Grace Christian University is asking one of the biggest questions in higher education right now. How do you use AI without losing the human relationships that make learning meaningful? In this conversation, Dr. Shaw and Dr. Loverin discuss that question and how to use AI well without letting it replace critical thinking, wisdom, or face-to-face relationships.
Every Generation Has Its Defining Technology
Danny: All right, well, first and foremost, I want to lay the groundwork. Let’s talk about the landscape in general, what we are seeing with AI. So an opening question. I would love to hear your guys’ thoughts on AI, specifically in the context of higher education. What are some things that you guys feel that everyday people need to know that are considering going and pursuing higher education?
Dr. Shaw: Much like the internet revamped how we do things, if we’re talking higher ed specific When I started college, we were talking about email. And it was radical that you could actually email someone. The internet was just on the cusp, at least in the higher education space. We had blue books. We had paper tests. And the internet revamped that.
Now we take it for granted. Things like learning management systems, like Blackboard or Google or Canvas. And even the way that we do research. Back in the library, you’d go and look at physical books. And we had the old microfiche, where you could log on a screen to view these articles. The internet changed that. We have online databases that are still great sources of information. But now, with a click on a computer or even a phone, we have ready access.
Dr. Loverin: Yeah, I think one thing we should talk about is the big wave of AI that’s everywhere. Everyone’s already using it, whether it’s for navigation on your phone or replacing the Google search.
There are kind of these tiers where AI functions for us automatically. Both students and faculty and academic staff are using AI already to accomplish what we would call those menial tasks. Those everyday tasks that are time-consuming, like evaluation of complicated email threads. You know, that big, long email that you get that has many bullet points to it? It gives you a quick summary. You get the executive summary. And it just gets right to the heart of that work, so you’re able to do your work with a lot more efficiency.
Information vs. Wisdom
Danny: I want to hear from your perspective. What are conversations you’ve had, the things that you’ve witnessed, and the direction [we are] going in addressing AI in higher education?
Dr. Loverin: Yeah, for sure. The first thing, the boots-on-the-ground experience that most students and faculty have had, is to use this as a research assistant. Then also for paper drafting and paper editing. Maybe the far-end extreme is you let it write your paper for you, and then faculty kind of police that. But that’s really shifted in the last year or two, where faculty have seen, okay, these tools are everywhere.
If we spend all of our time trying to police AI use, that’s all that we’ll do. And so we need to adapt our teaching methods to something that’s a little bit less traditional. In terms of the written essay or in terms of a research paper where the student has the opportunity to use those tools in an unhealthy, unhelpful way. So you’ll see a lot more handwritten in-class assignments. And this was kind of like a first reaction or a first line of defense that faculty brought to that question of “what do we do with AI now that it’s here?”
Dr. Shaw: Yeah, I would just say what excites me about what we’re doing here at Grace is that one of our core values is transformational relationships. And that lends itself really well to competency-based education. You know, if you’re a pastor and I come to you and I say, “I’m really struggling with my faith,” you can’t just go to Chat or Claude and say, “Give me a good response here.” There has to be some basic competence to sit with someone. To have some understanding of scriptural knowledge, background, applied theology, and maybe even some psychology.
AI Should Support Thinking, Not Replace It
Dr. Shaw: How do I work with someone in need? And I think going back to some of those assessments where we have to be more creative as a faculty member As a professor, I can’t be too tied into the method of how they get the knowledge as long as students get the knowledge and can apply it. So I don’t necessarily care if they use a Word doc or a Google doc, but do you know what you’re writing about? Do you know and can you demonstrate a competency that shows me you know your stuff and you can apply it? When we’re graduating students, we’re confident that they know it.
It’s like, well, what if they used AI? Please do, because employers are expecting that they’ll have some competence in generative AI for some of the efficiencies that Dr. Loverin mentioned. But at the same time, we want them to have an ethical perspective, so I’m not letting it think for me.
One phrase I’ve heard is that using some of these large language models. It’s kind of like having a really smart seven-year-old do your writing for you. You know, the level of critical thinking is kind of homogenized. You know, it’s not real critical thinking, and you can usually tell that. When you’re reading a paper, it’s like, you know, I want to hear what you think, and here’s kind of this homogenized paper. It’s like, yeah, I don’t see a lot of critical thinking.
Competency MattersÂ
Dr. Shaw: But, you know, competency-based, where we can have a conversation and sit down and talk or demonstrate. I just wrote a chapter on using poster sessions, where we have students demonstrate, “Here’s my research. Talk me through it.” What did you learn? What are the gaps? Talk me through the gaps. What do you wish you could have done that you didn’t have time to do if you could have more time for this? And get them thinking critically about developing a topic or asking a critical question.
Dr. Loverin: Yeah, it sounds like you sort of lose the taste of a the person and their personality and character when you are developing something. I think that also goes into the work field. When you step out of the classroom and you’re pursuing a job, you have an AI assistant that’s doing sort of a task that is a lot better than what you could do, right? It’s far more knowledgeable; it has a lot more free time to be able to spend its moments doing those things. It can do it like that.
Whereas, when it comes to you, you bring something that’s unique and that’s special. And when one business has Claude running its marketing campaign and another business has Claude doing the same thing. You have just Claude doing something really well for both businesses. There’s nothing to distinguish them from each other.
Teaching Students to Critically Think
Danny: So it sounds like when it comes to being in the classroom, you’re trying to get students to think on their own, to have their own thoughts and their own personal ideas, and to be able to flesh that out based off of their own experience and bring that into whatever job they’re pursuing, essentially.
And I think critical thinking and ethical use and knowing which tools to use when can be a force multiplier. And if you don’t have a good grasp of how the tools work or how to use them ethically, you can spin your wheels exponentially as well. So it can take it in different directions.
We know that using AI tools leads us to use less of our brains, and so we like to think that we’re saving time and being more efficient when, actually, the term is “cognitive offloading.” We’re using our brains less to do that critical thinking, and as a result, we’re not learning as much.
Dr. Loverin: When it comes to higher ed and those AI applications, we want to take measures to ensure that students are still learning. A lot of that happens face-to-face. But also a lot of that happens with the difficulty of wrestling with a complex piece of reading, written language that you haven’t seen before, and it’s difficult to understand.
You have to just really chew on that for hours to be able to understand what’s going on there or to face a blank screen as you’re going to write your paper, essay, or your outline. The difficult process of coming up with an argument rather than just saying, hey, could I just get like three ideas for my paper here? All of that hard work and the cognitive load are lost when we do that. Therefore, faculty are struggling to come up with new ways of delivering the same education in an environment where so much information is so easily available.
Jobs and the Future
Danny: I’ve heard a lot about how people are afraid that AI is going to basically take away job opportunities from them. And there’s been that whole conversation ever since robots started being developed in factories. This makes it easier for certain tasks to be done. When you look at today, you’ve heard people say that 80% of the jobs didn’t exist 20 years ago. That might continue down the line.
We don’t know what jobs will exist in the future in hindsight based off of AI. But when it comes to higher education, when it comes to learning and educating yourself based off of that, a student desiring to further their education. What is the benefit of stepping into a classroom and getting that professor-student engagement interaction versus just someone looking up and learning based off of a large learning model?
Dr. Shaw: There’s a lot that happens in the classroom. My own belief is that the classroom can be a really magical place where you have those incredible lightbulb moments. As a professor, you look out to your classroom. You can see—sometimes you can physically see, the lightbulbs go on for students when they make a connection they never thought of before.
The Professor’s PerspectiveÂ
Dr. Loverin: And I’ll add to that, the faculty member brings a unique perspective. They might be really pro-AI; other professors might be really ideologically opposed to AI. They believe it’s bad for us. And so, as students encounter professors with different perspectives, that too stretches them into new ways of thinking that they couldn’t experience just by looking it up on their phone.
I like, there’s a quote by this poet and Anglican priest, Malcolm Guy. I watched him on a podcast, and he’s made a point of this hopeful counterpoint to AI, how there could be some type of benefit even in light of maybe some of the problems that AI might cause.
So he says that this trend, AI developing and causing people to really pull away from actually engaging with hard challenges and questions and stuff like that, is concerning. He says this trend would put a huge premium on in-person experiences. It’s not just an artificial intelligence spewing out knowledge and information to you; it’s another person across the room having dialogue.
Dr. Shaw: That idea of the face-to-face human relationship experience is a place where I think Grace Christian University will stay really unique because of our commitment to that value of transformational relationships. That doesn’t mean that we won’t use AI tools or that we won’t equip students to use those tools. We’re not hearing very much about jobs being replaced anymore as we serve on the National Council. It’s more about jobs that are augmented with AI. Students going into the job market need to be familiar with the tools so they can be ready for that workforce. And it’s up to us to equip them with that.
Dr. Loverin: We have to train our students to be able to engage with it but also have some boundaries and know what this tool is used for. Not how can this tool use me in light of what it’s meant to be used for?
Do’s and Don’ts
Dr. Shaw: I think we crave connection as human beings. We crave belonging. So often we think higher education is about conveying knowledge. And it really isn’t anymore because knowledge is free. Any one of us can pick a topic and get PhD-level knowledge if we’re so motivated and have a good Wi-Fi connection. It’s kind of what Dr. Loverin was talking about being in the same room together. We can say, “Here’s the information, but here’s how you use it, and here’s how you apply it to be who God created you to be.”
Dr. Shaw: Again, with some of these tools, we think, well, that’s the outcome. Tools are not the outcome. Tools are really a process to get to the outcome, in our case, of graduating students who know how to be who God created them to be.
Danny: I was just about to mention it, and you hit it on the spot, because we’re at a conference in Colorado, and we spent a lot of time talking about AI for pastoral ministry. We’re wrestling with the fact of how much time it takes for us to engage with our sermon preparation and all that. I think giving it the thought that AI is offering you more freedom to spend with people because it’s being used as a tool to help you spend more time with other people.
If you’re using it as a crutch to limit the depth and discovery of reading God’s Word or studying or even just taking the easy way out, then maybe you might want to rethink and consider, should I be doing that? In light of that, when it comes to students in college and they’re asking, how do I use AI? What are the do’s and don’ts? What are some advice and some wisdom that you guys can offer to a student that’s wrestling with that question, whereas they don’t want to cheat, but they know they need to use it to know how to use it?
Importance of Asking QuestionsÂ
Dr. Shaw: I encourage my students to use it to ask them questions. Here’s maybe a paper that I’m writing. This is my general topic. What should I be thinking about? Ask the generative AI 10 good questions that would help me refine my topic. As they start interacting, it becomes, “Oh, I hadn’t thought of that.” That’s really good.
Dr. Loverin: One of the don’ts that we’re generating for some student life guidance and also for academic guidance is to say, “Is this a question you could ask your professor?” Is this a question you could ask your RA or the campus pastor? If this is a question that you could bring to a human, maybe you shouldn’t be asking it of the large language model.
We’re avoiding life direction counseling, any kind of spiritual counseling. Especially when you have a whole bunch of PhD-level Bible and theology faculty members at your disposal to go and have a face-to-face conversation. Part of the culture that we want to build is to go have the question with your professor. Have the conversation with your professor so that you can build that relationship rather than shortcutting to the information. We want to distinguish between information that is free and knowledge, which is a little bit different than information. Information, knowledge, and understanding are three separate layers, and we haven’t even talked about wisdom, but you can get knowledge, understanding, and wisdom from a human much more reliably than you can get it from AI.
Privacy and SecurityÂ
Danny: Lastly, what are some questions that you see people aren’t asking in regard to AI use, as well as maybe that I didn’t ask here today, that you feel need to be addressed or talked about?
Dr. Loverin: There’s a great deal to think about when it comes to privacy and security. That’s one of the things that we learned at the national conference: you always have IT officers; you always have people who are working with FERPA compliance, which is federal education privacy compliance. Which is to say we value privacy, and the more we give over to convenience, there’s always a sacrifice of privacy.
For example, the AI model that I use most knows me really well, and it can tell you 10 or 15 things about me. It can tell you a lot more, but it can give you a pretty decent summary of who I am. It knows my kids’ names because I put that in there. We sacrifice privacy for convenience. One of the things that higher ed institutions need to think about is how to protect student data. We’re working with an AI service provider that does protect student data. Our student educational and informational data.
Dr. Loverin: Our student and institutional data are secure. A lot of times people aren’t thinking about where my data is going when I’m putting those prompts in there, when I’m putting those queries, when this large language model company has a pretty good profile of who I am, and is that consistent with my values, with my worldview, and with who I want to be moving into the future?
Grace Christian University’s Approach
AI will continue to change the way we learn, work, and solve problems. Grace Christian University isn’t trying to resist those changes. We want our students to understand these tools, use them wisely, and enter the workforce prepared for what’s ahead. But education has always been about more than information. Information is readily available. Wisdom, discernment, and the ability to apply knowledge well are developed through transformational relationships. That’s why leaders like Dr. Shaw, Dr. Loverin, and our faculty invest so intentionally in every student. They ask hard questions, challenge assumptions, encourage growth, and help students become who God created them to be. Those conversations cannot be replaced by artificial intelligence. At Grace, we believe the greatest transformation still happens when people learn together, wrestle with ideas together, and grow together.
