump in and start using one of these tools. There's got to be some analysis right? Before we start using this tool, we got to understand our context and why we're using this. What's our goal? Understanding.

When I work with a subject matter expert to develop a course, the first thing I ask, as I say, can you articulate in a single sentence what your ultimate goal for the student is in taking this course or taking this module? Because if they can articulate that that is now my north star as an instructional designer, I'm going to use that as my guide and I'm going to question myself as I start to go through the process of analyst developing all that good stuff, I'm going to question is this aligned with meeting that goal? And that keeps me focused. It keeps the learning focused. It keeps us from cluttering a course. You've probably taken a course in your lifetime that you're like, oh my goodness, I'm drinking from a fire hose.

Well, if you said that that course is ineffective, you've already exceeded cognitive load, you are not going to retain all that information. So in education, a lot of times less is more and we just have to be okay with that and understand that. And sometimes that produces a little bit of anxiety, especially for an instructor and teacher. But in my experience, if you can produce the few, the little bare pieces, your students will surprise you.

Thembi (00:33:10): Well, how can AI help with that? 

Dr. Dwayne Wood: As an instructional designer, right now just using, say, generative AI within your instructional design process can be used in all the phases. Now again, we have to be careful in analysis because what data are we giving it? Because once we put it into the system, where does it go, right? Who now has it? So we have to be careful with that. But one of the things that can help in that phase is maybe you need some help with brainstorming. So you got a gap, you understand I got a gap between actual performance and where I want people. 

Maybe I put that gap and I explain it to the system and I say, Hey, could you brainstorm 10, 15 ideas of how I would close that gap and see what it comes up with? Maybe it'll come up with something you can go further explore. In the design phase, there's so many educational theories, instructional strategies that are out there that it's just impossible for it to be right at the top of your mind all the time. All of those types of things. 

And I would even say that there's no one theory that'll apply to every context. So you have to be able to go through this process and all the models are wrong. They are based on an ideal situation. Your context is not going to be ideal. So you have to be able to look at those theories and processes and strategies and go, how do I use this and adapt it to my context for my audience that's aligned with my objectives. 

So you're using those things as you adapt. It's this idea of taking theory to practice that's a skill and be able to do that so that AI can help there. You can ask us some questions. One of the things I like to do is like, Hey, this is what I was thinking about doing and I'll type it in stuff. And I was like, then I'll say, Hey, before responding, ask me more questions.

Thembi (00:34:58): Oh, that's interesting.

Dr. Dwayne Wood (00:34:59): And then when it runs, it just asks a bunch of questions and then you can respond to it and then you can answer all those questions, and then you can have it produce something, and then it generally is more aligned with what you were thinking. 

I took that one additional step as I go through the process, and that's a way, not to get too far off what you're kind of thinking, but we talk about how do you collaborate effectively with an AI bot or generative aspects of it, and I always think, well, why do we make teams as humans? 

Well, we make teams because you have strengths, I have weaknesses, I have strengths. You have weaknesses. Well, we form a team because your strengths will compliment my weaknesses, and that's what a leader does. They figure that out and how they can do that aspect well, I think it's the same thing with AI. 

AI has some strengths. It also has a lot of weaknesses, but those weaknesses are correlated to a human strengths, so we got to be careful how far we go. We just can't let AI do 90% of it and then human does the 10%, which is maybe submit something, right? That doesn't work. There's got to be that way to collaborate with this system. I do fear that we tend to think if we use this thing a lot, we tend to start thinking of as a person, and I think there's some pitfalls there.

Thembi (00:36:18): I've named mine. I talked to it as a person. I'm guilty as charged.

Dr. Dwayne Wood (00:36:24): One of my concerns there is with humans, based upon actions and how we interact, we build trust. That system doesn't understand trust.

Thembi (00:36:32): Okay, that's real.

Dr. Dwayne Wood (00:36:34): We have to be careful of that, and we have to understand how the system works. It doesn't see the big picture. It's just producing the next word based upon statistical probability, and it's not even a word. It might be a phonic or it might be a letter. 

It might be, that's why if you put the system, ask it to spell strawberry, you can never get it right because it's working off these statistical probabilities. But if you say, Hey, break up the word strawberry into individual letters and then organize them, then it can do it because it's broken it up into, so it's the way we have to know how. 

I still think we have to understand that it's a machine. It's a machine that's backed by a lot of data and it's based on statistics. It doesn't truly understand what you understand when you're putting it into the system.

It's why you have to be very specific with your prompts to get what you're looking for. You have to treat it like I'm going to give it very detailed instructions that in a way that if no one knew the task I was doing, I'm outlining how to do it. 

That's why prompts can get very long to get a specific product, adding all this level of detail. And I think some people get a little frustrated with that because they'll try one of the free versions and they'll put in a simple question or a simple task and it produces something like, well, this is really generic and it's not really what I was looking for. It's not oriented. Your prompt was super simple. You didn't give it enough information to try to get to where you're getting at. But on the flip side, think about this. 

If I have to take and put a whole bunch of cognitive effort to develop the prompt, am I achieving an outcome, a learning outcome, just in that process?

Thembi (00:38:05): Yes. I would say yes...

Dr. Dwayne Wood (00:38:07): And it can be almost inquiry based because I have to figure out what questions to ask. I like to say that we've been taught how to answer questions. That's what we do, but we're not really taught how to ask questions, usually not until very late in our education.

Thembi: That's true, which is more that's research.

Dr. Dwayne Wood (00:38:29): Think about if we took even at the lowest levels, again, we have to look at even at the elementary level, do the students possess the skills and attributes and knowledge to actually do this process? But think about if you took a completely inquiry-based process where a student could explore something they're interested in versus something you gave them. 

I mean, there's a whole bunch of motivational pieces that could be played there, but I also like the idea of the extra cognitive aspect, but not only that, that's the other aspects when we talk about these AI tools and how they're used in education is they're solely focused on the cognitive function. 

The cognitive function is only one part of learning. We have effective psychomotor. There's all these other things that are important. Social emotional aspects in the affective piece are critically important in our day-to-day lives, and that has to be part of our learning, that AI bot is not going to be able to do that.

That's why you need a teacher. You need a facilitator, you need a coach, you need a mentor. That's why I firmly believe that teachers are not going away. The role I think will shift instead of maybe being that sage on the stage, the transmitter of knowledge, your role starts to shift to coach, mentor, and taking those different roles, but it's still critically important that a human teacher is involved in those processes for those other aspects of learning that are important. 

And I would almost start to rank some of those maybe even higher in our society than some of the cognitive aspects. And again, it's a lot of intangible things. How do you measure that in our world of metrics, how do you measure some of those things? It's really hard to do, so that becomes, we're just not going to do it right because we can't measure it. Those are critical, and it's a shift in our way. We think about education, I think, and an opportunity for us to reimagine the learning process. 

Thembi (00:40:15): And so that makes me want to ask you about multimodal learning.

Dr. Dwayne Wood (00:40:23): When I think about that, it's kind of like a fancy word. I'm a simple soldier, so I like, Hey, just give it to me in simple words. I know you probably paid $5 for that word, but I only need the $.10 word. So it's just using media, multiple different means of media. And we have, when I say in education, we have long history of models and stuff. 

One of my most favorite one is Universal Design for Learning. It talks about different representations, and now we tend to think, and I think there's a long standing thing of like, well, I'm a visual learner and I'm, well, that's mostly been debunked, right? There's not really such thing because we learning more about how the brain functions and honestly, you take the pieces of the brain that processes information. 

We're all visual learners because a large part of our brain is associated to vision. But there are, I think preferences, if I can make a distinction. For me, I know how I learn self-reflection as I'm going through how to learn to be an educator. During my training as an educator, I'm reflecting on like, well, yeah, they're saying that, but for me, I know how I learn. It's a little bit different, and that was a big eye-opener for me. I'm the type of learner where, just give me the book, I'll read it and then I'll practice it and I'm good. But not everybody can do that.

Thembi: Yeah, that's definitely for some people, they need a presence there to walk them along,

Dr. Dwayne Wood (00:41:46): And that's what the UDL tries to get at is how do you structure what you're doing to allow that to allow the student to explore how they learn best. 

One of the analogies I like to use when we're talking about this is you buy a new bike for your kid, the bike shows up. It's all in pieces in a box. How do you approach putting that bike together? And that approach will give you an idea of maybe how you learn. 

For me, the first thing I do is where's the manual? Where's the instructions that came with it? That's what I'm looking for first. Then I'm going to peruse it because I have a basic idea of what a bike is and what the pieces are, that type of stuff. 

So I'm going to peruse it and just make sure I don't miss a step or something, and then I'm just going to start putting it together. That's my style or my preference. I like to do. 

Some people will dump that thing out, that book slides underneath somewhere and they just put it together.

Thembi: They work their way through with their hands.

Dr. Dwayne Wood (00:42:46): They learn as they go, and it's like, oh, that's backwards. Lemme take that apart, switch it around, right? Then there's the person that's like, you know what? They go to their computer, they pull up YouTube, they do a search for how to put a bike together. They watch the video. 

So that's what I like to do with, I say, think about that scenario and how do you approach that, and that will kind of give you an idea of how you learn. And then if you have everybody share that, you start to go, oh my goodness. Everybody picks up and learns something a little differently. So now how do I approach that in my design or in my teaching? 

UDL is one of those processes or frameworks that can help you think about that and get you to that ability. There's a bunch of other models out there that become, I don't like to use the word trend because trend tends to have, to me a negative connotation, but the flipped classroom was a trend a couple years ago. 

Thembi (00:43:37): No question about that.

Dr. Dwayne Wood (00:43:38): Mixed results, if you go through the literature and you look out there mixed results, but the premise is very, at least appeals to me when I think about it because especially when I think of mathematics, and the reason is what's our traditional way? 

Well, in the traditional way, the teacher goes through and talks about this is the order of operations. This is how you solve this equation. They do all that in the classroom, and then they send 'em home with send the kids home with 50 questions to answer, and then the only person, the people they have to ask is their parents. Figure out on their own, and then they go to their parents. 

They're like, I don't know how to solve this quadratic equation. And the parents are like, well, yeah, 30 years ago I knew how to do a quadratic equation, but I've never used it before. I don't know what they're lost. And that injects a whole bunch of one frustration, anxiety, all these negative things that we don't want to happen, but it also could help breed bad habits because they'll practice something that's not the right way, and that becomes a habit, and they bring that right when they go through the process. 

But the flipped classroom idea is, well, I'm going to send you home with a video to watch or something to read. It tells you how to go through the process, and granted, there's going to be a population of your students that just won't do it. You have to understand that and know that and be prepared for that.

Thembi (00:44:53): Always.

Dr. Dwayne Wood (00:44:54): But then when they practice in the classroom, there's an expert in the classroom with them to help them. What I like to do in some of those aspects is the idea of almost productive failure or making mistakes. 

I like that for two reasons. One, we tend to learn better when we make a mistake and then we learn how to correct it. It tends to stick with us a little bit longer, but I also like it because of the way that it kind of encourages a growth mindset. I can get better. I can learn this and I can do this through perseverance and grit. 

That's why I'm not a huge fan of grades. That student that gets a pluses all the time versus that student that had a C and then by the end of the 10 they had a B. That demonstrates more grit and perseverance and learning than that person that got a's all the way across. I'm not saying that we just get a with the grades, I think there's more to the story. 

The grade is that quantifiable piece. What's the qualitative stuff that's important for us to understand the growth of the student in learning? That sounds really easy for me to say. The hard part is how do we do that in practice?

Thembi (00:46:00): It works differently at different levels too, right? I find in higher ed with students, I say because I'm not a fan of grades either, but they have to be done. So I'm saying, okay, I have calculations, and as long as you cross this line, as long as you complete this task, then you'll get an A. It's up to you. You are a self-selected learner, but then when you go to the K-12 realm, most of them are not self-selecting learners. They're against their will...

Dr. Dwayne Wood (00:46:29): And again, a lot of times I see grades produce anxiety and anxiety works against learning,

Thembi (00:46:36): And that's all they want. They just want the grade,

Dr. Dwayne Wood (00:46:38): And that's this idea. When we talk about, we say instructional design, and I actually make a distinction between instructional design versus learning experience designer, and what I mean by that is instructional design is focused on the actual step one, step two, I'm putting all these pieces and parts together to achieve this learning outcome. 

Well, in a learning experience, designer looks at using a systems thinking approach. What's everything that's involved, the context, the environment, all these other aspects that would factor into a student learning and will make decisions on that. 

Think about some of the systems you've used for education. We talk about UX user experience. That's a large part of being a learning experience designer. You have to understand if a student has to click four or five times, they're probably not going to go there, right?

That's just part of the understanding how that design getting into some of the design elements of Gestalt principles and fonts, and I can't emphasize enough accessibility. If we design to accessibility standards, we are doing everybody a favor, not just the people that need it. 

And to give you an example, think about that adult learner that the only time they work full time, they have a family and maybe they ride a commute train back and forth to work well, the videos for their education they have to watch on the train. 

Well, if there's captions for that video, they can do it. That just helped. That learner wouldn't fit in the standard needing and accessibility, but that accessibility helped them. Same with screen readers. There's times where maybe I just don't don't want to read all the way through that. If I can use a screen reader to tell me, I can just listen to it. 

That might be one of my learning preferences, which again, to come back, there are AI tools that will do this. One of the newer ones that's out there that's free is Google Notebook, lm. You can actually put in a document and have it produce a podcast based upon that document,

Thembi (00:48:44): Really?

Dr. Dwayne Wood (00:48:44): So maybe you got this 40-page policy that just came out, maybe the one from the Department of Education, perhaps, and you're like, I really kind of want to know this stuff, but I don't want to sit and read and scroll through and find it, turn it into a podcast and listen to it.

Thembi (00:48:59): So interesting.

Dr. Dwayne Wood (00:49:00): That's a way the AI can be leveraged, but again, we've been talking about very, very targeted, very, very specific reasons how to do this. I don't think there's a general, yes, in general do this with ai. I just have a hard time believing that exists. 

It has to be specific with understanding the limitations and the boundaries, understanding the risks so that you can mitigate them and having that transparency with the student or user learner to produce this product, whatever you're trying to achieve. 

That's a lot to say, and it gets complicated real fast, but I think that's where it is. We have this problem, I think in our, maybe I shouldn't couch it as a problem. I'm going to say that works. I can't come up with another word. The problem of one of the fallacies of thinking is the exclusion of the middle, and all you have to do is think about our election cycles and stuff. 

There's either left or when the answer is probably in the middle. It's a little more complicated. It's harder to explain in a 32nd byte information bite, and it requires some critical thinking, right? You can't do that.

Thembi (00:50:09): Who wants to do that?

Dr. Dwayne Wood (00:50:10): Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But what I think happens though is we start to think, well, there's only a left or right. There's only option A, option B. Well, there's an infinite number of options between A and B, but we have to be able to figure out what those are...

Thembi: And we're not practicing that critical thinking process. Yeah...

Dr. Dwayne Wood (00:50:27): We jump -- go ahead.

Thembi (00:50:28): No, go ahead.

Dr. Dwayne Wood (00:50:30): Well, I was going to say, we jump, right? The human brain is great about filling in things even when the data's not there, and we have these things called heuristics, right? 

It's a shortcut to thinking, and we have to be careful and just be self-aware of those heuristics that we're applying. That's our bias. We have to say we're a bias. I know I'm biased towards education. I believe that you can boil down all our society's problems to education, but I'm biased because I'm an educator, right?

Thembi (00:51:00): That's where you work and live. Yeah. Okay. So I think about educators. We talked a lot about educators. Well, the Department of Education's, new policy and educators being hesitant to embrace generative AI specifically, and from the cheating standpoint, from wanting their students to really learn the cognitive steps that needs to be taken to evaluate a passage and respond to it. 

And I think about a video I just saw maybe yesterday or the day before where there was a teenager in a class who had been assigned five 10-minute videos, something along those lines. She had been assigned several 10 minute videos and she fed them into an AI platform or something like that, and was able to come up with summaries of those videos. And so whoever was recording this video is recording the teacher arguing with her about why it didn't make sense for her to do that, and she's arguing back with the teacher saying, listen, you wanted me to summarize and respond to these videos I did.

I just fed it into the AI bot and it did it for me. Just because that's how I did it doesn't mean I know what the piece is about. And the teacher was just trying to explain, but you didn't, the process of you understanding and then discussing the piece didn't happen, and it was clear that she didn't understand why, because her thought was expediency. I want to get the right grade.

And I want to know what advice would you give to educators who are trying to help their students understand that while these are helpful tools, in some instances, it's cutting out a process that you must be able to do yourself.

Dr. Dwayne Wood (00:52:44): One is, we already kind of talked about was transparency right up front. One of the things I like to do is I'll say, if I put a restriction on an AI on an assignment, I tell them, why is this important? Why am I putting this restriction on? So that's being transparent. 

The other piece of this is make connections to the real world. Make it authentic. Make the reflection or the process of the learner to make those connections. What I mean by that is, yes, there's some knowledge transmission that's got to happen, but we really need to get to knowledge application. 

So what I like to do is, okay, hey, if we got a concept that we're working on, maybe those videos that we're talking about, it's a certain concept. Well, what if the question is, Hey, use the AI system to summarize it for you so you can gain a better understanding.

Maybe ask questions about something you don't understand that's coming off that summary, and they can explain to you, because I want you to develop how you're going to apply this in your real life. I'm not making this up and it's not my idea, but there's a lot of models out there that use the experiential learning aspects, and I think this is a good tool to use in conjunction with the collaboration with AI. 

It's because there's certain cycles to experiential learning. One is, I need to produce, there needs to be some kind of experience. And the first thing is they call it a concrete experience. You don't want it to be abstract. You want it to be concrete. So it might be a case study, it might be a scenario. You might watch a video, it might be an exercise you do or something, and if you do an activity, you might fail.

That's okay, because that's just part of the process as you go through it and then learn a little bit about the stuff, and then you do this idea of, I call it reflecting forward, why all this stuff that I just learned, why is it important to me? How am I going to use it in the future? What value does this have to me? And that does a couple reasons. 

One, it helps cement all that stuff that's happening, right? You're making all the connections. You have to be able to articulate all that stuff and why it's important, why it needs to be done, but it's, again, it's a part of that establishing a growth mindset. It's taking ownership of my learning. 

Again, these intangible things that you want to happen during your learning process, but they're hard to measure, they're hard to design for. Honestly, there's a bunch of resource constraints you have to take into account.

People are getting very creative too though. Students get creative too. Learners get creative, right? If I'm in a time crunch and I need to produce something by a certain date, I might just use one of the tools to do it because I'm feeling pressure.

 It's part my belief, part of my teaching and instructional philosophy is time does not equal learning. Yes, there might be some deadlines, but if you communicate with me, again, being transparent, I don't want you to rush through an assignment and submit it because the intended learning doesn't happen. 

There's learning that happens, but it's not the intended learning, so if I have to give you some extra time to accomplish that, let's work together. Let's figure that out. 

Come up with a solution so we can get to the learning, and that's coupled with my idea that I'll take resubmission anytime because that just furthers the learning. If I provide feedback and you take it and look at it and maybe we have a talk about it and then you reproduce it, the learning happened and that's the goal. Learning focused...

Thembi (00:56:11): And then it's tragic. If I give you a worse grade just because it took you a little longer to experience that learning than the next person...

Dr. Dwayne Wood (00:56:18): Yeah, it works against you. Honestly, I think late penalties work learning because now you're providing that stick that's reinforcing this. Let's just hurry up and submit something, which to me, that's not the goal. 

The goal is to work through that activity as designed to go through the processes to get to the end state that's aligned with achieving that outcome. Now, granted, I say that we don't have unlimited time. There's not unlimited resources, but we have to be able to think through that and work through that and be able to be flexible enough in our policies and processes. 

Maybe the university gives a two week gap between courses, so that allows an instructor to have a little extra time if someone needs it to bleed over to accomplish that outcome. 

Again, I work mostly in the adult education and most adult learners that I'm encountering are working full-time jobs, maybe a full-time job, plus a part-time job and taking care of their family, and they're trying to do education at the same time and just be an understanding of that and how that will impact their learning and being flexible enough with the idea that you're still going to achieve the learning outcome, but it might not look the same as it does for another student in that class,

Thembi: And that's okay.

Dr. Dwayne Wood (00:57:38): And that's okay, because I'm getting to the outcome.

Thembi (00:57:41): Yeah, that's definitely a paradigm shift that needs to happen in the minds of a lot of educators, and I know that we've talked both about instructional design and we've talked about K-12 education. We've talked about higher education, so there's a lot of different sort of lanes in there. 

I think for our listeners to understand that we are definitely crossing certain lines between compartmentalized areas of education, but they all apply some of the big ideas that really stuck out for me, transparency, time not equaling learning, taking ownership over one's learning as a student, as a learner, which I think is really empowering. Digital literacy and information literacy, and then mitigating bias.

Those are all things that really stuck out to me in this conversation to continue to think about moving forward because the technology is not slowing down. It feels like it's speeding up and there's no point in sticking one's head in the sand and just trying to make it go away. 

It's like, how can we navigate this new world that we're in and how can we change our thinking? So I'm really excited. I feel hopeful about this. Even as scary as it might be, I feel hopeful about the possibilities of what's ahead. Any closing thoughts?

Dr. Dwayne Wood (00:58:54): I would just like to, if there's any listeners that are thinking about using AI, they're educated or thinking about, or maybe they're hesitant and completely understand, but try to go out and find these systems, go in there and just experiment with them, just see what they can do and then just start having some reflection about one, how are your learners potentially using this? They have access. They might not be using it. 

I think we tend to overthink how many people are actually using it, but it's a tool. It's available out there and just kind of understand that and start to understand what it is, and then it's a slow incremental process of, I wouldn't say just wrap your arms around it and say, yes, this is it, right? 

You need to understand it and be able to, you already know your contacts and you already know your learners and see if that could be a tool that could be used, and also think about sustainability over time. 

That's something we tend to forget. We tend to think in pretty short, just the school year. Well think of two or three years, five years. What does that look like? Just kind of have the kind of internal dialogue and maybe experimenting with it. 

There's a bunch of free resources out there. You can just Google and find on AI and education. Use a reputable source. There are some, if you type in open educational resources and type in AI and education, they'll come up with a bunch of stuff you can take. 

These are all created by educators for educators, so you can go in there and you can see what everybody else is thinking.

Thembi (01:00:17): This is so great. So helpful. I'm so glad that we got to talk today, Dwayne, and this is Thembi, this is KeyBard, until next time...

Dr. Dwayne Wood: Thank you.