General Session | The Future of Learning: How AI and Other Forces Are Changing the Undergraduate Experience

College is supposed to be a time of exploration and engagement, when students are challenged to figure out who they are and what they want to become. Increasingly though, college feels transactional?to both students and professors. That’s understandable. Students are stressed about the high cost of a degree. They are worried that AI will decimate the job market. They are hesitant to take risks in the classroom because failure?or even struggle?seems too risky. 

Meanwhile, professors are burned out. They taught through a pandemic. Just when they thought things were getting better, generative AI upended everything they understood about authentic teaching and learning. And they’re exhausted trying to engage a generation of students that is coming to college less academically prepared and less willing to spend time on their coursework.

What is the way forward? In her keynote, Beth will explore these changing classroom dynamics, dig into the teaching challenges facing higher education during a time of deep skepticism about the value of college, and offer ideas to help restore the sense of meaning and purpose to the undergraduate experience, based on her years of deep reporting.

About Beth McMurtrie:
A senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Beth has covered the beat for more than 25 years. Since 2017 she has focused on the future of learning and technology’s influence on teaching. She explores complicated, systemic issues like whether higher education values good teaching. She helps faculty members see the patterns in these challenges and understand that they are not alone as they wrestle with them in and around their classrooms. More recently, she has written about Gen Z students, from their struggles with reading to the complex ways they think about AI. In addition to her reported stories, Beth writes a weekly Teaching newsletter about what works in and around the classroom.

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