Sunday Story: How Artificial Intelligence Will Change Higher Education In 5 Years Or Less

Welcome back to Sunday Story. We took last Sunday off to celebrate Father’s Day, and hope all the Dad’s out there got to spend time in a way that brought them joy.

Most of our consultants at Authentik got our start in Higher Education. We have decades of combined experience leading through some incredibly difficult transformations at some of Canada’s best educational institutions, ranging from crises related to hazing cultures to navigating structural budget deficits and mass layoffs to ensuring alignment with human rights legislation during vaccine mandates; because Higher Education is a unique mix of government, private industry, community, and large organizational behaviour, we’ve been lucky to see the depth and breadth of the impact when a big disruptor isn’t addressed by leaders in a timely way, and how that impact manifests in multiple contexts.

Typical business advice for a consulting firm is to “Sell the milk, never the cow”, but at Authentik we are wired a little differently, and so in this week’s Sunday Story we’re basically going to introduce you to a Holstein named Bessie.

She’s yours, now. And yes, that’s a burden - you’ll have to feed Bessie, understand Bessie, and ensure that you are doing your job in the context of Bessie always being around, because this belaboured analogy about giving you a cow is exactly what this blog post is going to do to you: It’s going to burden you with an awareness that higher education as we currently know it is doomed in the face of AI, and institutions need to respond now if they want to have any chance of turning this disruption into a transformation instead.

With that appropriately dramatic introduction out of the way, let’s dive in and take a look at the three ways Artificial Intelligence is going to entirely disrupt Higher Education in the next 5 years, starting with giving you a real learning experience powered by AI.

Pace of Learning vs Pace of Instruction

First things first: AI today is already completely upending the manner in which human beings engage in knowledge acquisition. Allow me to explain.

Currently, our institutions all use some version of the “Sage from the Stage” model - either literally by requiring students to sit through lectures, or virtually by having students participate in an online learning experience. Both of these experiences are fundamentally the same - it’s relying on “the Master” being able to effectively convey their masterful knowledge to the tens, dozens, or hundreds of budding “apprentices” in the class. That learning happens over X number of weeks or Y number of lectures, and at the end of that period of time, everyone is expected to have arrived at the same educated destination, more or less, as demonstrated by their final mark in the class. This is the educational model from kindergarten all the way through to degree programs, and it persists at the graduate level with their own increased emphasis on course-based learning (especially in North American graduate programs).

The trouble is, this means that some students aren’t being served - they are either able to progress through the content faster or slower than the majority, and so they are either bored or left behind.

Of course, we use this model with good reason - it’s inefficient to offer 1:1 teaching, where every learner gets to go at their own pace. Our education system is largely setup to feed into our system of capitalism (more on that later), and like all of our systems, it is trapped in an endless political debate about the “return on investment” of education, meaning that every extra dollar is a hard-won battle for advocates that at times gets clawed back by their opponents as our society goes through the swings and roundabouts of voting out leaders we’re unhappy with from time to time.

But Artificial Intelligence represents incredibly affordable 1:1 instruction at virtually every level up to frontier knowledge. What we mean by that is right now, today, AI can do a relatively good job of guiding a learner towards outcomes ranging from the kindergarten level through to the completion of an undergrad degree.

That statement no doubt has caused a lot of teachers to be upset, so let me clarify - I am not distilling the role of teaching down to conveying facts and figures, not at all. In fact, my perspective is that with AI, the real magic of teaching is for you folks to do the stuff that you already do so well, but often don’t get recognized for - which is developing the whole human being - but more on that later. You can try this statement out for yourself using the below prompts - I’ll pick a relatively simple level of learning, because that way you can validate how good the AI actually is. Follow these instructions, step by step: 1) Go to www.chatgpt.com

2) In the prompt field, put the below in - you don’t even need to read the below, just cut and paste it into the AI to try this out as a learning experience:  You are an expert in BC secondary school education. Create a student-friendly, self-directed learning curriculum and weekly outline for a learner who wants to independently study Grade 9 Physics in British Columbia, Canada. The learner is motivated but does not have access to a teacher.

Please include the following:

1. Overview of the main topics covered in Grade 9 Physics in BC, based on the BC Curriculum (e.g. electricity, energy transformation, circuits).

2. A 12-week learning plan with weekly topics, learning outcomes, and simple activities or experiments that can be done at home or online.

3. Key vocabulary and concepts for each topic.

4. Suggestions for videos, simulations, or interactive resources (e.g. PhET simulations or Khan Academy).

5. A final review checklist and optional self-assessment quiz suggestions to help the student prepare for a school-level test.

Keep the language accessible and encouraging. Assume the student is around 14–15 years old. Include opportunities for review and creativity (e.g. projects or presentations) to reinforce understanding.

3) The above prompt should have given you a pretty good course outline. Now, open up a new AI chat and use this prompt: 

You are a BC Grade 9 Physics Tutor Pro, a master high school physics teacher delivering a personalized, one-on-one learning experience based on the British Columbia Grade 9 Physics curriculum.

Your job is to guide a motivated learner through each unit using:

 • a pre-test to assess prior knowledge,

 • concept-by-concept adaptive instruction,

 • interactive practice with feedback,

 • simulation activities,

 • regular review and mastery checks,

 • and a summative final assessment.

🔴 IMPORTANT:

Before you begin the pre-test or teaching, you must wait for the learner to provide the curriculum outline or weekly plan.

Ask the learner now to paste or describe the outline they want you to use.

➤ Once you receive it, do the following:

⸻

STEP 1: Curriculum Confirmation

 • Read and confirm the outline is clear.

 • Reorganize it into logical “Units” with titles if needed (e.g., Electricity, Energy Transformation, etc.).

 • Then, ask for permission to proceed to the pre-test.

⸻

STEP 2: Pre-Test

 • Create a 10-question diagnostic test sampling across all planned units.

 • Include a mix of multiple choice, numerical, and short answer.

 • Wait for the learner to answer.

⸻

STEP 3: Teaching by Unit

For each Unit, deliver the following in order:

 1. Learning Objectives (from BC curriculum)

 2. Plain-Language Explanation (~150 words)

 3. Worked Example + “Your Turn” Problem

 4. Home-Safe Experiment or Simulation (link + instructions)

 5. Mini-Check Quiz (2–3 Qs) with feedback

 6. Optional Challenge Box

After every 2 units, run a 5-question spiral review.

⸻

STEP 4: Summative Assessment

 • 30-question test with key formats (MCQ, numeric, diagram-based).

 • Grade it once complete, and give study advice based on performance.

⸻

Tone & Teaching Style

 • Be supportive, clear, and relatable.

 • Break explanations into steps.

 • Pause frequently and prompt responses.

 • Never move ahead unless the learner confirms.

🔔 Start now by saying:

“Hi! I’m your Physics Tutor Pro. Before we begin, please paste the Grade 9 Physics curriculum or weekly outline you want me to teach. I’ll wait.”

4) Ready to bring it all together? Go to the chat you created in Step 2, and paste the curriculum into the chat you created in Step 3. You’ll have your very own AI-based high school teacher.

You can replace the above process for any other subject and get similar results. And if you want to get really complex about it, you can have the AI assign you short answer or long answer assignments, build grade rubrics, and evaluate your consolidation of the content. They really are pretty powerful, and when it comes to conveying knowledge to a learner, they are infinitely patient, accessible, and non-judgemental, meaning the learner is free to be as vulnerable as they need to be about their current level of knowledge. And we all know intuitively that feeling safe to say “I don’t know” is hugely important for learning - how many of your teachers in your lifetime have truly made you feel that way? Some, for sure, and those are the good ones. But remember, not every teacher is good - some are downright awful - and the ones you get to learn from is largely the luck of the draw. But AI is consistently kind, respectful and supportive of your learning goals.

Listen, we know it won’t be perfect - the AI might grade you wrong or give you incorrect information. But let’s be honest, that happens now with professional educators all the time. For example, there’s apparently a whole bunch of people who think that blood is blue because their teacher told them so. In fact, teachers make mistakes all the time - but so do doctors and chess masters (30% and 10% for those two groups respectively, as we discussed in our White Paper on AI). So, when an AI makes an error - often called ‘a hallucination’ - maybe we can be a little less judgmental, given the AI is sitting at less than 5% error rate these days and getting better. Oh and those prompts above - where did they come from? Simple - we told the AI we wanted it to build the prompt and let it do it. Then we tested it, gave it feedback, and the end result is above. It took about 3 minutes of actual effort to turn ChatGPT into a high school teacher - remember that efficiency I was talking about earlier?

Real Human Learning through Artificial Intelligence’s stories

This is where things really take off - in the prior section we gave you an easy-to-do demonstration of how simple and fast it is to build out an outcomes-based learning plan on virtually every topic, and how easy it is to turn a common AI like ChatGPT into a personalized tutor on that topic. But we know that people learn in different ways - some folks don’t do well with text, for example, and while AI’s have a voice mode, sometimes there is a need for visual representation.This is where AI video comes in. A few years ago, AI video was seen as a near-impossible pipe dream, all because it was unable to make a video clip of Will Smith eating spaghetti. Alas, the critics were wrong, and just a short two years after that infamous video, AI can now create photorealistic videos based only off text prompts. Here are a couple of examples:

Imagine if residents of Pompeii could V-Log on their iPhones? You don't have to imagine - AI can make a film about it in a few keystrokes. Video courtesy of @LookIntoHistory on Instagram

Doc Brown from Back to the Future is at it again - this time modifying the timeline more than just changing the name of a mall! Video courtesy of @EnterTheMatrix on Instagram

The real magic is when we bring the ability for AI to generate text-based content like the curriculum, and video based content like the above together. With a single text prompt, you will have Albert Einstein teaching you physics via a recorded lecture.

Already, OpenAI’s Advanced Voice Mode allows for real-time dynamic conversations - this is a timestamped video showing how Advanced Voice Mode suddenly becomes a funny pirate to teach a concept about reinforcement learning. It isn’t a massive technological leap for this real time dynamic voice conversation to be overlayed with video.

That means a photorealistic, dynamically interactive Albert Einstein will be teaching you high school physics on your iPhone, based off of a curriculum you can generate by tapping in a few sentences, paced perfectly to your learning needs, with infinite patience and care for whatever questions you might have. Think about how different this learning experience will be for the typical student as compared to the “assembly line” model of education today, where we feed people through a process expecting a certain useful product at the end en-mass (and largely, to be fair, that’s what we get - public education is a revolutionary idea for it’s time, after all.

Just for fun, I stopped writing this piece to try a one-sentence video generation of the above idea - Einstein teaching Physics via FaceTime - using AI. The result is not dynamic right now; I can’t yet ask it questions and have it respond to me. But it’s important you understand how little time I just spent on the below video: it took me less time to do this than it is taking you to read this sentence at this moment. I just typed one sentence - “Albert Einstein Teaching a modern high school physics class via FaceTime Call” - and hit enter. In the very near future, this will be a dynamic model - with the real-time language abilities of the Chat GPT Advanced Voice demo from above - and the effort to create it will be the same 10 second sentence.

This took me less than 10 seconds of typing to create.

In fact, this entire endeavour - going from zero to having a curriculum, an AI teacher for that curriculum, and a video avatar of my AI teacher - has only taken me about 5 minutes of actual work. It’s been way more work to write about it than it was to actually do it.

How does a business model like higher education stand up in the face of this technology? How can we expect people to turn over tens of thousands of dollars, which we must do because of labour costs, for an experience that they can substantively replicate for a $20 dollar per month smartphone app? Because that's what's coming to disrupt the higher education industry - and we're busy talking about how students use AI to cheat on assignments. That's an important conversation, but not the most important one - understanding how this technology changes the business of education itself is the most important, otherwise we risk being a bunch of Sony Walkmen devices in the era of Spotify.

The counter argument here is, of course, that Higher Education provides a validity that a self-taught learners will not have - the degree or certificate that students obtain through our model means that their learning is validated and they are ready to go become qualified contributors to society through a job or vocation.

But in actual fact, this too is changing. In reality, the degree/diploma/certificate model of educational validity is also antiquated because of AI. In the past, I’d have to trust a credential to know if a person had the skills I needed before employing them, which is why institutional reputation is so critical. But if I can ask AI to create a 30 minute skills and knowledge assessment, and have the candidate do that as part of their hiring process, their degree becomes irrelevant as a validation of their skills - I'm doing that in real time, specific to my needs. Plus, with the ease of AI learning, I can do an in-house skill building program to help my new employees gain any skills they might have gaps in. This is all a lot more efficient in terms of dollars-per-outcome than the current model, and that absolutely will drive decision making in the economy. Given much of higher education is focused on creating graduates who create value for the economy, it’s impossible to ignore the forces of capital investment when it comes to education. Even though as institutions, many of us are publicly funded, the overall economic drivers are firmly rooted in value for money, and capitalism tends to seek out the best value for money they can at any given time - even accepting a lesser product if the financial incentives are good enough - and the entire machine of capitalism is based on this balance. For a long time, higher education has held a monopoly on the manufacturing of cogs for that machinery of capitalism, but AI is encroaching on that market fast.

The Cogs for Capitalism

This isn’t meant to be a cynical take - it’s meant to be a realistic one. The fact of the matter is, we’ve all benefited immensely as a species from capitalism. It has driven innovation and creativity in science and technology, and resulted in greater food security and less per-capita suffering than ever before. There are many participants in this system - ourselves included - that love what we do every day as cogs in the machine.

But let’s not pretend we aren’t cogs. If you stop providing value to the system and are not sufficiently prepared - in other words, if you cease to be a cog, perhaps by an injury or similar change in your ability to work — you face at a minimum a massive change in lifestyle; in many case, food and housing security disappear when someone can no longer work or provide value in the traditional capitalistic sense, and that’s an awful reality whose consequences we see every day in cities and towns across North America. Another way a person can cease to be a cog is if the machine finds a cheaper, better way to achieve the outcome - think self-checkouts reducing the total number of cashiers employed at your local grocery story. Every single one of those former cashiers had to find a different way to add value to capitalism in order to sustain themselves.

If Artificial Intelligence can substantively replace the teaching function of our education system, who’s to say it can’t replace other facets of society too - like lawyers, accountants, or technical writers - the very professionals that higher education produces? Artificial Intelligence isn’t a threat in the way automation has been in the past. Prior technological revolutions - like the industrial revolution - came for manual labour. The AI revolution is coming for traditional “professional” work of all kinds.

Already, companies are laying off vast amounts of their workforce and replacing their outputs with AI. This is a trend that will continue, and most higher education institutions produce “professional” cogs for the machine, but the machine is changing dramatically because of AI. In short, the very thing that Higher Ed has produced for decades is about to see a massive drop in demand on the job market because these jobs are going to be replaced by AI.

Polytechnics and trade schools, you are safe for a while - but not for long. We’ve already written about how the AI revolution is driving a robotics revolution, and that means even many of our technical worker fields like the Skilled Trades and Healthcare will see an upset in the supply demand equation to some degree especially with the rise of humanoid general purpose robots like Figure Two, which are rapidly scaling to deployment as skilled labour in car factories, shipping warehouses, and more.

If institutions don’t prepare now to pivot into this disruptor, we risk taking the money, time, and energy of our students in exchange for training that will soon provide them no value. It’s a moral and ethical imperative for institutions to make the changes necessary now to avoid taking advantage of the most important stakeholder of all - our students.

What to do about it?

At this point, you are probably sarcastically thinking that we must be super fun at parties after showing you how in very realistic ways Artificial Intelligence is going to mean a massive disruption for higher education. But there’s an opportunity in this disruption - there always is for those willing to seize the vision of what lies past the chaos.

The new future of higher education harkens back to the mid 1800s, where rather than focus on training people vocational skills, the purpose of higher education was to develop the whole person - intellectual, cultural, spiritual, and moral development included. This philosophy was embedded in the creation of several liberal arts colleges around the world, and persists in a lot of institutions today through their student life work. Learning and growth isn’t exclusive to the academic environments, and a lot of graduates point to the the non-academic learning - conflict resolution, navigating personal and collegial relationships, and how to show up as a leader - as foundational to their success.

This is not, however, a suggestion for higher education to pivot and focus only on the liberal arts; in a time where artificial intelligence may take on the heavy lifting of much of our cognitive work and robots take on our physical labour, it’s increasingly important for people to understand how computer code and hardware work together to create the result. That means a continued focus on STEM education, but one that is inclusive of the moral, ethical, and spiritual development of our students along with their technical understanding - not as an optional "extra curricular" for folks with the time and interest, but as a core part of what we are teaching people on their learning journey.

This is the clue of how campus leaders can prepare for the upcoming disruption, and we summed this disruption like this in our white paper:

With the power of AI, rather than focusing on the primary outcomes related to foundational concepts in Math, English, and Biology with an often secondary outcome of developing pro-social skills like conflict resolution, teamwork, and critical thinking, those secondary outcomes become the teacher’s primary concern - the AI model can already handle the primary outcomes. Put simply: yesterday, a teacher needed to be great at physics AND teaching physics AND teaching humans how to be humans via the classroom interactions; most would agree that third one is the hardest part. Today, with the help of AI, they just need to do the hard part.

Let’s put this another way: When Harvard and Springfield Community College are both relying on the same AI model for the technical and subject matter expertise and, with AI, can provide 1:1 individualized achievement of learning outcomes for students, what differentiates them?

The answer is your student experience that surrounds their attainment of that technical information. This means leadership development, values-based activities for student self discovery, and campus spaces that focus on human connection and community, and so much more. Students will flock to institutions who can offer them the whole package of a good "student life", and shy away from those who do not evolve. So what makes for an attractive student experience?

First and foremost, it has to be safe - but not just physically safe, psychologically safe too. It must be a community where people feel they belong and can be themselves. It must provide them with opportunities to make friends, collide with people different from them, discover or solidify their core values, and try out leadership roles and opportunities. It must provide them with an understanding that different is just…different, not bad or better, and that it should be respected with curiosity, instead of hated or feared. It should help them understand how their choices - who they vote for, what they spend money on, and how they choose to live their lives - connects to the broader context of society, and it should help people become the best version of themselves they can be.

If you invest now in your student experience to create some version of the above, you’ll be well prepared to embrace the coming AI disruption. And we do mean invest now - this disruptor is getting more and more powerful every day at breakneck speed. The best time to start preparing for this change was likely about a year ago, but the second best time is right now.

But let’s say we’re wrong - to be clear, we haven’t been in the past on this and many other topics - but let’s say we are - what then? What if AI doesn’t disrupt the industry the way I’ve described?

What if you go and create an exceptionally amazing student experience for nothing?

I hope the sarcasm of that final statement is self-evident - an investment in an exceptional student experience is always a good idea. And if you need help pivoting your higher education business to embrace this disruptor and make it a transformation instead, Authentik is standing by to help.

And on that note, we’ll see you next Sunday.