The COVID pandemic accelerated the adoption of different classroom modalities. One of the most popular was the rise of asynchronous classes. They offered flexibility, reduced commuting, and made it easier for students with jobs or family obligations to complete their degrees. As long as the work was submitted on time, the model largely functioned.
But Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has negatively affected the core assumptions that made this model viable: that submitted work reflects a student’s independent thinking. In asynchronous courses, it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between students’ original work and that created by ChatGPT or other AI programs.
This issue is not primarily a cheating problem. It is a challenge to assess students’ work and their learning adequately. When AI can reliably produce summaries, reflections, and even passable analyses, written assignments lose much of their value as evidence of understanding. When students can simply go to AI and ask it for answers to quizzes, multiple-choice exams, etc., then little learning occurs.
The issue is especially pronounced in content-heavy courses, where instructors want students to understand specific ideas, concepts, or theories. Students may still be engaging with the material, but instructors can no longer be confident that the work they are grading demonstrates understanding and mastery of the subject matter.
Some instructors who teach asynchronous classes have modified the way they assess students’ learning by asking them to write assignments or essays that connect the course content to personal experience. That approach can limit AI use, but it does not work well when instructors want their students to master disciplinary content rather than reflection. Others have experimented with AI-permitted assignments, reframing coursework around prompting or critique. These strategies may be pedagogically interesting, but they do not solve the basic problem of evaluating individual learning in asynchronous environments.
The most reliable alternatives (e.g., oral exams, in-class tests, etc.) reintroduce exactly what asynchronous students thought they were avoiding. They also raise equity concerns for students who live out of state, overseas, or whose schedules make real-time participation difficult.
Higher education now faces a difficult tradeoff. Asynchronous courses expanded access and flexibility, but AI has exposed how weak their assessment models really are. Instructors and the educational institutions they work for will eventually have to choose between preserving convenience and enabling meaningful evaluation of learning. The future of asynchronous education isn’t its elimination, but its use will probably be more limited.
Illustration:
Title: Architecture of a generative AI agent
Creator: Marxav
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/GenAI_Agent.png480744Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2025-12-21 13:42:522025-12-21 13:42:52How AI Has Negatively Affected Asynchronous Learning
The holidays are fast approaching, and with them the annual tradition of buying gifts. Deciding what to purchase for the criminologist in your life can be challenging. As instructors, supervisors, mentors, colleagues, spouses, relatives, and friends, they are often a difficult lot to please.
They already get free books from publishers (mostly texts), and they are deeply tired of true crime. Although some of these suggestions may be more labor-intensive to secure than others, here are a few ideas beyond another Amazon gift card.
A Signed First Edition of Their Favorite Classic Book on Crime
Get them a book written by Cohen, Merton, or Young. Get it signed if you can. Watch them spend the next ASC conference casually showing it off to their homies at the hotel bar. They will be genuinely touched by the lengths you went to secure it, by what it signals about their respect for the canon, and how impressed they think their colleagues will be.
A Ring Doorbell System
Because they study and/or teach about crime all day but frequently live in gated communities or the leafy suburbs, they are probably concerned about package theft. They will present papers on mass incarceration at the morning panel, then check their phone during lunch to see whether that alert was the neighbor’s cat or an actual threat to their property.
Arrange a Police Ride-Along
It’s probably been years since they did a ride-along with the local police department, if they ever did one at all. They talk about “the streets” in classes, cite ethnographies about corner boys, and assign Code of the Street every semester. But the closest they get to the streets these days is taking their dog for a walk, or driving to campus or Whole Foods.
A Prison Tour With Someone Who Is Formerly Incarcerated
Not a warden. Not a “corrections professional.” Someone who did time and can explain what actually happens versus what they have come to believe from reading academic research.
A Framed Map with dots on the locations of the ASC Conferences They Attended
Atlanta four times. Philadelphia three times. Washington twice. They have seen the inside of more Marriott ballrooms than any human should. This gift says: I recognize that you have technically been to lots of major American cities.
A physical copy of Wilson & Kelling’s 1982 Broken Windows Article
They teach it every semester in their Crime and Public Policy seminar. They have relied on summaries for years. But now they might be finally motivated to read the piece without admitting they have never read the original in its entirety.
A Consultation With Someone Who Actually Reduced Crime
Not another academic. Not someone with a theory. Someone who ran a program that worked and has the data to prove it. Watch your criminologist carefully explain why it does not count: there was no randomization, the effect size is too small, or it is not generalizable. They need to be right more than they need solutions. This gift will remind them of that.
What Not to Buy
Anything true-crime related. No documentaries. No podcasts. No theories about who really did it. By the end of the fall semester, academic criminologists are probably tired. They just want to finish grading poorly written term papers and exams, and forget what they do to earn a living for a few weeks.
Photo
Title: Small Gift Boxes
Photographer: Thomas Sienicki
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/Prezenty_EXP_096_ubt.jpg15072313Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2025-12-14 16:23:362025-12-14 22:44:08What Should You Buy The Academic Criminologist in Your Life?
Determining what additional support promotes learning versus what substitutes for skills university students need to develop remains an open question.
The issue isn’t really about the amount of scaffolding instructors provide. It’s about the type. Some forms of support actively build student capacity. This includes detailed rubrics that demystify expectations, sample essays that illustrate strong reasoning, templates that model professional formatting, or prompts that help students assess their own understanding. These tools don’t do the work for students; they make the work more achievable.
Other forms of support are less clearly developmental. Automated deadline reminders provided by learning-management systems fall into this category. Some students find them helpful, particularly those managing complex schedules or navigating college without the benefit of prior models for academic success. But repeated reminders also risk creating dependence rather than building the time-management skills students need both during their academic careers and beyond.
Context matters here. Students arrive at university with very different levels of organizational ability and demands on their time. This is largely a function of prior educational experiences, neurodivergence, work obligations, caregiving responsibilities, and access to support systems. What one student experiences as excessive hand-holding might be an essential structure for another student learning to navigate academic expectations for the first time. A first-generation college student working two jobs faces different organizational challenges than someone whose family provided extracurricular tutors since middle school.
No single approach works for all students. The goal isn’t to withhold support in the name of toughness, but to provide structure that gradually transfers responsibility to students. Early in the semester, more reminders and check-ins might be appropriate. As the term progresses, those can taper off, signaling that students are expected to internalize and track their own obligations.
The medical analogy clarifies part of this tension. Doctors send appointment reminders because missed appointments create direct financial loss. In higher education, a student who misses a deadline doesn’t cost the instructor money. Arguably, it’s one less assignment or final exam to grade. But this framing misses the broader institutional and personal stakes: completion rates, retention metrics, and the students’ own investment in their education all suffer when deadlines slip. The question isn’t whether instructors have an incentive to remind students, but whether doing so serves educational aims.
Ultimately, the most useful scaffolding makes disciplinary thinking and academic processes transparent without doing that thinking for students. An assignment that includes a detailed breakdown of how historians evaluate sources teaches more than one that simply says “analyze your sources.” A rubric that distinguishes between summary and analysis helps students develop critical judgment. A sample outline reveals how arguments build coherently across paragraphs.
Deadline reminders, by contrast, don’t teach students how to plan backward from due dates, estimate how long tasks take, or balance competing priorities. These are skills students need to develop during college, and they matter long after the semester ends. The challenge for instructors is providing enough structure that students can succeed while resisting the impulse to manage students’ time on their behalf.
A well-designed syllabus, clear initial communication, and strategic use of developmental scaffolding can support students without undermining their growth. But here’s what’s at stake: students who never learn to manage their own time don’t just struggle in subsequent courses. They enter workplaces where no supervisor sends reminder emails about project deadlines, where the ability to anticipate, prioritize, and deliver without external prompting determines whether they advance or stall. The question isn’t whether to support students, but whether our support equips them for contexts where that support won’t exist.
Photo
Title: Scaffolding for rehabilitation in Madrid, Spain
Photographer. Felalo
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/Andamio_de_tres_cuerpos_de_Aneur.jpg1024768Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2025-12-07 03:24:532025-12-07 03:35:42What Kind of Scaffolding Should University Instructors Provide?
How AI Has Negatively Affected Asynchronous Learning
/by Jeffrey Ian RossThe COVID pandemic accelerated the adoption of different classroom modalities. One of the most popular was the rise of asynchronous classes. They offered flexibility, reduced commuting, and made it easier for students with jobs or family obligations to complete their degrees. As long as the work was submitted on time, the model largely functioned.
But Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has negatively affected the core assumptions that made this model viable: that submitted work reflects a student’s independent thinking. In asynchronous courses, it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between students’ original work and that created by ChatGPT or other AI programs.
This issue is not primarily a cheating problem. It is a challenge to assess students’ work and their learning adequately. When AI can reliably produce summaries, reflections, and even passable analyses, written assignments lose much of their value as evidence of understanding. When students can simply go to AI and ask it for answers to quizzes, multiple-choice exams, etc., then little learning occurs.
The issue is especially pronounced in content-heavy courses, where instructors want students to understand specific ideas, concepts, or theories. Students may still be engaging with the material, but instructors can no longer be confident that the work they are grading demonstrates understanding and mastery of the subject matter.
Some instructors who teach asynchronous classes have modified the way they assess students’ learning by asking them to write assignments or essays that connect the course content to personal experience. That approach can limit AI use, but it does not work well when instructors want their students to master disciplinary content rather than reflection. Others have experimented with AI-permitted assignments, reframing coursework around prompting or critique. These strategies may be pedagogically interesting, but they do not solve the basic problem of evaluating individual learning in asynchronous environments.
The most reliable alternatives (e.g., oral exams, in-class tests, etc.) reintroduce exactly what asynchronous students thought they were avoiding. They also raise equity concerns for students who live out of state, overseas, or whose schedules make real-time participation difficult.
Higher education now faces a difficult tradeoff. Asynchronous courses expanded access and flexibility, but AI has exposed how weak their assessment models really are. Instructors and the educational institutions they work for will eventually have to choose between preserving convenience and enabling meaningful evaluation of learning. The future of asynchronous education isn’t its elimination, but its use will probably be more limited.
Illustration:
Title: Architecture of a generative AI agent
Creator: Marxav
What Should You Buy The Academic Criminologist in Your Life?
/by Jeffrey Ian RossThe holidays are fast approaching, and with them the annual tradition of buying gifts. Deciding what to purchase for the criminologist in your life can be challenging. As instructors, supervisors, mentors, colleagues, spouses, relatives, and friends, they are often a difficult lot to please.
They already get free books from publishers (mostly texts), and they are deeply tired of true crime. Although some of these suggestions may be more labor-intensive to secure than others, here are a few ideas beyond another Amazon gift card.
A Signed First Edition of Their Favorite Classic Book on Crime
Get them a book written by Cohen, Merton, or Young. Get it signed if you can. Watch them spend the next ASC conference casually showing it off to their homies at the hotel bar. They will be genuinely touched by the lengths you went to secure it, by what it signals about their respect for the canon, and how impressed they think their colleagues will be.
A Ring Doorbell System
Because they study and/or teach about crime all day but frequently live in gated communities or the leafy suburbs, they are probably concerned about package theft. They will present papers on mass incarceration at the morning panel, then check their phone during lunch to see whether that alert was the neighbor’s cat or an actual threat to their property.
Arrange a Police Ride-Along
It’s probably been years since they did a ride-along with the local police department, if they ever did one at all. They talk about “the streets” in classes, cite ethnographies about corner boys, and assign Code of the Street every semester. But the closest they get to the streets these days is taking their dog for a walk, or driving to campus or Whole Foods.
A Prison Tour With Someone Who Is Formerly Incarcerated
Not a warden. Not a “corrections professional.” Someone who did time and can explain what actually happens versus what they have come to believe from reading academic research.
A Framed Map with dots on the locations of the ASC Conferences They Attended
Atlanta four times. Philadelphia three times. Washington twice. They have seen the inside of more Marriott ballrooms than any human should. This gift says: I recognize that you have technically been to lots of major American cities.
A physical copy of Wilson & Kelling’s 1982 Broken Windows Article
They teach it every semester in their Crime and Public Policy seminar. They have relied on summaries for years. But now they might be finally motivated to read the piece without admitting they have never read the original in its entirety.
A Consultation With Someone Who Actually Reduced Crime
Not another academic. Not someone with a theory. Someone who ran a program that worked and has the data to prove it. Watch your criminologist carefully explain why it does not count: there was no randomization, the effect size is too small, or it is not generalizable. They need to be right more than they need solutions. This gift will remind them of that.
What Not to Buy
Anything true-crime related. No documentaries. No podcasts. No theories about who really did it. By the end of the fall semester, academic criminologists are probably tired. They just want to finish grading poorly written term papers and exams, and forget what they do to earn a living for a few weeks.
Photo
Title: Small Gift Boxes
Photographer: Thomas Sienicki
What Kind of Scaffolding Should University Instructors Provide?
/by Jeffrey Ian RossDetermining what additional support promotes learning versus what substitutes for skills university students need to develop remains an open question.
The issue isn’t really about the amount of scaffolding instructors provide. It’s about the type. Some forms of support actively build student capacity. This includes detailed rubrics that demystify expectations, sample essays that illustrate strong reasoning, templates that model professional formatting, or prompts that help students assess their own understanding. These tools don’t do the work for students; they make the work more achievable.
Other forms of support are less clearly developmental. Automated deadline reminders provided by learning-management systems fall into this category. Some students find them helpful, particularly those managing complex schedules or navigating college without the benefit of prior models for academic success. But repeated reminders also risk creating dependence rather than building the time-management skills students need both during their academic careers and beyond.
Context matters here. Students arrive at university with very different levels of organizational ability and demands on their time. This is largely a function of prior educational experiences, neurodivergence, work obligations, caregiving responsibilities, and access to support systems. What one student experiences as excessive hand-holding might be an essential structure for another student learning to navigate academic expectations for the first time. A first-generation college student working two jobs faces different organizational challenges than someone whose family provided extracurricular tutors since middle school.
No single approach works for all students. The goal isn’t to withhold support in the name of toughness, but to provide structure that gradually transfers responsibility to students. Early in the semester, more reminders and check-ins might be appropriate. As the term progresses, those can taper off, signaling that students are expected to internalize and track their own obligations.
The medical analogy clarifies part of this tension. Doctors send appointment reminders because missed appointments create direct financial loss. In higher education, a student who misses a deadline doesn’t cost the instructor money. Arguably, it’s one less assignment or final exam to grade. But this framing misses the broader institutional and personal stakes: completion rates, retention metrics, and the students’ own investment in their education all suffer when deadlines slip. The question isn’t whether instructors have an incentive to remind students, but whether doing so serves educational aims.
Ultimately, the most useful scaffolding makes disciplinary thinking and academic processes transparent without doing that thinking for students. An assignment that includes a detailed breakdown of how historians evaluate sources teaches more than one that simply says “analyze your sources.” A rubric that distinguishes between summary and analysis helps students develop critical judgment. A sample outline reveals how arguments build coherently across paragraphs.
Deadline reminders, by contrast, don’t teach students how to plan backward from due dates, estimate how long tasks take, or balance competing priorities. These are skills students need to develop during college, and they matter long after the semester ends. The challenge for instructors is providing enough structure that students can succeed while resisting the impulse to manage students’ time on their behalf.
A well-designed syllabus, clear initial communication, and strategic use of developmental scaffolding can support students without undermining their growth. But here’s what’s at stake: students who never learn to manage their own time don’t just struggle in subsequent courses. They enter workplaces where no supervisor sends reminder emails about project deadlines, where the ability to anticipate, prioritize, and deliver without external prompting determines whether they advance or stall. The question isn’t whether to support students, but whether our support equips them for contexts where that support won’t exist.
Photo
Title: Scaffolding for rehabilitation in Madrid, Spain
Photographer. Felalo