Podcast
AI has disrupted educational technology like few other disciplines, starting with the generative AI, or GenAI, phase in late 2022, when tools like ChatGPT cut production time for instructional materials from days down to minutes. It also placed more knowledge at workers' fingertips by making relevant learning content easier to find. Subject matter experts could use GenAI to capture and share their knowledge more easily, allaying fears of a brain drain from layoffs and mass retirements.
Today's agentic phase of AI brings a slew of new capabilities to learning management. For example, agents can cut and paste content, which used to be a tedious part of the instructor's job. They can also reconfigure workflows by monitoring student activities and answering questions – two important responsibilities formerly handled by humans.
In this episode of Enterprise Apps Unpacked, Zach Pendleton, chief architect at Instructure, explains how AI is transforming learning management and how CIOs and other business leaders can best take advantage of it. Instructure makes Canvas, a learning management system it says is used by more than 8,000 educational institutions.
Graduating from compliance to skills development
Pendleton said that for most of his career, workplace learning was "learning for lawyers" and overly focused on compliance requirements.
"It wasn't really about developing employees and certainly was not seen by employees as a benefit," he said.
Nowadays, employees are more interested in using learning technology to acquire new skills, increase their value to the organization and build their careers.
AI has helped organizations meet this uptick in demand for training that can be easily consumed during the workday.
"That kind of immersive, just-in-time, on-the-job training is difficult to build and maintain," Pendleton said. "AI can understand the problem, understand what the worker's asking for and connect them with the right resource."
He explained how agentic AI has changed his profession, software development, by democratizing the ability to create tools and custom workflows. In the past, a person who was close to a problem would ask a technology specialist to come up with a solution and write the code. A product manager and other workers would probably get involved, which made it hard to stay focused on the original problem.
With agentic AI connected to the relevant systems, such as Canvas LMS and its APIs, an instructor can coach the AI on what they need done, Pendleton said.
"I don't have to be a technologist. I just have to be a motivated person with a problem. That, for me, is maybe where the biggest potential for agentic AI is," he said.
Similar agentic capabilities can ease the workload of corporate learning and development departments by automating report writing, for example.
"You probably don't have someone in the org who's really great at writing SQL, but AI is," he said.
Other topics discussed in the podcast include the following:
- Whether AI is helping in local workforce development efforts.
- How learning management technology differs between the educational and corporate markets.
- How to address employee misuse of AI for learning.
- Challenges of using AI in corporate learning.
David Essex is a senior editor who creates in-depth content on enterprise applications, emerging technology and market trends for TechTarget's CIO group.
