Stephanie Boragina

‘2025 Voice of the Online Learner (UK Edition)’ This week marked the release of ‘Voice of the Online Learner (UK Edition)’. This is the first time UK-specific insight has been published, being based on data from the US until now. It’…

‘2025 Voice of the Online Learner (UK Edition)’
"This report doesn’t claim to solve the challenges of online learning, but it ... telling us how to design better ones."
👉 Read my summary here: www.dontwasteyourtime.co.uk/elearning/20...

We are excited to share our latest publication in the Online Learning Journal: "New Normal in higher education for the post-COVID-19 world: Reimagining and reexamining factors for student success in online learning." Read more here: doi.org/10.24059/olj...

Experimental evidence of the effects of large language models versus web search on depth of learning Abstract. The effects of using large language models (LLMs) versus traditional web search on depth of learning are explored. A theory is proposed that when

First, here is the paper this news is based on. Read it so you get a feel for the nuanced findings. You know, do the hard thing we accuse students of not doing.

academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

Paper here 🔒💲 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

A new paper argues that current generative AI tools offer little benefit for genuine learning unless students already have substantial prior knowledge. genAI gives probabilistic summaries, not the kind of support that builds expertise.

(PDF) How Faculty Fool Themselves about Teaching and Learning PDF | Last month I wrote about how students fool themselves into thinking they have learned concepts when they really haven't. This month I focus on how... | Find, read and cite all the research you n...

My essay for The Teaching Professor, "How Faculty Fool Themselves about Teaching and Learning" now freely available at ResearchGate
www.researchgate.net/publication/...

How Your Brain Creates ‘Aha’ Moments and Why They Stick | Quanta Magazine A sudden flash of insight is a product of your brain. Neuroscientists track the neural activity underlying an “aha” and how it might boost memory.

Three words: pine, crab, sauce. There’s a fourth word that combines with the others to create another common word. What is it? When you finally get it, it may feel instantaneous. A recent study shows what happens in the brain during “aha” moments.

"It takes what I say/think and puts it in an order which makes it easier for others to understand." Male student, aged 17 (talking about generative AI)

From a report by Oxford University Press, "Teaching the AI-Native Generation," comes this quote about a 17-year-old unable to find the right words. There are many things to be sad about in this world, but this one sticks with me.

1. This is being passed off as a benefit of generative AI.

1/x

Another example of the increasingly common situation where AI helps an academic with intellectually challenging work (solving a 42-year-old open math problem). Seems like real value in combining expert human guidance and increasingly powerful LLM. arxiv.org/abs/2510.23513

This is a heavy, emotionally charged paper... and so beautiful at the same time... a must-read. Link in the first comment.

Process mining measures students’ help-seeking transitions when completing assignments in an online learning and assessment platform - Metacognition and Learning The shift towards active pedagogies in higher education that emphasize students’ engagement in their own learning in and outside of the classroom has increased the ubiquity of online learning and asse...

Curious about how help-seeking behaviors relate to learning in an online learning environment? Then check out this open access (!) article authored by Chenyu Hou, featuring the outstanding mentoring of @shelbikuhlmann.bsky.social! doi.org/10.1007/s114...

Here's GREAT news for educators! You know all the hard work you put in to design outside of class activities to help your students learn? Well, when they do those things, in the order you intended, they actually learn more! Check it out: dx.doi.org/10.1037/edu0... #PsychSciSky #AcademicSky #EduSky

Teachers’ workload, turnover intentions, and mental health: perspectives of Australian teachers - Social Psychology of Education Teaching has long been recognised as a demanding profession. Despite growing acknowledgement of the stress and emotional exhaustion experienced by teachers, limited research has considered how these e...

A major UNSW Sydney study found teachers suffer depression, anxiety, and stress at rates three to four times higher than the national average, largely driven by excessive administrative tasks. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

I was happy to contribute to 'AI and the future of education: disruptions, dilemmas and directions', a publication by UNESCO aligned with Digital Learning Week.

Check it out for an overview of thoughts from education experts and leaders on the #ai zeitgeist! #aied

doi.org/10.54675/KEC...

(a)dalfaculty.bsky.social and those responding to/quoting their posts have come across my feed.

Generative AI in Higher Education: Evidence from an Elite College Generative AI is transforming higher education, yet systematic evidence on student adoption remains limited. Using novel survey data from a selective U.S. college, we document over 80 percent of stude...

“In educational contexts, rapid
technology adoption can create or exacerbate inequalities between early and late adopters, particularly if the technology confers significant learning advantages.” arxiv.org/abs/2508.00717 Given schools’ jagged adoption AI, this is worth considering. #eduskyAI

Aggregate Non-Repayable Aid vs Aggregate Domestic Tuition fees, 2007-08 to 2023-24, in Billions of $2023. Canada has had net-negative tuition fees for seven years now.

Seems obvious, and yes: "organizations should establish clear norms for response times across different communication channels. ... Just as importantly, teams should have a shared practice for letting senders know when a timely response isn’t possible—preventing frustration and bottlenecks."

Another example of a persistent problem with LLMs. They do very well on standard medical questions, but when the right answer is replaced with “none of the above” performance drops.

More recent models generally have lower drops in performance. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

1. Data lock-in: Schools become dependent on Google's systems,which collect and use data from students and teachers. 2. Political lock-in: Digital solutions have become part of politicalmodernization projects—and are therefore difficult to roll back. 3. Regulatory lock-in: Legislation lags behind technology, and it isdifficult to enforce rules on global players. 4. Discursive lock-in: The debate is characterized by an "eitherChromebooks or blackboards" rhetoric that makes alternativesinvisible. 5. Temporal lock-in: The longer the technology has been in use, theharder it becomes to switch to something else.

Those of us studying edtech platforms and infrastructures in education talk a bit about vendor "lock-ins" - how schools can't get out of a platform once they're on it. This is a magnificent paper about that by @lucascone.bsky.social and Signe Sophus Lai www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

Contradiction is key. For change to happen, students must recognize that what they believed is incompatible with the correct view. If there’s no conflict, they may just absorb the new fact into the wrong framework.

Not all wrong answers are equal. I used to think students just needed the right information to fix misconceptions but then I read the work of Michelene Chi🧵⬇️

Nice thing about this figure is unlike benchmarks on factuality or hallucinates eg FACTscore we dont know if the test questions reflected real world use. OpenAI basically gave us the stat we were wondering about (2) More info from system card cdn.openai.com/pdf/8124a3ce...

Thanks, yes! That aligns with what I was thinking.

Interesting idea. Managing the practical side would be challenging. The article mentions the challenges of ensuring fair grades and scheduling sessions, but a bigger challenge to me is the time it takes to grade such an assessment versus a written one, for example.

"Listening Rooms involvea pair of friends participating in a discussion with prompts provided in a ‘room’. ... One important aspect is that there is no authoritarian presence in the room, just the two friends chatting about what they see on the cards in front of them."

Meta brought AI to rural Colombia. Now students are failing exams When Meta embedded AI bots in its apps, even students in the most remote corners of Colombia gained access. But rather than boosting learning, it’s getting in the way.

“Starting in July 2024, AI was suddenly everywhere all at once in Latin America after Meta Platforms started incorporating chatbots in its apps across the region. Whether users wanted them or not, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram became homes for a variety of AI bots.”

To me, this part is most important. I've had students read multiple ai generated “responses” to discussion questions they’d also answered themselves. It takes reading through about 3 before you start to realize it’s all the same. But we mostly use AI independently so don’t see the repetition.

"They didn’t like hearing how their AI-generated submissions, in which they’d clearly felt some personal stake, amounted to a big bowl of bland, flavorless word salad."

"Some students said that they liked the AI’s topic more than their own human-generated topics. But the students hadn’t compared notes: only I had seen every single AI topic."