The few who read this may have seen the post a while back called “Sunset“in which I reflected on the difficulties and, well, failures I suppose of trying to develop an LMS as a small business without a huge bankroll for a coding team and marketing. In 2007 when I started this and made some money from my inventions, the internet was very different.
So then AI came along. There is plenty of material for blog posts on how this transforms my teaching (I still teach remotely part-time). The big effort for me was trying to devise ways to prevent or at least make difficult the inappropriate use of AI by my students. Interestingly, I turned to AI to do this.
Like my colleagues who did not just surrender to AI student work submissions, I first worked on changing how I designed my assignments. That only goes so far.
Next I rolled up my sleeves and started tweaking my own code in this platform which I use for teaching remotely. Things like timers, detailed logging and response of student activity in a browser, hiding things until time has passed, and eventually on to getting an API key from OpenAI so that I could add a button that would analyze the logged data from student interactions on the platform and understand likelihood of inappropriate usage.
Once I started tweaking my old code, I noticed increasingly that the AI I was using to correct it, making enhancement above my coding ability, was itself increasingly having trouble with old-fashioned and out of date coding practices in the Perl language. I asked it about this. It explained that the code base I had (which is admittedly 20+ years old) was out of date such that it would not support a moderate customer base. The database itself, holding the work of myself and customers some going back twenty years, had obsolete features beyond the scope of this post to explain. The work to re-code and update this was enormous and overwhelming. That’s when the “Sunset” blog was written.
But then I had a cool idea for an application. I needed a way to let my AP French students practice and be evaluated asynchronously for conversation skills. I wanted to write this in a modern way using up-to-date code base. I used AI to write it. I was not as proficient in PHP as I was in Perl. I was tired of coding and wanted to focus on curriculum development.
The result was smashing! And from there I kept building… Three months later, I have nearly completed Innovation 2.0. Wow. I have moved from coding myself to directing the AI to to the detailed coding. I am now the creative director, no longer consulting programming language manuals or searching stackoverflow.
What’s especially exciting for me is that the new software works exactly as I wish it to. And it’s all in one place! That was why I started coding 30 years ago anyway! I like to build and invent.
So in January I will be using innovation 2.0 with my own students to refine and debug it and then move customers over in February and start offering this platform publicly. There are great new apps I can offer, a fully-integrated AI support system with guardrails and controls, effective live monitoring and more!