Time on Task: Critical Thinking

November 21, 2025

I recommend listening to this week’s College Matters podcast, Jack had Beth McMurtrie on to their show this week. Beth is one of the Chronicle’s teaching superstars. Their conversation this week on artificial intelligence was right on the money!

They had a nice discussion about artificial intelligence in colleges. It was something like:

What I want as a professor is time on task critical thinking.

What students want his task completion efficiency.

We assess student successful completion of tasks.

This doesn’t add up

In the Jurassic pre-Internet education era we assessed whether or not students can successfully complete a task. For sure students could cheat or hire somebody to write their essay for them, but there was a lot of risk and it was fairly difficult. However, in modern times, and especially with artificial intelligence, students can use tools to make their successful completion of tasks easier. So the students are successfully competing tasks and efficently too, with the help of ChatGPT.

The issue isn’t we aren’t assessing time on task critical thinking AND we aren’t making students work long enough.

More Time on Task?

Jobs, internships, and clubs are important. But students are in college to learn. Students are supposed to spent 3 hours outside of class for every 1 contact hour. That means that a full time students (45 hours for a 15 credits) should be FULL TIME! We are not making the students work out of class. We are failing.

We need to find new ways to get students to think critically outside of the classroom.

Project Labs

This semester, I am consummed with my project lab course. Its been really hard to help all of the students with their indiviual projects. Unlike a lecture where I control all the information, in a project lab, the students do what’s interesting to them and I do my best to guide their process. Soooo it is almost impossible to prepare. I am being challenged to the max everyclass.

But students are learning a ton on their projects and are having a lot of fun doing so. The are working hard, learning, and thinking deeply. We are winning on Time on Task Crtiical Thinking.

I am so happy that Sean Bentley came up with adding this classes into our curriculum.

AI in the classroom

I have been running towards using AI in the classroom this semester. Go with it. Do more. Point out all the traps and how I use it. We can’t assume our students know what they are doing. Even still, I was surprised when my students in my first year senimar asked to be taught how to use AI. So…

On Monday: History of computing, how AI works under the hood. I explained how nueral networks and large langaugae models work (to the best of my ability).

On Wednesday: How to use AI to help folks converse with , study, create flash cards, turn books into podcasts, and make rap videos. We made Poop water park! Seriously funny.