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Interview Series

An interview with Adam Hodges

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Adam Hodges

Adam Hodges, PhD – Linguistics Professor at University of Colorado Boulder and Learning Design Strategist

In this interview

In this interview, I had the pleasure of speaking with Adam Hodges, PhD, a Learning Design Strategist and Education Consultant. Adam’s journey into AI in education began as an English professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s campus in Qatar, where he explored flipped classrooms and online learning. He later collaborated with Coursera to develop large-scale online programs. In our conversation, Adam discusses how generative AI is transforming curriculum design and student support—helping educators work more efficiently while keeping human connection at the core of teaching.

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Could you share your background and how you got started with AI in education?

My background is in higher education and my interest in online education began while spending about five years as an English professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s campus in Doha, Qatar. Not only did that allow me to witness firsthand how university education is expanding beyond traditional campuses to reach learners worldwide, but I began experimenting with a “flipped classroom” approach while teaching. That led me toward more explorations of online learning platforms. When I returned to the US, I started working with the teaching and learning team at Coursera to develop pedagogy best practices and train course teams building online courses. Since the release of ChatGPT just over a few years ago, I’ve been eagerly experimenting with various AI tools for day-to-day tasks in curriculum design and course construction as the technology has been rapidly advancing.

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Why do you believe generative AI is such a “game changer” for education?

AI can effectively provide each learner an individual tutor. In 1984, educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom wrote an influential paper called “The 2 Sigma Problem” where he showed “the average student under tutoring was about two standard deviations [sigmas] above the average” level of achievement of students in a traditional class. Before and since then, educators have been trying to figure out how to provide more individualized learning at scale — to effectively mimic the effectiveness of one-on-one tutoring. “At scale” is key because not everyone can afford to hire their own personal teacher. Online education in and of itself couldn’t solve the dilemma because many early MOOCs — massive open online courses — simply adopted the passive teaching techniques found in traditional classrooms. But now with generative AI, we’re at a point where we can actually provide learners not only with more active learning experiences, but effectively provide an individual tutor that accompanies learners throughout their learning journey. And that’s just from the perspective of the learner. For the educator, generative AI can provide you with a cadre of teaching assistants to help prepare lessons, develop more personalized teaching materials, and on and on. Generative AI helps multiply any single educator’s creativity and helps them become that much more effective in their craft.

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Can you give a concrete example of how you integrate AI into curriculum development?

Before generative AI, we would hold multi-day workshops with subject matter experts to build detailed course outlines for a learning program. The instructors and subject matter experts supplied their domain knowledge and learning designers provided pedagogy support. It took time to gather the expert knowledge and organize it into effective outlines based on the requirements of a particular program. Now with generative AI, rather than starting with a blank slate, the AI tool can be given context that includes program requirements and desired outcomes, and it can generate detailed course outlines that adhere to our instructional design approach. Now, that acts as the starting point. Then we get together with the instructors and subject matter experts to revise and edit the drafts — refining the approach and checking for accuracy to ensure alignment with the program goals. This saves substantial time during the initial design phase, allowing us to move more quickly into content creation

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Some educators worry that AI might replace them. How do you address that concern?

Educators aren’t going anywhere. As highlighted in the curriculum development example, we still need instructors and subject matter experts to decide what topics are taught and how they are delivered — to put their stamp of expertise on the learning experiences and to ensure the lessons are accurate, engaging, and aligned with learner needs. Learners enroll in courses because they trust human expertise and personal insight. AI can’t replicate the nuanced understanding of a professor who’s spent years researching a subject or the human mentorship aspect of teaching. My hope is that, as educators embrace AI as a powerful team of teaching assistants, they will be able to spend more time on the human interaction side of teaching.

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You mentioned “day-to-day tasks” getting easier with AI. What does that look like in practice?

Take assignment creation as an example. Let’s say you need to put together a quiz based on your lecture notes or a reading assignment. You can provide the generative AI tool with the source material and ask it to generate a list of potential questions. Now, rather than writing the quiz from scratch, you have a draft you can edit for clarity, accuracy, and difficulty level. But the applications become even more interesting as you start to develop project-based assignments that are central to hands-on learning. Say you want learners to critically analyze a series of case studies. You might have a few examples you’ve been using in the past, but now generative AI can help you spin off several more that you can personalize based on the interests of the students in your classes. Whether creating assignments or developing engaging lessons, generative AI functions as a team of collaborators to help you put your creative vision into practice — and in much less time than it would take if you had to develop everything on your own.

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What about using AI directly with students—any favorite integrations there?

I think the advancement in AI tutors is incredibly exciting, especially for asynchronous online courses. Khan Academy has Khanmigo and Coursera has Coursera Coach — these are AI tools that accompany learners on their learning journey. Learners can ask questions about a lesson just as they would ask a teacher, and the AI tutor pulls from the course knowledge base to provide individualized responses. Coursera has gone a step further to integrate Coursera Coach directly into the learning path, allowing course instructors to create immersive conversation-based activities that engage learners in active learning. I think we’ll start to see more of these types of personalized experiences, including for role-playing scenarios. Say you’re taking a program to become a back-end engineer. AI can simulate a job interview or client scenario, offering real-time feedback. It’s a safe environment where you can practice and build confidence as a learner.

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How do you ensure the AI’s output is accurate and ethically sound?

The key is keeping a human in the loop. During curriculum development or content creation, it’s important to have human experts vet anything provided by your generative AI assistants. In tutoring applications, such as those we previously discussed, it’s important to delimit the knowledge base that the AI tutors draw from while setting appropriate guardrails to keep the conversation within bounds of the intended learning outcomes. One approach is to have AI tutors adopt a Socratic approach, where the AI helps learners think through their own questions to come up with the answer themselves. This ensures learners still engage in the struggle of learning, which is crucial for retention and understanding. On the larger issue of generative AI accuracy, it’s been amazing to see how far generative AI models have come just in the last few years — especially when you’re delimiting the source material that you want the generative AI tool to work with. Hallucinations and accuracy concerns are becoming less of an issue with newer models. But it will always be important to keep in mind that LLMs lack knowledge representation, requiring a critically engaged human on the other end to interpret their output.

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What’s your advice for educators just starting to explore AI in the classroom?

I recommend taking some short courses from Coursera’s Generative AI Academy, including Jules White’s courses on prompt engineering and generative AI for educators. He’s a computer science professor at Vanderbilt University who is deeply engaged in educational applications of AI. Coursera’s co-founder, Andrew Ng, also has some great courses, including Generative AI for Everyone. Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, is another good resource. He studies AI on work, entrepreneurship, and education, and he writes a newsletter on Substack. But the most important step is to simply start playing around with as many AI tools as you can access. Try out a few easy applications to begin with, such as generating some quiz questions based on source material. Get familiar with the basics of prompt engineering and keep experimenting with your approaches as the models continue to advance. Stay vigilant about bias and inaccuracies; double-check everything. And most importantly, remember that these tools are here to support, not supplant, your role as an educator. When used thoughtfully, AI can free you up to focus on what humans do best: guiding, mentoring, and inspiring students.

Final Thoughts

Adam Hodges’s experience shows that AI can seamlessly blend into both course creation and direct student support, making education more flexible, innovative, and personalized. From scoping out curriculums to providing 24/7 tutoring, generative AI is revolutionizing the day-to-day tasks of teaching. However, the real power lies in combining AI’s speed and efficiency with the expertise and empathy only a human educator can provide.

As Adam puts it:

“AI shouldn’t be seen as a replacement for human intelligence, but as a tool that can complement human intelligence and creativity. Try to figure out the ways you can leverage this tool to automate the repetitive tasks associated with your current job and elevate the more interesting, human-oriented aspects that you’d like to spend more time on. That will help you evolve in your career as technology changes the nature of your job role.”

Embracing AI isn’t about losing the human touch; it’s about amplifying it—so educators can spend less time on routine tasks and more time cultivating the deeper connections that truly shape a student’s journey.

About Adam Hodges

Adam Hodges, PhD, is a Learning Design Strategist and Education Consultant based in Boulder, Colorado. With deep expertise in sociocultural linguistics and instructional design, Adam has partnered with Coursera and leading institutions to develop professional certificates and online courses that serve millions of learners. He is also an adjunct assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Colorado Boulder.

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