{"id":94410,"topic":"ai","source":"University of Nevada, Reno","title":"AI expert urges faculty to redesign courses for AI era - University of Nevada, Reno","url":"https://www.unr.edu/nevada-today/news/2026/ai-in-classroom-sidorkin","url_hash":"ed0adf76d8506a6b354c5cb902e00b028710e2f4","author":"","summary":"<a href=\"https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMidkFVX3lxTE51SmxzS1hRcXh5SmF0NnNwU1JvNXRWNzFYYTFWenUwVFp1eXUxay1sRmpnRTNfc0dVb2pENjVhQjZ3ckk5ZmprUEdzbmM2OHJBS3QzQUo5VHZYbnFVWHYzUDRISHF2VmhuOXhYNktRZXB3bzFJVEE?oc=5\" target=\"_blank\">AI expert urges faculty to redesign courses for AI era</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;<font color=\"#6f6f6f\">University of Nevada, Reno</font>","content":"When Alexander “Sasha” Sidorkin visited the University of Nevada, Reno in September, his message to faculty was direct: Artificial intelligence has already altered the basic assumptions behind many college assignments, and higher education cannot respond by just trying to keep the technology outside the classroom.\nSidorkin's lecture, “The AI-Native Course: Rethinking Assignments, Assessments, and Outcomes” was part of AI in the Classroom, a Pack AI Symposium Series designed to give faculty space to learn, ask questions and discuss how artificial intelligence is affecting teaching and learning. Pack AI supports thoughtful, ethical and discipline-specific exploration rather than prescribing one approach for every instructor or course.\nUniversity Executive Vice President and Provost Jeff Thompson opened the event, saying that the conversation reflects the University of Nevada, Reno's responsibility as the state's land-grant, flagship institution to prepare students for a rapidly changing world.\n\"Part of that responsibility is ensuring that our graduates are prepared for the world they will enter, not the world that existed 10, or even 5 years ago,\" Thompson said at the event's opening.\nThe AI course\nSidorkin, a professor of education at California State University, Sacramento, previously served as the university’s chief AI officer and founding director of its National Institute on AI in Society. A philosopher of education by training, he has written about relational pedagogy, educational theory, and the integration of AI into teaching and learning. His take: faculty should not protect human-centered learning by ignoring AI. They should instead redesign courses so technology handles appropriate tasks, while students devote more attention to judgment and complex thought.\n\"Dr. Sidorkin has always advocated for the primacy of human relationships in education. That's why his perspective resonates with me.\" – Vice Provost Hillary Procknow\n\"I've studied Dr. Sidorkin's scholarship for years, so it's especially meaningful to hear him talk about AI,” said Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education Hillary Procknow. “As one of the founding voices in relational pedagogy, Dr. Sidorkin has always advocated for the primacy of human relationships in education. That's why his perspective resonates with me: he's not asking us to choose between technology and people. He's challenging us to use technology in ways that make the human side of teaching even stronger,” she said.\nHere are four takeaways from Sidorkin’s presentation:\n1. Treat AI as a design problem\n“The students will use AI whether we want it or not,” Sidorkin said. The more important issue is that higher education has long relied on written products as evidence that students have done deep thinking. With generative AI producing quality text, “that whole assumption no longer works.”\nSidorkin encouraged faculty to examine whether their assignments still measure the learning they’re intended to. He suggests the “lazy prompt test”: Paste your assignment into an AI tool and ask it to produce the final product.\n“This is a design problem that we have with curricula, not a compliance problem.\"\n“It's not your fault but if AI's response is good enough, you have a problem in your course,” he said.\nSidorkin was also skeptical of AI-detection systems because AI use is not a single, clearly measurable behavior. A student might use a tool to brainstorm, outline, research, draft, edit, or copy edit, each of which represents a different action. Instead, he encouraged instructors to explain which foundational skill students are expected to develop.\n“This is a design problem that we have with curricula, not a compliance problem,” he said.\n2. Use AI to create time for yourself\nRedesigning a course takes time, Sidorkin acknowledged. He encouraged faculty to use AI to reduce their own repetitive work and demonstrated how AI could help draft a syllabus, organize assignments and provide preliminary feedback on student work. He recommended reinvesting the time saved into revising curricula, including learning outcomes, assignments and rubrics.\n“You have to save yourself first,” he said. “Use AI to change the balance of time.”\n3. Shift students toward judgment, context and purpose\nSidorkin described course redesign as a “double pivot.” The first shift moves instructional attention away from procedural production and toward conceptual knowledge and advanced skills.\nThe second changes how faculty use their time.\nThat doesn't mean students no longer need to understand how a process works, but that how something works shouldn't automatically be the highest evidence of learning.\n\"If some task is fun and actually gives you a little jolt of engagement, you’re probably better than AI at it.”\nSidorkin offered faculty a simple rule of thumb: “If some task is boring and you’re not looking forward to doing it, AI is probably better at it than you are. If some task is fun and actually gives you a little jolt of engagement, you’re probably better than AI at it.”\nAI cannot form relationships, understand messy human contexts or decide independently which tasks are worth pursuing, Sidorkin said.\n“Deciding what’s worth doing is essentially human and valuable capacity. We need to teach students to decide what’s important,” he said.\n4. Rebuild courses around authentic, complex problems\nSidorkin’s final recommendation was to deconstruct a course to its learning outcomes and rebuild assignments around the revised outcomes.\nOne emerging skill is knowing how to divide work appropriately between a person and an AI system. “When I get a task right now, I immediately break it down in my head into two parts,” he said. “This one AI will do, and this one I’ll have to do myself. That’s a skill that your students will need to develop.”\n\"When I get a task, I break it down: This one AI will do, and this one I’ll have to do myself. That’s a skill that your students will need to develop.”\nFaculty can give students complex, real-world problems and allow them to use AI for some procedural support while evaluating how well they account for context, allocate tasks, verify information, supervise outputs, and exercise human judgment.\n“It doesn’t have to be revolutionary,” Sidorkin said. “You just have to be moving in the right direction.”\nUp Next: Oct. 16 AI in the Classroom Virtual Conference, Nov. 12 Pack AI Symposium Series\nThe campus conversation will continue Oct. 16 during the third annual AI in the Classroom Virtual Conference, co-hosted by the University of Nevada, Reno and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The program will include demonstrations of custom AI chatbots and creative tools, research presentations on AI literacy and ethical frameworks for responsible use and non-use, and workshops focused on redesigning courses and assignments.\nAnother in-person event for the AI Symposium Series, Research Perspectives Across Disciplines, will take place Nov. 12 at 2 p.m. on campus. This research-focused workshop brings together faculty from English, Finance, Art & Design, and University Libraries to offer diverse perspectives on AI, from historical and economic frameworks to creative resistance and information literacy. Stay tuned on the Pack AI website for more information.","image_url":"https://www.unr.edu//main/images/news/2026/October/ai-sidorkin-speech.jpg","lang":"en","published_at":"2026-10-02T01:05:54+00:00","fetched_at":"2026-10-02T01:15:15+00:00","status":"read","starred":0,"extract_state":"ok","summary_auto":"When Alexander “Sasha” Sidorkin visited the University of Nevada, Reno in September, his message to faculty was direct: Artificial intelligence has already altered the basic assumptions behind many college assignments, and higher education cannot respond by just trying to keep the technology outside the classroom. Sidorkin's lecture, “The AI-Native Course: Rethinking Assignments, Assessments, and Outcomes” was part of AI in the Classroom, a Pack AI Symposium Series designed to give faculty space to learn, ask questions and discuss how artificial intelligence is affecting teaching and learning.","cluster_id":null,"extract_retries":0,"extract_error":null,"contract_version":"news_item.v1","format_contract_version":"news_item_formats.v1","dedup_url":"https://www.unr.edu/nevada-today/news/2026/ai-in-classroom-sidorkin","quality_profile":{"profile_version":"extraction_quality.v2","bucket":"high","confidence":0.9,"failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"retry_after_attempts":0,"reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 7289 characters.","operator_guidance":{"severity":"ok","recommended_action":"trust_full_text","next_step":"Use the extracted full text as the primary article source.","operator_label":"Ready","can_retry":false,"can_use_summary":false,"diagnostics_required":false},"content_depth":{"contract_version":"content_depth.v1","category":"full_text","label":"Full text","has_full_text":true,"has_summary":true,"content_length":7289,"summary_length":600,"usable_text_length":7289,"source_field":"content"},"legacy_collapsed":false,"signals":{"extract_state":"ok","extract_error":null,"extract_retries":0,"content_length":7289,"summary_length":600}},"news_item":{"id":94410,"canonical_url":"https://www.unr.edu/nevada-today/news/2026/ai-in-classroom-sidorkin","source_url":"https://www.unr.edu/nevada-today/news/2026/ai-in-classroom-sidorkin","title":"AI expert urges faculty to redesign courses for AI era - University of Nevada, Reno","source_name":"University of Nevada, Reno","author":null,"published_at":"2026-10-02T01:05:54+00:00","locale":"en","topic":"ai","tags":[],"rss_summary":"<a href=\"https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMidkFVX3lxTE51SmxzS1hRcXh5SmF0NnNwU1JvNXRWNzFYYTFWenUwVFp1eXUxay1sRmpnRTNfc0dVb2pENjVhQjZ3ckk5ZmprUEdzbmM2OHJBS3QzQUo5VHZYbnFVWHYzUDRISHF2VmhuOXhYNktRZXB3bzFJVEE?oc=5\" target=\"_blank\">AI expert urges faculty to redesign courses for AI era</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;<font color=\"#6f6f6f\">University of Nevada, Reno</font>","full_text":"When Alexander “Sasha” Sidorkin visited the University of Nevada, Reno in September, his message to faculty was direct: Artificial intelligence has already altered the basic assumptions behind many college assignments, and higher education cannot respond by just trying to keep the technology outside the classroom.\nSidorkin's lecture, “The AI-Native Course: Rethinking Assignments, Assessments, and Outcomes” was part of AI in the Classroom, a Pack AI Symposium Series designed to give faculty space to learn, ask questions and discuss how artificial intelligence is affecting teaching and learning. Pack AI supports thoughtful, ethical and discipline-specific exploration rather than prescribing one approach for every instructor or course.\nUniversity Executive Vice President and Provost Jeff Thompson opened the event, saying that the conversation reflects the University of Nevada, Reno's responsibility as the state's land-grant, flagship institution to prepare students for a rapidly changing world.\n\"Part of that responsibility is ensuring that our graduates are prepared for the world they will enter, not the world that existed 10, or even 5 years ago,\" Thompson said at the event's opening.\nThe AI course\nSidorkin, a professor of education at California State University, Sacramento, previously served as the university’s chief AI officer and founding director of its National Institute on AI in Society. A philosopher of education by training, he has written about relational pedagogy, educational theory, and the integration of AI into teaching and learning. His take: faculty should not protect human-centered learning by ignoring AI. They should instead redesign courses so technology handles appropriate tasks, while students devote more attention to judgment and complex thought.\n\"Dr. Sidorkin has always advocated for the primacy of human relationships in education. That's why his perspective resonates with me.\" – Vice Provost Hillary Procknow\n\"I've studied Dr. Sidorkin's scholarship for years, so it's especially meaningful to hear him talk about AI,” said Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education Hillary Procknow. “As one of the founding voices in relational pedagogy, Dr. Sidorkin has always advocated for the primacy of human relationships in education. That's why his perspective resonates with me: he's not asking us to choose between technology and people. He's challenging us to use technology in ways that make the human side of teaching even stronger,” she said.\nHere are four takeaways from Sidorkin’s presentation:\n1. Treat AI as a design problem\n“The students will use AI whether we want it or not,” Sidorkin said. The more important issue is that higher education has long relied on written products as evidence that students have done deep thinking. With generative AI producing quality text, “that whole assumption no longer works.”\nSidorkin encouraged faculty to examine whether their assignments still measure the learning they’re intended to. He suggests the “lazy prompt test”: Paste your assignment into an AI tool and ask it to produce the final product.\n“This is a design problem that we have with curricula, not a compliance problem.\"\n“It's not your fault but if AI's response is good enough, you have a problem in your course,” he said.\nSidorkin was also skeptical of AI-detection systems because AI use is not a single, clearly measurable behavior. A student might use a tool to brainstorm, outline, research, draft, edit, or copy edit, each of which represents a different action. Instead, he encouraged instructors to explain which foundational skill students are expected to develop.\n“This is a design problem that we have with curricula, not a compliance problem,” he said.\n2. Use AI to create time for yourself\nRedesigning a course takes time, Sidorkin acknowledged. He encouraged faculty to use AI to reduce their own repetitive work and demonstrated how AI could help draft a syllabus, organize assignments and provide preliminary feedback on student work. He recommended reinvesting the time saved into revising curricula, including learning outcomes, assignments and rubrics.\n“You have to save yourself first,” he said. “Use AI to change the balance of time.”\n3. Shift students toward judgment, context and purpose\nSidorkin described course redesign as a “double pivot.” The first shift moves instructional attention away from procedural production and toward conceptual knowledge and advanced skills.\nThe second changes how faculty use their time.\nThat doesn't mean students no longer need to understand how a process works, but that how something works shouldn't automatically be the highest evidence of learning.\n\"If some task is fun and actually gives you a little jolt of engagement, you’re probably better than AI at it.”\nSidorkin offered faculty a simple rule of thumb: “If some task is boring and you’re not looking forward to doing it, AI is probably better at it than you are. If some task is fun and actually gives you a little jolt of engagement, you’re probably better than AI at it.”\nAI cannot form relationships, understand messy human contexts or decide independently which tasks are worth pursuing, Sidorkin said.\n“Deciding what’s worth doing is essentially human and valuable capacity. We need to teach students to decide what’s important,” he said.\n4. Rebuild courses around authentic, complex problems\nSidorkin’s final recommendation was to deconstruct a course to its learning outcomes and rebuild assignments around the revised outcomes.\nOne emerging skill is knowing how to divide work appropriately between a person and an AI system. “When I get a task right now, I immediately break it down in my head into two parts,” he said. “This one AI will do, and this one I’ll have to do myself. That’s a skill that your students will need to develop.”\n\"When I get a task, I break it down: This one AI will do, and this one I’ll have to do myself. That’s a skill that your students will need to develop.”\nFaculty can give students complex, real-world problems and allow them to use AI for some procedural support while evaluating how well they account for context, allocate tasks, verify information, supervise outputs, and exercise human judgment.\n“It doesn’t have to be revolutionary,” Sidorkin said. “You just have to be moving in the right direction.”\nUp Next: Oct. 16 AI in the Classroom Virtual Conference, Nov. 12 Pack AI Symposium Series\nThe campus conversation will continue Oct. 16 during the third annual AI in the Classroom Virtual Conference, co-hosted by the University of Nevada, Reno and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The program will include demonstrations of custom AI chatbots and creative tools, research presentations on AI literacy and ethical frameworks for responsible use and non-use, and workshops focused on redesigning courses and assignments.\nAnother in-person event for the AI Symposium Series, Research Perspectives Across Disciplines, will take place Nov. 12 at 2 p.m. on campus. This research-focused workshop brings together faculty from English, Finance, Art & Design, and University Libraries to offer diverse perspectives on AI, from historical and economic frameworks to creative resistance and information literacy. Stay tuned on the Pack AI website for more information.","excerpt":"When Alexander “Sasha” Sidorkin visited the University of Nevada, Reno in September, his message to faculty was direct: Artificial intelligence has already altered the basic assumptions behind many college assignments, and higher education cannot respond by just trying to keep the technology outside the classroom. Sidorkin's lecture, “The AI-Native Course: Rethinking Assignments, Assessments, and Outcomes” was part of AI in the Classroom, a Pack AI Symposium Series designed to give faculty space to learn, ask questions and discuss how artificial intelligence is affecting teaching and learning.","extraction":{"state":"ok","confidence":0.9,"error":null,"explanation":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 7289 characters.","diagnostics_url":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.unr.edu/nevada-today/news/2026/ai-in-classroom-sidorkin","quality_profile":{"profile_version":"extraction_quality.v2","bucket":"high","confidence":0.9,"failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"retry_after_attempts":0,"reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 7289 characters.","operator_guidance":{"severity":"ok","recommended_action":"trust_full_text","next_step":"Use the extracted full text as the primary article source.","operator_label":"Ready","can_retry":false,"can_use_summary":false,"diagnostics_required":false},"content_depth":{"contract_version":"content_depth.v1","category":"full_text","label":"Full text","has_full_text":true,"has_summary":true,"content_length":7289,"summary_length":600,"usable_text_length":7289,"source_field":"content"},"legacy_collapsed":false,"signals":{"extract_state":"ok","extract_error":null,"extract_retries":0,"content_length":7289,"summary_length":600}}},"display_formats":["compact","card","full","digest_section","json"]},"daily_stack_record":{"title":"AI expert urges faculty to redesign courses for AI era - University of Nevada, Reno","url":"https://www.unr.edu/nevada-today/news/2026/ai-in-classroom-sidorkin","summary":"When Alexander “Sasha” Sidorkin visited the University of Nevada, Reno in September, his message to faculty was direct: Artificial intelligence has already altered the basic assumptions behind many college assignments, and higher education cannot respond by just trying to keep the technology outside the classroom. Sidorkin's lecture, “The AI-Native Course: Rethinking Assignments, Assessments, and Outcomes” was part of AI in the Classroom, a Pack AI Symposium Series designed to give faculty space to learn, ask questions and discuss how artificial intelligence is affecting teaching and learning.","source":"University of Nevada, Reno","date":"2026-10-02T01:05:54+00:00","content":"When Alexander “Sasha” Sidorkin visited the University of Nevada, Reno in September, his message to faculty was direct: Artificial intelligence has already altered the basic assumptions behind many college assignments, and higher education cannot respond by just trying to keep the technology outside the classroom.\nSidorkin's lecture, “The AI-Native Course: Rethinking Assignments, Assessments, and Outcomes” was part of AI in the Classroom, a Pack AI Symposium Series designed to give faculty space to learn, ask questions and discuss how artificial intelligence is affecting teaching and learning. Pack AI supports thoughtful, ethical and discipline-specific exploration rather than prescribing one approach for every instructor or course.\nUniversity Executive Vice President and Provost Jeff Thompson opened the event, saying that the conversation reflects the University of Nevada, Reno's responsibility as the state's land-grant, flagship institution to prepare students for a rapidly changing world.\n\"Part of that responsibility is ensuring that our graduates are prepared for the world they will enter, not the world that existed 10, or even 5 years ago,\" Thompson said at the event's opening.\nThe AI course\nSidorkin, a professor of education at California State University, Sacramento, previously served as the university’s chief AI officer and founding director of its National Institute on AI in Society. A philosopher of education by training, he has written about relational pedagogy, educational theory, and the integration of AI into teaching and learning. His take: faculty should not protect human-centered learning by ignoring AI. They should instead redesign courses so technology handles appropriate tasks, while students devote more attention to judgment and complex thought.\n\"Dr. Sidorkin has always advocated for the primacy of human relationships in education. That's why his perspective resonates with me.\" – Vice Provost Hillary Procknow\n\"I've studied Dr. Sidorkin's scholarship for years, so it's especially meaningful to hear him talk about AI,” said Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education Hillary Procknow. “As one of the founding voices in relational pedagogy, Dr. Sidorkin has always advocated for the primacy of human relationships in education. That's why his perspective resonates with me: he's not asking us to choose between technology and people. He's challenging us to use technology in ways that make the human side of teaching even stronger,” she said.\nHere are four takeaways from Sidorkin’s presentation:\n1. Treat AI as a design problem\n“The students will use AI whether we want it or not,” Sidorkin said. The more important issue is that higher education has long relied on written products as evidence that students have done deep thinking. With generative AI producing quality text, “that whole assumption no longer works.”\nSidorkin encouraged faculty to examine whether their assignments still measure the learning they’re intended to. He suggests the “lazy prompt test”: Paste your assignment into an AI tool and ask it to produce the final product.\n“This is a design problem that we have with curricula, not a compliance problem.\"\n“It's not your fault but if AI's response is good enough, you have a problem in your course,” he said.\nSidorkin was also skeptical of AI-detection systems because AI use is not a single, clearly measurable behavior. A student might use a tool to brainstorm, outline, research, draft, edit, or copy edit, each of which represents a different action. Instead, he encouraged instructors to explain which foundational skill students are expected to develop.\n“This is a design problem that we have with curricula, not a compliance problem,” he said.\n2. Use AI to create time for yourself\nRedesigning a course takes time, Sidorkin acknowledged. He encouraged faculty to use AI to reduce their own repetitive work and demonstrated how AI could help draft a syllabus, organize assignments and provide preliminary feedback on student work. He recommended reinvesting the time saved into revising curricula, including learning outcomes, assignments and rubrics.\n“You have to save yourself first,” he said. “Use AI to change the balance of time.”\n3. Shift students toward judgment, context and purpose\nSidorkin described course redesign as a “double pivot.” The first shift moves instructional attention away from procedural production and toward conceptual knowledge and advanced skills.\nThe second changes how faculty use their time.\nThat doesn't mean students no longer need to understand how a process works, but that how something works shouldn't automatically be the highest evidence of learning.\n\"If some task is fun and actually gives you a little jolt of engagement, you’re probably better than AI at it.”\nSidorkin offered faculty a simple rule of thumb: “If some task is boring and you’re not looking forward to doing it, AI is probably better at it than you are. If some task is fun and actually gives you a little jolt of engagement, you’re probably better than AI at it.”\nAI cannot form relationships, understand messy human contexts or decide independently which tasks are worth pursuing, Sidorkin said.\n“Deciding what’s worth doing is essentially human and valuable capacity. We need to teach students to decide what’s important,” he said.\n4. Rebuild courses around authentic, complex problems\nSidorkin’s final recommendation was to deconstruct a course to its learning outcomes and rebuild assignments around the revised outcomes.\nOne emerging skill is knowing how to divide work appropriately between a person and an AI system. “When I get a task right now, I immediately break it down in my head into two parts,” he said. “This one AI will do, and this one I’ll have to do myself. That’s a skill that your students will need to develop.”\n\"When I get a task, I break it down: This one AI will do, and this one I’ll have to do myself. That’s a skill that your students will need to develop.”\nFaculty can give students complex, real-world problems and allow them to use AI for some procedural support while evaluating how well they account for context, allocate tasks, verify information, supervise outputs, and exercise human judgment.\n“It doesn’t have to be revolutionary,” Sidorkin said. “You just have to be moving in the right direction.”\nUp Next: Oct. 16 AI in the Classroom Virtual Conference, Nov. 12 Pack AI Symposium Series\nThe campus conversation will continue Oct. 16 during the third annual AI in the Classroom Virtual Conference, co-hosted by the University of Nevada, Reno and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The program will include demonstrations of custom AI chatbots and creative tools, research presentations on AI literacy and ethical frameworks for responsible use and non-use, and workshops focused on redesigning courses and assignments.\nAnother in-person event for the AI Symposium Series, Research Perspectives Across Disciplines, will take place Nov. 12 at 2 p.m. on campus. This research-focused workshop brings together faculty from English, Finance, Art & Design, and University Libraries to offer diverse perspectives on AI, from historical and economic frameworks to creative resistance and information literacy. Stay tuned on the Pack AI website for more information.","confidence":0.9,"diagnostics_url":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.unr.edu/nevada-today/news/2026/ai-in-classroom-sidorkin","quality_bucket":"high","failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"quality_reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 7289 characters.","quality_profile":{"profile_version":"extraction_quality.v2","bucket":"high","confidence":0.9,"failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"retry_after_attempts":0,"reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 7289 characters.","operator_guidance":{"severity":"ok","recommended_action":"trust_full_text","next_step":"Use the extracted full text as the primary article source.","operator_label":"Ready","can_retry":false,"can_use_summary":false,"diagnostics_required":false},"content_depth":{"contract_version":"content_depth.v1","category":"full_text","label":"Full text","has_full_text":true,"has_summary":true,"content_length":7289,"summary_length":600,"usable_text_length":7289,"source_field":"content"},"legacy_collapsed":false,"signals":{"extract_state":"ok","extract_error":null,"extract_retries":0,"content_length":7289,"summary_length":600}},"tags":[]},"fallback_formats":["markdown","json","html"],"actions":{"read":"/item/94410","export_markdown":"/api/items/94410/export?format=markdown","export_json":"/api/items/94410/export?format=json","diagnose":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.unr.edu/nevada-today/news/2026/ai-in-classroom-sidorkin"},"formats":{"full":{"id":94410,"title":"AI expert urges faculty to redesign courses for AI era - University of Nevada, Reno","url":"https://www.unr.edu/nevada-today/news/2026/ai-in-classroom-sidorkin","source":"University of Nevada, Reno","author":null,"published_at":"2026-10-02T01:05:54+00:00","locale":"en","topic":"ai","tags":[],"excerpt":"When Alexander “Sasha” Sidorkin visited the University of Nevada, Reno in September, his message to faculty was direct: Artificial intelligence has already altered the basic assumptions behind many college assignments, and higher education cannot respond by just trying to keep the technology outside the classroom. Sidorkin's lecture, “The AI-Native Course: Rethinking Assignments, Assessments, and Outcomes” was part of AI in the Classroom, a Pack AI Symposium Series designed to give faculty space to learn, ask questions and discuss how artificial intelligence is affecting teaching and learning.","full_text":"When Alexander “Sasha” Sidorkin visited the University of Nevada, Reno in September, his message to faculty was direct: Artificial intelligence has already altered the basic assumptions behind many college assignments, and higher education cannot respond by just trying to keep the technology outside the classroom.\nSidorkin's lecture, “The AI-Native Course: Rethinking Assignments, Assessments, and Outcomes” was part of AI in the Classroom, a Pack AI Symposium Series designed to give faculty space to learn, ask questions and discuss how artificial intelligence is affecting teaching and learning. Pack AI supports thoughtful, ethical and discipline-specific exploration rather than prescribing one approach for every instructor or course.\nUniversity Executive Vice President and Provost Jeff Thompson opened the event, saying that the conversation reflects the University of Nevada, Reno's responsibility as the state's land-grant, flagship institution to prepare students for a rapidly changing world.\n\"Part of that responsibility is ensuring that our graduates are prepared for the world they will enter, not the world that existed 10, or even 5 years ago,\" Thompson said at the event's opening.\nThe AI course\nSidorkin, a professor of education at California State University, Sacramento, previously served as the university’s chief AI officer and founding director of its National Institute on AI in Society. A philosopher of education by training, he has written about relational pedagogy, educational theory, and the integration of AI into teaching and learning. His take: faculty should not protect human-centered learning by ignoring AI. They should instead redesign courses so technology handles appropriate tasks, while students devote more attention to judgment and complex thought.\n\"Dr. Sidorkin has always advocated for the primacy of human relationships in education. That's why his perspective resonates with me.\" – Vice Provost Hillary Procknow\n\"I've studied Dr. Sidorkin's scholarship for years, so it's especially meaningful to hear him talk about AI,” said Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education Hillary Procknow. “As one of the founding voices in relational pedagogy, Dr. Sidorkin has always advocated for the primacy of human relationships in education. That's why his perspective resonates with me: he's not asking us to choose between technology and people. He's challenging us to use technology in ways that make the human side of teaching even stronger,” she said.\nHere are four takeaways from Sidorkin’s presentation:\n1. Treat AI as a design problem\n“The students will use AI whether we want it or not,” Sidorkin said. The more important issue is that higher education has long relied on written products as evidence that students have done deep thinking. With generative AI producing quality text, “that whole assumption no longer works.”\nSidorkin encouraged faculty to examine whether their assignments still measure the learning they’re intended to. He suggests the “lazy prompt test”: Paste your assignment into an AI tool and ask it to produce the final product.\n“This is a design problem that we have with curricula, not a compliance problem.\"\n“It's not your fault but if AI's response is good enough, you have a problem in your course,” he said.\nSidorkin was also skeptical of AI-detection systems because AI use is not a single, clearly measurable behavior. A student might use a tool to brainstorm, outline, research, draft, edit, or copy edit, each of which represents a different action. Instead, he encouraged instructors to explain which foundational skill students are expected to develop.\n“This is a design problem that we have with curricula, not a compliance problem,” he said.\n2. Use AI to create time for yourself\nRedesigning a course takes time, Sidorkin acknowledged. He encouraged faculty to use AI to reduce their own repetitive work and demonstrated how AI could help draft a syllabus, organize assignments and provide preliminary feedback on student work. He recommended reinvesting the time saved into revising curricula, including learning outcomes, assignments and rubrics.\n“You have to save yourself first,” he said. “Use AI to change the balance of time.”\n3. Shift students toward judgment, context and purpose\nSidorkin described course redesign as a “double pivot.” The first shift moves instructional attention away from procedural production and toward conceptual knowledge and advanced skills.\nThe second changes how faculty use their time.\nThat doesn't mean students no longer need to understand how a process works, but that how something works shouldn't automatically be the highest evidence of learning.\n\"If some task is fun and actually gives you a little jolt of engagement, you’re probably better than AI at it.”\nSidorkin offered faculty a simple rule of thumb: “If some task is boring and you’re not looking forward to doing it, AI is probably better at it than you are. If some task is fun and actually gives you a little jolt of engagement, you’re probably better than AI at it.”\nAI cannot form relationships, understand messy human contexts or decide independently which tasks are worth pursuing, Sidorkin said.\n“Deciding what’s worth doing is essentially human and valuable capacity. We need to teach students to decide what’s important,” he said.\n4. Rebuild courses around authentic, complex problems\nSidorkin’s final recommendation was to deconstruct a course to its learning outcomes and rebuild assignments around the revised outcomes.\nOne emerging skill is knowing how to divide work appropriately between a person and an AI system. “When I get a task right now, I immediately break it down in my head into two parts,” he said. “This one AI will do, and this one I’ll have to do myself. That’s a skill that your students will need to develop.”\n\"When I get a task, I break it down: This one AI will do, and this one I’ll have to do myself. That’s a skill that your students will need to develop.”\nFaculty can give students complex, real-world problems and allow them to use AI for some procedural support while evaluating how well they account for context, allocate tasks, verify information, supervise outputs, and exercise human judgment.\n“It doesn’t have to be revolutionary,” Sidorkin said. “You just have to be moving in the right direction.”\nUp Next: Oct. 16 AI in the Classroom Virtual Conference, Nov. 12 Pack AI Symposium Series\nThe campus conversation will continue Oct. 16 during the third annual AI in the Classroom Virtual Conference, co-hosted by the University of Nevada, Reno and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The program will include demonstrations of custom AI chatbots and creative tools, research presentations on AI literacy and ethical frameworks for responsible use and non-use, and workshops focused on redesigning courses and assignments.\nAnother in-person event for the AI Symposium Series, Research Perspectives Across Disciplines, will take place Nov. 12 at 2 p.m. on campus. This research-focused workshop brings together faculty from English, Finance, Art & Design, and University Libraries to offer diverse perspectives on AI, from historical and economic frameworks to creative resistance and information literacy. Stay tuned on the Pack AI website for more information.","reading_time_min":6,"extraction":{"state":"ok","confidence":0.9,"error":null,"explanation":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 7289 characters.","diagnostics_url":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.unr.edu/nevada-today/news/2026/ai-in-classroom-sidorkin","quality_profile":{"profile_version":"extraction_quality.v2","bucket":"high","confidence":0.9,"failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"retry_after_attempts":0,"reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 7289 characters.","operator_guidance":{"severity":"ok","recommended_action":"trust_full_text","next_step":"Use the extracted full text as the primary article source.","operator_label":"Ready","can_retry":false,"can_use_summary":false,"diagnostics_required":false},"content_depth":{"contract_version":"content_depth.v1","category":"full_text","label":"Full text","has_full_text":true,"has_summary":true,"content_length":7289,"summary_length":600,"usable_text_length":7289,"source_field":"content"},"legacy_collapsed":false,"signals":{"extract_state":"ok","extract_error":null,"extract_retries":0,"content_length":7289,"summary_length":600}}},"quality_profile":{"profile_version":"extraction_quality.v2","bucket":"high","confidence":0.9,"failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"retry_after_attempts":0,"reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 7289 characters.","operator_guidance":{"severity":"ok","recommended_action":"trust_full_text","next_step":"Use the extracted full text as the primary article source.","operator_label":"Ready","can_retry":false,"can_use_summary":false,"diagnostics_required":false},"content_depth":{"contract_version":"content_depth.v1","category":"full_text","label":"Full text","has_full_text":true,"has_summary":true,"content_length":7289,"summary_length":600,"usable_text_length":7289,"source_field":"content"},"legacy_collapsed":false,"signals":{"extract_state":"ok","extract_error":null,"extract_retries":0,"content_length":7289,"summary_length":600}},"actions":{"read":"/item/94410","export_markdown":"/api/items/94410/export?format=markdown","export_json":"/api/items/94410/export?format=json","diagnose":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.unr.edu/nevada-today/news/2026/ai-in-classroom-sidorkin"}},"digest":{"id":94410,"title":"AI expert urges faculty to redesign courses for AI era - University of Nevada, Reno","url":"https://www.unr.edu/nevada-today/news/2026/ai-in-classroom-sidorkin","source":"University of Nevada, Reno","topic":"ai","published_at":"2026-10-02T01:05:54+00:00","excerpt":"When Alexander “Sasha” Sidorkin visited the University of Nevada, Reno in September, his message to faculty was direct: Artificial intelligence has already altered the basic assumptions behind many college assignments, and higher education cannot respond by just trying to keep…","quality_bucket":"high","quality_reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 7289 characters.","reading_time_min":6,"cluster_id":null},"card":{"display_title":"AI expert urges faculty to redesign courses for AI era - University of Nevada, Reno","subtitle":"University of Nevada, Reno · 2026-10-02","summary":"When Alexander “Sasha” Sidorkin visited the University of Nevada, Reno in September, his message to faculty was direct: Artificial intelligence has already altered the basic assumptions behind many college assignments,…","badges":["quality:high"],"links":{"read":"/item/94410","original":"https://www.unr.edu/nevada-today/news/2026/ai-in-classroom-sidorkin","diagnose":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.unr.edu/nevada-today/news/2026/ai-in-classroom-sidorkin"},"quality_warning":null},"export":{"title":"AI expert urges faculty to redesign courses for AI era - University of Nevada, Reno","url":"https://www.unr.edu/nevada-today/news/2026/ai-in-classroom-sidorkin","summary":"When Alexander “Sasha” Sidorkin visited the University of Nevada, Reno in September, his message to faculty was direct: Artificial intelligence has already altered the basic assumptions behind many college assignments, and higher education cannot respond by just trying to keep the technology outside the classroom. Sidorkin's lecture, “The AI-Native Course: Rethinking Assignments, Assessments, and Outcomes” was part of AI in the Classroom, a Pack AI Symposium Series designed to give faculty space to learn, ask questions and discuss how artificial intelligence is affecting teaching and learning.","source":"University of Nevada, Reno","date":"2026-10-02T01:05:54+00:00","content":"When Alexander “Sasha” Sidorkin visited the University of Nevada, Reno in September, his message to faculty was direct: Artificial intelligence has already altered the basic assumptions behind many college assignments, and higher education cannot respond by just trying to keep the technology outside the classroom.\nSidorkin's lecture, “The AI-Native Course: Rethinking Assignments, Assessments, and Outcomes” was part of AI in the Classroom, a Pack AI Symposium Series designed to give faculty space to learn, ask questions and discuss how artificial intelligence is affecting teaching and learning. Pack AI supports thoughtful, ethical and discipline-specific exploration rather than prescribing one approach for every instructor or course.\nUniversity Executive Vice President and Provost Jeff Thompson opened the event, saying that the conversation reflects the University of Nevada, Reno's responsibility as the state's land-grant, flagship institution to prepare students for a rapidly changing world.\n\"Part of that responsibility is ensuring that our graduates are prepared for the world they will enter, not the world that existed 10, or even 5 years ago,\" Thompson said at the event's opening.\nThe AI course\nSidorkin, a professor of education at California State University, Sacramento, previously served as the university’s chief AI officer and founding director of its National Institute on AI in Society. A philosopher of education by training, he has written about relational pedagogy, educational theory, and the integration of AI into teaching and learning. His take: faculty should not protect human-centered learning by ignoring AI. They should instead redesign courses so technology handles appropriate tasks, while students devote more attention to judgment and complex thought.\n\"Dr. Sidorkin has always advocated for the primacy of human relationships in education. That's why his perspective resonates with me.\" – Vice Provost Hillary Procknow\n\"I've studied Dr. Sidorkin's scholarship for years, so it's especially meaningful to hear him talk about AI,” said Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education Hillary Procknow. “As one of the founding voices in relational pedagogy, Dr. Sidorkin has always advocated for the primacy of human relationships in education. That's why his perspective resonates with me: he's not asking us to choose between technology and people. He's challenging us to use technology in ways that make the human side of teaching even stronger,” she said.\nHere are four takeaways from Sidorkin’s presentation:\n1. Treat AI as a design problem\n“The students will use AI whether we want it or not,” Sidorkin said. The more important issue is that higher education has long relied on written products as evidence that students have done deep thinking. With generative AI producing quality text, “that whole assumption no longer works.”\nSidorkin encouraged faculty to examine whether their assignments still measure the learning they’re intended to. He suggests the “lazy prompt test”: Paste your assignment into an AI tool and ask it to produce the final product.\n“This is a design problem that we have with curricula, not a compliance problem.\"\n“It's not your fault but if AI's response is good enough, you have a problem in your course,” he said.\nSidorkin was also skeptical of AI-detection systems because AI use is not a single, clearly measurable behavior. A student might use a tool to brainstorm, outline, research, draft, edit, or copy edit, each of which represents a different action. Instead, he encouraged instructors to explain which foundational skill students are expected to develop.\n“This is a design problem that we have with curricula, not a compliance problem,” he said.\n2. Use AI to create time for yourself\nRedesigning a course takes time, Sidorkin acknowledged. He encouraged faculty to use AI to reduce their own repetitive work and demonstrated how AI could help draft a syllabus, organize assignments and provide preliminary feedback on student work. He recommended reinvesting the time saved into revising curricula, including learning outcomes, assignments and rubrics.\n“You have to save yourself first,” he said. “Use AI to change the balance of time.”\n3. Shift students toward judgment, context and purpose\nSidorkin described course redesign as a “double pivot.” The first shift moves instructional attention away from procedural production and toward conceptual knowledge and advanced skills.\nThe second changes how faculty use their time.\nThat doesn't mean students no longer need to understand how a process works, but that how something works shouldn't automatically be the highest evidence of learning.\n\"If some task is fun and actually gives you a little jolt of engagement, you’re probably better than AI at it.”\nSidorkin offered faculty a simple rule of thumb: “If some task is boring and you’re not looking forward to doing it, AI is probably better at it than you are. If some task is fun and actually gives you a little jolt of engagement, you’re probably better than AI at it.”\nAI cannot form relationships, understand messy human contexts or decide independently which tasks are worth pursuing, Sidorkin said.\n“Deciding what’s worth doing is essentially human and valuable capacity. We need to teach students to decide what’s important,” he said.\n4. Rebuild courses around authentic, complex problems\nSidorkin’s final recommendation was to deconstruct a course to its learning outcomes and rebuild assignments around the revised outcomes.\nOne emerging skill is knowing how to divide work appropriately between a person and an AI system. “When I get a task right now, I immediately break it down in my head into two parts,” he said. “This one AI will do, and this one I’ll have to do myself. That’s a skill that your students will need to develop.”\n\"When I get a task, I break it down: This one AI will do, and this one I’ll have to do myself. That’s a skill that your students will need to develop.”\nFaculty can give students complex, real-world problems and allow them to use AI for some procedural support while evaluating how well they account for context, allocate tasks, verify information, supervise outputs, and exercise human judgment.\n“It doesn’t have to be revolutionary,” Sidorkin said. “You just have to be moving in the right direction.”\nUp Next: Oct. 16 AI in the Classroom Virtual Conference, Nov. 12 Pack AI Symposium Series\nThe campus conversation will continue Oct. 16 during the third annual AI in the Classroom Virtual Conference, co-hosted by the University of Nevada, Reno and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The program will include demonstrations of custom AI chatbots and creative tools, research presentations on AI literacy and ethical frameworks for responsible use and non-use, and workshops focused on redesigning courses and assignments.\nAnother in-person event for the AI Symposium Series, Research Perspectives Across Disciplines, will take place Nov. 12 at 2 p.m. on campus. This research-focused workshop brings together faculty from English, Finance, Art & Design, and University Libraries to offer diverse perspectives on AI, from historical and economic frameworks to creative resistance and information literacy. Stay tuned on the Pack AI website for more information.","confidence":0.9,"diagnostics_url":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.unr.edu/nevada-today/news/2026/ai-in-classroom-sidorkin","quality_bucket":"high","failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"quality_reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 7289 characters.","quality_profile":{"profile_version":"extraction_quality.v2","bucket":"high","confidence":0.9,"failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"retry_after_attempts":0,"reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 7289 characters.","operator_guidance":{"severity":"ok","recommended_action":"trust_full_text","next_step":"Use the extracted full text as the primary article source.","operator_label":"Ready","can_retry":false,"can_use_summary":false,"diagnostics_required":false},"content_depth":{"contract_version":"content_depth.v1","category":"full_text","label":"Full text","has_full_text":true,"has_summary":true,"content_length":7289,"summary_length":600,"usable_text_length":7289,"source_field":"content"},"legacy_collapsed":false,"signals":{"extract_state":"ok","extract_error":null,"extract_retries":0,"content_length":7289,"summary_length":600}},"tags":[],"format_contract_version":"news_item_formats.v1"}}}