It’s a special occasion, such as a birthday, graduation, promotion, or anniversary. You decide to celebrate by going out to a fancy restaurant with a close circle of friends, relatives, or loved ones.
In order to choose an appropriate eating establishment, you rely on memory, reputation, and/or the recommendation of someone whose opinion you trust in these matters. Alternatively, or in combination, you consult Google, Yelp, and TripAdvisor reviews. You book your reservation through an app. You receive confirmations, reminders, and sometimes even warnings. This strategy attempts to minimize the risk of a poor choice.
That being said, one must keep in mind that restaurants change. A place you loved five years ago may disappoint today; a restaurant you wrote off once may surprise you later. Risk has always been part of the dining experience. But the corporate restaurant (supported to a lesser extent by review platforms) doesn’t eliminate uncertainty; rather, it redistributes it. Now there is less chance of a spectacularly bad experience, and more certainty of an unremarkable experience. Most restaurant goers know this, and yet they return, hoping this time will be different, failing to accept the reality of what these places have become.
What frustrates me is not any single failure like bad food, slow service, or a noisy room, but the way these failures now arrive as a package, predictably and repeatedly.
First, there is time. Despite securing a reservation, you and your party may unexpectedly find yourself waiting for your seat. Once seated, you wait again for water, for menus, and for drinks and food. Courses arrive unevenly, separated by long, awkward gaps that drain the pleasure from the meal. When you want the check, the wait staff somehow seems to disappear into some back-of-house limbo, only to reappear the moment you’ve clearly overstayed your welcome.
Then there is quality control. Plates arrive lukewarm or cold. Portions are so minimal that they feel more conceptual than filling or nourishing. At the same table, one of your party’s food items is hot, another’s barely warm, and another’s chilled. This isn’t a demonstration of creativity; it’s operational sloppiness.
Next comes psychological pressure. Wine glasses are refilled aggressively, not out of hospitality but strategy. Upselling is constant, including another bottle of wine or alcoholic drink, another side dish, or another add-on. You sense the script. You may even know more about the food and wine than the person serving you. This happens because wait staff work under scripts, metrics, and upsell quotas that tie their earnings to their ability to extract more from each table. The interaction feels transactional, not convivial, because it has been designed that way.
None of this happens by accident.
This is the logic of the corporate restaurant: maximize table turnover, standardize experience, extract value at every step of the process. Hospitality becomes a revenue-optimization problem. The diner is no longer a guest but a unit of throughput.
Finally, there is the sensory assault. The room is loud. Music thumping, voices ricocheting off hard surfaces. Whether this is an intentional strategy to discourage lingering or merely indifference to acoustics hardly matters. The effect is the same. Conversation becomes work. Lingering becomes impossible. The message is clear: eat, pay, leave.
None of this happens by accident.
This is the logic of the corporate restaurant: maximize table turnover, standardize experience, extract value at every interaction point. Hospitality becomes a revenue-optimization problem. The diner is no longer a guest but a unit of throughput.
And the servers and wait staff? They are not the villains here. Being a waiter is an exhausting, precarious job. They are typically underpaid, overmanaged, and increasingly constrained by the very scripts, metrics, and quotas that make the dining experience feel mechanical. Few people choose it as a calling, and fewer still practice it as a craft. In the corporate model, servers are as trapped as diners, forced to prioritize speed and sales over attentiveness and care.
Anthony Bourdain, the celebrity chef and travel documentarian, once observed that most restaurants are terrible businesses, and he was right. Profit margins are thin, costs are high, and failure is a common occurrence. But that reality has pushed many owners toward a false solution: corporatization. The belief that if you optimize hard enough by tightening portions, rushing tables, and automating warmth. But you can’t.
The restaurants that linger in memory are not the most efficient ones. They are the places where time stretched, where food arrived with intention, where no one rushed you out the door, where hospitality felt human rather than programmed.
I hope that the decidedly corporate restaurant is nearing its end. Not because patrons are nostalgic, but because they are tired. Tired of being hustled. Tired of paying more for less. Tired of experiences engineered to look good online but feel hollow in person.
If the corporate restaurant does fall, it won’t be a dramatic event. It will be gradual. Diners will stop choosing it. And in its place, slowly and unevenly, something better may return: restaurants run not to scale endlessly, but to serve well.
That would be worth celebrating.
Photo Credit: Charlie Chaplin from the movie Modern Times.
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2026-01-03-at-10.20.27-AM.png660934Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2026-01-04 05:23:542026-01-04 13:51:02Why Corporate Restaurants Fail
Creative work isn’t just about generating ideas; it’s about knowing which ones to keep and which ones to discard. Similar to what happens in artisanal butcher shops, most ideas don’t survive the grinder. Over the past year, Ross Industries put its provisional blog posts through that process week after week; trimming excess, cutting away what didn’t work, and refining what remained until only the strongest pieces made it to the showcase. What follows are the ten blog posts that resonated most across the various platforms on which this blog appears.
Vincenzo Ruggiero was a respected criminologist, influential scholar of political crime and penal abolitionism, and a generous colleague whose rigorous, provocative work shaped the field and deeply influenced my own scholarship. Beyond academia, his generosity and warmth were evident in years of shared conversations, meals, and memorable moments at conferences and time spent together in Tuscany. His passing represents a profound loss to criminology and criminal justice, and to the many colleagues, friends, his wife, and daughter whose lives he enriched through his intellect, humanity, and quiet wit.
It has been three decades since Controlling State Crime was published. The book aimed to redirect scholarly attention away from merely identifying state crimes toward the more complex challenge of how to deter, prevent, and control them. While the field has grown—particularly around resistance and crimes of the powerful—I argue that effective control remains the central, unresolved challenge. The anniversary offered an opportunity to revisit these arguments in light of contemporary political developments that make the book’s core questions very urgent.
Because the academic study of graffiti and street art is highly interdisciplinary, lacks dedicated programs, and has no formal home within major scholarly societies, researchers in the field often work in isolation. Since January 2023, John L. Lennon, PhD (University of South Florida), has addressed this gap by organizing a monthly Zoom-based Graffiti and Street Art Group. Scholars from around the world and at all career stages share research, discuss publications, and foster collaborations. Topics vary widely, participants have contributed to special journal issues, and the meet-up has built a sustaining community for an otherwise fragmented field.
My university students are increasingly worried as the Trump administration moves from rhetoric to dismantling federal agencies, programs, and cutting grants, leading to layoffs and the elimination of programs that underpin higher education, raising real fears about the future of the Department of Education and university education. The loss of DOE funding jeopardizes student aid and the stability of public colleges and universities. It also undermines the global competitiveness and prestige of American higher education. Students, faculty, and parents need to be civically engaged. This includes staying informed, advocating, supporting institutions, and voting, because political decisions have concrete consequences and passivity only deepens powerlessness.
During the June 2025 protests in Los Angeles, there was a noticeable increase in anti-ICE graffiti. This activity is part of the city’s long-standing tradition of graffiti and a recurring feature of contemporary political dissent. Concentrated around federal buildings and downtown infrastructure, the largely text-based and confrontational graffiti targeted ICE, President Trump, and local authorities, transforming urban space into a charged visual landscape of resistance. Rather than mere defacement, this work serves as an early-stage form of visual politics, documenting anger, solidarity, and temporary redefinitions of power in public space.
Despite producing scholarship in the field of corrections, I’ve never been comfortable with the term. While it was intended to humanize punishment, it ultimately obscures the realities of incarceration. The system is effective at punishment but largely fails at public safety, deterrence, and rehabilitation, making the idea that people are being “corrected” misleading. I continue to use the term pragmatically—as a widely understood shorthand—while urging readers to remain critical of what the word conceals, especially in a society where crimes of the powerful often go unpunished.
Decades of political rhetoric, media portrayals, and popular culture—now reinforced by Trump’s proposed and enacted policies—have unfairly demonized American inner cities as inherently dangerous. This narrative has fueled suburbanization, weakened urban tax bases, and justified policies that deepen inequality while ignoring structural causes. Such stereotypes oversimplify reality, overlook vibrant and diverse urban communities, and obscure comparable problems in suburban and rural areas. They demand sustained challenge and a more nuanced understanding of city life.
Despite significant investment in prison education, outcomes vary widely because research remains fragmented, methodologically weak, and rarely comparable across programs or countries. I propose creating a global database of correctional education programs and outcomes to identify what works, what doesn’t, and why. Beginning with crowdsourced data and expanding through institutional support, such a platform could replace anecdote with rigor, improve policy decisions, and significantly strengthen rehabilitation efforts worldwide.
This piece argues, somewhat humorously, that academic criminologists are difficult to shop for. They receive free books, are exhausted by true crime, and live with constant tension between theory and practice. Meaningful gifts, I suggest, should acknowledge these contradictions: signed classic texts, police ride-alongs, prison tours led by formerly incarcerated guides, or conference memorabilia that gently pokes fun at academic life. The post concludes with a warning against all true-crime gifts—most criminologists want a break from thinking about crime.
Trump’s second-term rhetoric and policies targeting free speech and DEI initiatives have intensified pressures on U.S. higher education, prompting some scholars to consider leaving for Canada or Europe. But emigrating is far more complex than media narratives suggest. This post outlines major obstacles, including language barriers, immigration hurdles, lower salaries, unfamiliar academic cultures, weak job markets (especially in the humanities), and entrenched local networks that disadvantage outsiders. Overseas academic jobs can be appealing, but they are scarce, competitive, and unstable—realities academics should weigh carefully before uprooting careers and families.
Most ideas at Ross Industries never make it this far. They get cut, trimmed, or sent back through the grinder. The posts above did what creative work must ultimately do: they held up once stripped of excess. As the year ahead takes shape, the process continues. In short, I will be focusing on what’s worth keeping and what should be discarded.
(No animals were harmed in the writing of this blog post.)
Photo Credit
Title: Alfa Modern manual meat grinder
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2025-12-26-at-1.22.13-PM-scaled.png12902560Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2025-12-28 05:26:522025-12-28 05:34:52What Survived The Grinder This Year
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
Why Corporate Restaurants Fail
/by Jeffrey Ian RossIt’s a special occasion, such as a birthday, graduation, promotion, or anniversary. You decide to celebrate by going out to a fancy restaurant with a close circle of friends, relatives, or loved ones.
In order to choose an appropriate eating establishment, you rely on memory, reputation, and/or the recommendation of someone whose opinion you trust in these matters. Alternatively, or in combination, you consult Google, Yelp, and TripAdvisor reviews. You book your reservation through an app. You receive confirmations, reminders, and sometimes even warnings. This strategy attempts to minimize the risk of a poor choice.
That being said, one must keep in mind that restaurants change. A place you loved five years ago may disappoint today; a restaurant you wrote off once may surprise you later. Risk has always been part of the dining experience. But the corporate restaurant (supported to a lesser extent by review platforms) doesn’t eliminate uncertainty; rather, it redistributes it. Now there is less chance of a spectacularly bad experience, and more certainty of an unremarkable experience. Most restaurant goers know this, and yet they return, hoping this time will be different, failing to accept the reality of what these places have become.
What frustrates me is not any single failure like bad food, slow service, or a noisy room, but the way these failures now arrive as a package, predictably and repeatedly.
First, there is time. Despite securing a reservation, you and your party may unexpectedly find yourself waiting for your seat. Once seated, you wait again for water, for menus, and for drinks and food. Courses arrive unevenly, separated by long, awkward gaps that drain the pleasure from the meal. When you want the check, the wait staff somehow seems to disappear into some back-of-house limbo, only to reappear the moment you’ve clearly overstayed your welcome.
Then there is quality control. Plates arrive lukewarm or cold. Portions are so minimal that they feel more conceptual than filling or nourishing. At the same table, one of your party’s food items is hot, another’s barely warm, and another’s chilled. This isn’t a demonstration of creativity; it’s operational sloppiness.
Next comes psychological pressure. Wine glasses are refilled aggressively, not out of hospitality but strategy. Upselling is constant, including another bottle of wine or alcoholic drink, another side dish, or another add-on. You sense the script. You may even know more about the food and wine than the person serving you. This happens because wait staff work under scripts, metrics, and upsell quotas that tie their earnings to their ability to extract more from each table. The interaction feels transactional, not convivial, because it has been designed that way.
None of this happens by accident.
This is the logic of the corporate restaurant: maximize table turnover, standardize experience, extract value at every step of the process. Hospitality becomes a revenue-optimization problem. The diner is no longer a guest but a unit of throughput.
Finally, there is the sensory assault. The room is loud. Music thumping, voices ricocheting off hard surfaces. Whether this is an intentional strategy to discourage lingering or merely indifference to acoustics hardly matters. The effect is the same. Conversation becomes work. Lingering becomes impossible. The message is clear: eat, pay, leave.
None of this happens by accident.
This is the logic of the corporate restaurant: maximize table turnover, standardize experience, extract value at every interaction point. Hospitality becomes a revenue-optimization problem. The diner is no longer a guest but a unit of throughput.
And the servers and wait staff? They are not the villains here. Being a waiter is an exhausting, precarious job. They are typically underpaid, overmanaged, and increasingly constrained by the very scripts, metrics, and quotas that make the dining experience feel mechanical. Few people choose it as a calling, and fewer still practice it as a craft. In the corporate model, servers are as trapped as diners, forced to prioritize speed and sales over attentiveness and care.
Anthony Bourdain, the celebrity chef and travel documentarian, once observed that most restaurants are terrible businesses, and he was right. Profit margins are thin, costs are high, and failure is a common occurrence. But that reality has pushed many owners toward a false solution: corporatization. The belief that if you optimize hard enough by tightening portions, rushing tables, and automating warmth. But you can’t.
The restaurants that linger in memory are not the most efficient ones. They are the places where time stretched, where food arrived with intention, where no one rushed you out the door, where hospitality felt human rather than programmed.
I hope that the decidedly corporate restaurant is nearing its end. Not because patrons are nostalgic, but because they are tired. Tired of being hustled. Tired of paying more for less. Tired of experiences engineered to look good online but feel hollow in person.
If the corporate restaurant does fall, it won’t be a dramatic event. It will be gradual. Diners will stop choosing it. And in its place, slowly and unevenly, something better may return: restaurants run not to scale endlessly, but to serve well.
That would be worth celebrating.
Photo Credit: Charlie Chaplin from the movie Modern Times.
What Survived The Grinder This Year
/by Jeffrey Ian RossCreative work isn’t just about generating ideas; it’s about knowing which ones to keep and which ones to discard. Similar to what happens in artisanal butcher shops, most ideas don’t survive the grinder. Over the past year, Ross Industries put its provisional blog posts through that process week after week; trimming excess, cutting away what didn’t work, and refining what remained until only the strongest pieces made it to the showcase. What follows are the ten blog posts that resonated most across the various platforms on which this blog appears.
10. Good Food, Great Wine, and Unforgettable Conversations: A Tribute to Vincenzo Ruggiero (1951–2024)
Vincenzo Ruggiero was a respected criminologist, influential scholar of political crime and penal abolitionism, and a generous colleague whose rigorous, provocative work shaped the field and deeply influenced my own scholarship. Beyond academia, his generosity and warmth were evident in years of shared conversations, meals, and memorable moments at conferences and time spent together in Tuscany. His passing represents a profound loss to criminology and criminal justice, and to the many colleagues, friends, his wife, and daughter whose lives he enriched through his intellect, humanity, and quiet wit.
9. Reflections on the 30th Anniversary of CONTROLLING STATE CRIME
It has been three decades since Controlling State Crime was published. The book aimed to redirect scholarly attention away from merely identifying state crimes toward the more complex challenge of how to deter, prevent, and control them. While the field has grown—particularly around resistance and crimes of the powerful—I argue that effective control remains the central, unresolved challenge. The anniversary offered an opportunity to revisit these arguments in light of contemporary political developments that make the book’s core questions very urgent.
8. How a Monthly Meet-Up of Graffiti and Street Art Scholars Builds Community
Because the academic study of graffiti and street art is highly interdisciplinary, lacks dedicated programs, and has no formal home within major scholarly societies, researchers in the field often work in isolation. Since January 2023, John L. Lennon, PhD (University of South Florida), has addressed this gap by organizing a monthly Zoom-based Graffiti and Street Art Group. Scholars from around the world and at all career stages share research, discuss publications, and foster collaborations. Topics vary widely, participants have contributed to special journal issues, and the meet-up has built a sustaining community for an otherwise fragmented field.
7. My Students Are Afraid, and They Have Good Reason
My university students are increasingly worried as the Trump administration moves from rhetoric to dismantling federal agencies, programs, and cutting grants, leading to layoffs and the elimination of programs that underpin higher education, raising real fears about the future of the Department of Education and university education. The loss of DOE funding jeopardizes student aid and the stability of public colleges and universities. It also undermines the global competitiveness and prestige of American higher education. Students, faculty, and parents need to be civically engaged. This includes staying informed, advocating, supporting institutions, and voting, because political decisions have concrete consequences and passivity only deepens powerlessness.
6. Reflections on Graffiti From The LA Anti-ICE Protests
During the June 2025 protests in Los Angeles, there was a noticeable increase in anti-ICE graffiti. This activity is part of the city’s long-standing tradition of graffiti and a recurring feature of contemporary political dissent. Concentrated around federal buildings and downtown infrastructure, the largely text-based and confrontational graffiti targeted ICE, President Trump, and local authorities, transforming urban space into a charged visual landscape of resistance. Rather than mere defacement, this work serves as an early-stage form of visual politics, documenting anger, solidarity, and temporary redefinitions of power in public space.
5. Why I Use the Word “Corrections” (Even Though It Makes Me Uneasy)
Despite producing scholarship in the field of corrections, I’ve never been comfortable with the term. While it was intended to humanize punishment, it ultimately obscures the realities of incarceration. The system is effective at punishment but largely fails at public safety, deterrence, and rehabilitation, making the idea that people are being “corrected” misleading. I continue to use the term pragmatically—as a widely understood shorthand—while urging readers to remain critical of what the word conceals, especially in a society where crimes of the powerful often go unpunished.
4. The Never-Ending Demonization of the American Inner City
Decades of political rhetoric, media portrayals, and popular culture—now reinforced by Trump’s proposed and enacted policies—have unfairly demonized American inner cities as inherently dangerous. This narrative has fueled suburbanization, weakened urban tax bases, and justified policies that deepen inequality while ignoring structural causes. Such stereotypes oversimplify reality, overlook vibrant and diverse urban communities, and obscure comparable problems in suburban and rural areas. They demand sustained challenge and a more nuanced understanding of city life.
3. How a Global Database on Prison Education Could Improve Rehabilitation
Despite significant investment in prison education, outcomes vary widely because research remains fragmented, methodologically weak, and rarely comparable across programs or countries. I propose creating a global database of correctional education programs and outcomes to identify what works, what doesn’t, and why. Beginning with crowdsourced data and expanding through institutional support, such a platform could replace anecdote with rigor, improve policy decisions, and significantly strengthen rehabilitation efforts worldwide.
2. What Should You Buy the Academic Criminologist in Your Life
This piece argues, somewhat humorously, that academic criminologists are difficult to shop for. They receive free books, are exhausted by true crime, and live with constant tension between theory and practice. Meaningful gifts, I suggest, should acknowledge these contradictions: signed classic texts, police ride-alongs, prison tours led by formerly incarcerated guides, or conference memorabilia that gently pokes fun at academic life. The post concludes with a warning against all true-crime gifts—most criminologists want a break from thinking about crime.
1. Sobering Thoughts on Academics Considering Leaving the United States
Trump’s second-term rhetoric and policies targeting free speech and DEI initiatives have intensified pressures on U.S. higher education, prompting some scholars to consider leaving for Canada or Europe. But emigrating is far more complex than media narratives suggest. This post outlines major obstacles, including language barriers, immigration hurdles, lower salaries, unfamiliar academic cultures, weak job markets (especially in the humanities), and entrenched local networks that disadvantage outsiders. Overseas academic jobs can be appealing, but they are scarce, competitive, and unstable—realities academics should weigh carefully before uprooting careers and families.
Most ideas at Ross Industries never make it this far. They get cut, trimmed, or sent back through the grinder. The posts above did what creative work must ultimately do: they held up once stripped of excess. As the year ahead takes shape, the process continues. In short, I will be focusing on what’s worth keeping and what should be discarded.
(No animals were harmed in the writing of this blog post.)
Photo Credit
Title: Alfa Modern manual meat grinder
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