In this episode, Priten speaks with Lorin Koch, an educator who has taught across high school, online, and college settings after starting his career in journalism. Koch brings perspective from multiple vantage points—as a classroom teacher navigating AI integration, an online instructor confronting assessment challenges, and a parent of soon-to-be teenagers. Together they explore what happens when students understand the difference between learning and shortcutting but choose the shortcut anyway, and whether responsibility can be taught when the incentive to take a quick way out has never been lower.

Key Takeaways:

• Understanding responsibility is not the same as practicing it. Students conceptually grasp that using AI to do their work for them is wrong, but when faced with pressure to get things done, they often choose the shortcut anyway—suggesting that knowing what you should do doesn't guarantee you'll do it.
• Self-paced, online environments create new accountability problems that have nothing to do with AI. The absence of in-person interaction makes it harder to detect cheating and easier to rationalize it, which means AI hasn't created the problem of student disengagement—it's simply made it more visible and more scalable.
• Your teaching intuition about whether something is AI-generated will become less reliable. As students grow up reading AI-generated text, their own writing will be shaped by those patterns, making it harder for teachers to distinguish between authentic voice and AI assistance based on stylistic markers alone.
• Presenting work through dialogue forces different stakes than submitting text alone. Requiring students to explain their thinking through presentations or discussion boards creates accountability that's harder to fake, even if the source material was AI-generated.
• The gap between high-achieving and struggling students will likely widen because of how students think about time. Students with short-term vision—those thinking about the next 24 hours rather than long-term consequences—are the most vulnerable to AI shortcuts, and they're also the ones who need human attention most.

Lorin Koch is an educator with 21 years experience teaching high school and 3 years as a college instructor of education. He holds an Ed.D. degree from the University of South Carolina. Lorin currently teaches online and in person from Washington state, where he works at Walla Walla University. He also writes and presents on Artificial Intelligence in education, focusing on integrating generative AI into the classroom.