Semester Without End: An Idea Resurrected

Now, OpenAI is suggesting that custom GPTs be created to accompany classes, facilitating learning during the semester, extending learning on the topic “and let[ting] people engage with the content in a lifelong manner.”

I am a longtime advocate of finding technological ways to extend learning beyond the end of the semester as well as beyond the boundaries of students and former students. I believe that it is part of our mission in higher education to offer learning opportunities to enlighten the broader society, not just those currently enrolled. Particularly in rapidly changing fields such as technology, it is important to provide updates after the class term is over. It is for that reason that I have blogged news updates on topics related to educational technologies for the past quarter century, and that more recently, I developed my own GPT, Ray’s eduAI Advisor.

Let me be clear, I am not the only one in our field to have suggested providing continuing access to relevant course materials for former students. In an informal conversation, Tawnya Means, assistant dean for educational innovation at the Gies College of Business of the University of Illinois, mentioned that her doctoral dissertation study suggested that in an established environment for willingness to return, learners have the willingness, and even an expectation, to return to digital learning resources following course completion.

Now the very concept of “semester without end” has come up again in a recent announcement by Siya Raj Purohit, a member of OpenAI’s go-to-market team for education, saying that OpenAI might explore ways to let e-learning instructors create custom GPTs that tie into online curricula. As quoted in an article by Kyle Wiggins in Tech Crunch, Purohit says, “What I’m hoping is going to happen is that professors are going to create custom GPTs for the public and let people engage with content in a lifelong manner … It’s not part of the current work that we’re doing, but it’s definitely on the roadmap.”

I came to this concept in teaching graduate seminars on communication technologies in the 1980s and 1990s, notably one titled New and Emerging Technologies in the Electronic Media. As is common in such seminars, I required students to critique articles and monographs, presenting their comments to the class at large. Given the emergent nature of the subject, relevant research articles would be published even during the course of the semester. To efficiently push those articles out to students, a Listserv was set up. As students completed the seminar and launched or continued their careers, a number continued their subscription to the list. This provided them with a relatively steady stream of reports of recent research in the field. It was one-way; students did not have permission to post to the list. However, soon after Pyra Blogs (which later became Google Blogs) launched in 1999, I converted to a blog entitled “Techno-News.” With RSS dissemination, updates were pushed out to subscriber computers via aggregators. Comments were enabled so that students, and others, could respond to the postings.

Students in the seminars completed their master’s degrees, and many moved on to doctorates and higher education faculty positions. Some continued to follow the blog, and I hoped it informed their own teaching. Not only did the blog gain readership among my former students, but as I shared postings on social media, the number of subscribers expanded to professionals in the field, ultimately reaching thousands of readers.

Over the intervening decades, I changed the title of the blog and added more posts on topics such as OER, the budget implications of the shifting economy on higher education and related topics. The goal in all cases was to provide further dissemination to administrators, faculty, students and interested others in keeping up with the developments in higher education. I presented on the topic of “semester without end” at the 2007 annual Distance Teaching and Learning conference in Madison, Wis. The paper was the foundation for a chapter for a book, Wired for Learning: An Educator’s Guide to Web 2.0, that was published in 2010. I also dedicated an article of this series to the concept in “Online: Trending Now” in February of 2020. In that column I enumerated a handful of the potential benefits of maintaining an open, regularly updated news blog in classes:

In a similar way, the creation of a GPT specializing in the topic of the course can provide the same benefits and more. A GPT will be able to provide valuable background in responses to original and follow-up prompts so that those who are relatively new to the topic can quickly get up to speed with the historical context and broader societal implications of whatever is searched. It will automatically scan the web for relevant new developments to include in the response to prompts. So, it was just last year that I jumped at the opportunity afforded me as a ChatGPT Plus member to train a GPT of my own to address the emerging topics and issues I was confronted with in advising UPCEA colleagues with responding to AI at their universities. I developed Ray’s eduAI Advisor. The tool is freely available to provide information, insights and ideas to those in higher education who are addressing generative AI.

I remain hopeful that this will become a standard practice for higher learning in the future. Just imagine each class that is offered continues to provide insights and new updates in an open format into the future. The footprint of a class will continue to move forward to an ever-larger audience of interested persons. Instructors can build upon what is created each semester to ever expand and better focus information to be relevant in the shifting emphases of society over time.

Have you considered training a GPT for your classes? Have you imagined using the technology to continue to advise and guide your former students through their careers in your field of specialization? The potential is enormous. It could revolutionize higher learning into a more open, dynamic process that never goes out of date!