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Top 5 Takeaways from the Teach with AI Conference 2025
I just returned from the Teach with AI conference, hosted by the University of Central Florida (UCF) in beautiful Orlando. It was a great event. I met a lot of great educators and had good discussions around navigating being an instructor in a post-AI world. Here is a summary of my top 5 takeaways from the conference.
1) The text-in/text-out assignment format is done, finished, over.
A pure essay assignment is exactly what Large Language Models do:
f(text_prompt) = text_response
Even for good students, it’s simply too tempting to use AI to “do the work” for you as opposed to assisting you. At this point, educators need to refactor courses with the assumption that students are using AI.
The only exception on essays would be courses that specifically focus on writing, such as English Composition. Even then, great care needs to be taken in planning coursework not performed in a classroom or proctored setting.
An interesting side note is that a UCF survey showed that student’s want human feedback, not AI grading or comments. If we flip the script and call this out to students, it can perhaps better illustrate how instructors also want student’s actual thoughts versus those of an AI.
