EDUO 9924: Managing AI for Healthy and Productive Academic Cognition

Course Overview

Students are using AI. Acknowledging that usage and helping them understand the importance of balancing its use requires honest conversations to establish collaboratively created guidance. Managing healthy and productive use of AI by students involves dynamic, participatory and proactive curriculum design. To assist that design, we will explore how over-reliance on AI impacts the development of thinking, remembering and problem-solving. Examine the research behind excessive cognitive offloading, a practice associated with overuse and dependence on using AI as a shortcut, the repercussions of which can hinder development of the brain’s decision-making capabilities instead of enhancing them. Develop strategies and activities that measure the value of using technology/AI-supported learning that simultaneously upload cognitive growth.

Learning Objectives

• Identify how constant AI use can compromise the user’s long-term memory, problem-solving skills, academic and narrative voices.
• Design student-facing and AI co-agency activities that emphasize the difference between “using AI to improve thinking” and “allowing AI to think for you.”
• Create classroom strategies that encourage students to embrace the use of the healthy “productive friction” required for authentic learning.
• Produce reflection and assessment tools that help students keep AI and technology dependency from developing.

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