AI Goes to College, Episode 33: Accessibility Hacks, 81,000 Interviews, and the Choppy Waters of Academic AI

Higher education is drowning in accessibility deadlines, grappling with what 81,000 AI interviews reveal about how people actually use these tools, and watching the academic publishing system creak under new pressures. In this episode, Craig and Rob dig into all three, with practical advice, a few uncomfortable truths, and their usual mix of optimism and healthy skepticism.

The Accessibility Crunch Is Here (and AI Can Help)

The episode opens with a problem that's top of mind for faculty everywhere: the April 24 federal deadline requiring public-facing digital content to meet WCAG accessibility guidelines. Universities have been scrambling, and many of the contracted tools designed to help have been, as Craig diplomatically puts it, hit and miss.

Craig shares a concrete example from his own workflow. He took three image-heavy slide decks from his Principles of Information Systems course and handed them to Claude Cowork with a simple instruction: add alt text for all the images. Within about 30 minutes, the job was done. The accuracy? Roughly 75 to 80 percent. A handful of images needed corrections, but instead of writing alt text for 40 or 50 images from scratch, he only had to fix six or eight. Rob tried something similar with Microsoft Copilot on a keynote presentation he gave at the SAIS conference in Asheville; two images, 30 seconds, done.

Rob makes the important point that accessibility isn't just a PowerPoint problem. It extends to whiteboard files, videos, and essentially everything faculty communicate digitally. The burden is real, and it lands on faculty who are already overwhelmed by the changes AI is bringing to their professional lives. Craig adds a note of personal sensitivity here; his wife has a profound hearing disability, which makes these issues more than abstract compliance for him.

The larger takeaway? When you hit one of these friction points in your work, try AI. It won't always solve the problem, but it often will, and the time savings can be substantial.

What 81,000 Interviews Tell Us About How People Actually Use AI

Link: https://www.anthropic.com/features/81k-interviews

Craig's article: https://open.substack.com/pub/aigoestocollege/p/what-81000-people-told-anthropic

The conversation shifts to Anthropic's large-scale qualitative study, where Claude was used to conduct and analyze 81,000 interviews about how people use AI tools. Rob, who has spent considerable time doing qualitative research the traditional way (36 interview transcripts with families, a labor-intensive process), finds the scale almost hard to believe. Craig wrote a separate article about this study for the AI Goes to College newsletter.

The phrase that catches both hosts' attention is one from the report: "the light and the shade are tangled together." It captures the tension between excitement about AI's possibilities and anxiety about what those possibilities mean for how people work, learn, and think. Craig connects this to a concept from technology studies: this is not technological determinism. The outcomes aren't dictated by the tools themselves. They emerge from the sociotechnical space where human choices and technological capabilities intersect.

Rob observes that most current AI use cases still amount to doing what we've always done, just faster. The real transformation will come when people start imagining entirely new approaches (he draws an analogy to cloud computing, which started as a backup solution and eventually reshaped how people interact with technology in ways nobody initially anticipated).

One quote from the Anthropic study lands hard. A freelance software engineer in Pakistan says: "I want to learn skills, but learning deeply is of no use. Ultimately I can just use AI." Craig points out that if a working professional thinks this way, the implications for students who may not yet appreciate the long-term value of deep learning are sobering. Rob agrees but pushes back slightly: people who lean too far into this mindset will eventually hit a wall where they lack the critical thinking skills to know when or why AI has gotten something wrong.

The hosts converge on what's becoming a running theme for the podcast: higher education's central task is helping students understand the long-term value of cognitive engagement, because without that understanding, the default will always be to let AI handle it.

Academics Need to Wake Up: 10 Theses on a Shifting Landscape

Link: https://substack.com/home/post/p-189705626

The second major discussion centers on Alexander Kustoff's Substack article, "Academics Need to Wake Up on AI: 10 Theses for Folks Who Haven't Noticed the Ground Shifting Under Their Feet." Rob sees it as a useful prompt for conversations the research community needs to have. Craig appreciates the ambition but pushes back on some of the claims.

Take thesis number one: AI can already do social science research better than most professors. Craig's reaction is nuanced. The claim is probably technically true if "most" is read literally, since many professors don't publish much (Rob notes the median number of publications for business school professors may be as low as one). But the implication that AI can replace skilled researchers? Not yet. Craig estimates that a knowledgeable researcher can use AI to cut research production time by about three-quarters, but that knowledge is the key ingredient; without research skill, you'll just produce publishable garbage faster.

Rob raises something interesting: colleagues who are brilliant thinkers but never thrived in research because they didn't enjoy writing may now have a path to contribute. AI could genuinely democratize parts of the research process. Craig extends this point to data analysis; tools like Cowork can run Python and R analyses without expensive specialized software, which matters enormously for under-resourced institutions and researchers in developing countries.

The conversation turns to the strain AI is putting on the peer review system. More submissions (many of them better written thanks to AI) are flooding journals, but finding reviewers was already difficult. Craig, speaking from his role as a journal editor, argues that well-trained AI could do a better job reviewing than roughly half of current human reviewers. Rob agrees but emphasizes that journal leaders need to come together and define norms for what's acceptable. Right now, the rules are either nonexistent or unrealistically restrictive ("just don't use AI for anything"), which creates the same kind of confusion faculty have imposed on students with inconsistent classroom policies.

One of the most provocative moments comes when Craig reads a quote from the Kustoff article: "I don't envision a research assistant role in my workflow anymore. What I want from collaborators is original thinking, domain expertise, and intellectual challenge. This is a genuine loss for the traditional apprenticeship model, and I don't have a clean answer for how to replace it." Both hosts take this seriously. Craig argues that senior scholars will need to accept some suboptimal results in the short term to continue mentoring the next generation. Rob suggests the apprenticeship model isn't dying; it's transforming. The mentorship shifts from teaching students how to do tasks to teaching them how to direct AI tools and critically evaluate what those tools produce.

Craig closes with a characteristically honest observation: senior scholars get stuck in their ways of thinking, and one of the real values of working with early-career doctoral students is the occasional moment when their unformed, messy thinking reveals a perspective that nobody in the room had considered. That's worth protecting.

AI-Generated Lesson Plans and the Bloom's Taxonomy Problem

Link: https://citejournal.org/volume-25/issue-3-25/social-studies/civic-education-in-the-age-of-ai-should-we-trust-ai-generated-lesson-plans/

The final segment covers a paper by four researchers from UMass Amherst, "Civic Education in the Age of AI: Should We Trust AI-Generated Lesson Plans?" The study found that roughly 90 percent of AI-generated lesson plans hit only the lower levels of Bloom's taxonomy (remembering, understanding) rather than the higher-order thinking skills like analyzing, evaluating, and creating.

Craig's first reaction was that the prompts used in the study were terrible. But he acknowledges the researchers had a reason: they were mimicking how most teachers would actually prompt. And that's the real finding. The problem isn't that AI can't produce sophisticated lesson plans; the problem is that untrained users produce unsophisticated prompts, and the output reflects the input. Rob agrees and broadens the point: if even a fraction of teachers are prompting this way, that's affecting a lot of students.

Craig shares a personal anecdote from his one year as a high school teacher. He diligently wrote lesson plans; a veteran teacher (whom he describes as one of the best he'd ever seen) simply copied his plans to satisfy an administrative checkbox. The experienced teacher didn't need detailed plans because she could read the room and adapt in real time. Some lesson planning, Craig suggests, falls...