Adjunct Intelligence: AI + HE

Adjunct Intelligence
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Adjunct Intelligence: Ai and the future of Higher EducationStay ahead of the AI revolution transforming education with hosts Dale, tech enthusiast and AI Nerd, and Nick McIntosh, Learning Futurist.This weekly espresso shot delivers essential AI insights for educators, administrators, and learning professionals navigating the rapidly evolving landscape of higher education.Each episode brings you a concise rundown of breaking AI developments impacting education, followed by deep dives into cutting-edge research, emerging tools, and practical applications that Dale and Nick are implementing in their own work. From classroom innovations to institutional strategy, discover how AI is reshaping teaching, learning, and educational operations.Whether you're working in the classroom, on the the classroom a university lecturer, TAFE teacher, or simply passionate about the future of learning, "Adjunct Intelligence" equips you with the knowledge to transform disruption into opportunity. Business casual, occasionally humorous, but always informative.

  1. 1D AGO

    The AI Tutor Flopped, So They Built the AI University

    Khan Academy's AI tutor Khanmigo quietly flopped — students didn't use it, teachers walked away, and Khan Academy's own chief learning officer admitted she isn't seeing the revolution she was promised. So instead of fixing the tutor, Khan Academy, TED and ETS announced a new institution: the Khan TED Institute, a sub-$10,000 AI-era degree shaped with corporate partners including Google, Microsoft and McKinsey — and not a single university. Dale Leszczynski and Nick McIntosh work through what it means when the companies selling AI tools also build the credentials that certify them, why student resistance to imposed AI is rational rather than technophobic, and what a healthier alternative actually looks like in practice. [00:00] — The clinical trials analogy [02:30] — Steelmanning the skills gap  [05:20] — Who's at the founding table  [06:00] — The South Korea precedent  [07:41] — Enclosure, not disruption  [10:03] — The always-on chatbot  [11:30] — Why students push back  [15:40] — Who steers the technology  [20:05] — The broken career ladder  [24:35] — Why universities can't leave 🎙️ Adjunct Intelligence is the weekly briefing for higher-ed professionals who want AI as a cheat code—not a headache. Every episode: • Real tests of AI tools in education and professional workflows • Fast, Monday-morning actions you can actually try • Clear signal through the noise (no hype, no jargon) 👉 Subscribe on [YouTube] | [Apple Podcasts] | [Spotify] 👉 Share this with a colleague who still says “I’ll figure AI out later” 👉 Join the conversation on LinkedIn with #AdjunctIntelligence Stay curious. Stay intelligent. Stay the human in the loop.

    27 min

  2. MAY 10

    The Legitimacy Winter: Why AI's Real Problem Isn't Capability

    The AI trust story isn't what most people think it is. In this episode, Dale and Nick work through a cluster of signals — a dramatic enterprise market share reversal, a 50-point gap between expert and public confidence in AI, a $17 million university contract already under faculty petition, and teenagers harassing delivery robots on TikTok — and argue they're all pointing at the same thing: capability isn't the problem anymore. Legitimacy is. From procurement traps and surveillance affordances in institutional AI, to a thought experiment about social license and AI rights, this is the episode for anyone trying to make sense of what "responsible adoption" actually looks like when the ground is moving under your feet. [00:00] — Violence, brand aversion, data [00:46] — Welcome and framing [01:47] — Enterprise market flips to Anthropic [03:29] — Identity signal, not capability signal [05:09] — Pentagon, OpenAI, Anthropic diverge [06:47] — Southeast Asia: tool-first, not brand-first [07:17] — Stanford AI Index 2026 trust gap [08:25] — Anthropic drops safety pledge [09:46] — Should expert confidence carry more weight? [12:42] — CSU's $17M OpenAI contract [13:37] — Faculty petition: don't renew it [ 14:38] — Procurement cycles vs lab timelines [15:23] — What do you actually anchor on? [16:47] — ASU's ethics layer approach [18:42] — 82% use consumer AI anyway [19:38] — Why university platforms always die [20:46] — Institutional AI as surveillance affordance [22:42] — Legitimacy winter, not capability winter [24:13] — Clanker as cultural leading indicator [25:18] — AI tribal sorting in the classroom [27:14] — The AI rights question [28:00] — Social license thought experiment [29:08] — Social license is the whole game [31:15] — The educator's role in a trust winter 🎙️ Adjunct Intelligence is the weekly briefing for higher-ed professionals who want AI as a cheat code—not a headache. Every episode: • Real tests of AI tools in education and professional workflows • Fast, Monday-morning actions you can actually try • Clear signal through the noise (no hype, no jargon) 👉 Subscribe on [YouTube] | [Apple Podcasts] | [Spotify] 👉 Share this with a colleague who still says “I’ll figure AI out later” 👉 Join the conversation on LinkedIn with #AdjunctIntelligence Stay curious. Stay intelligent. Stay the human in the loop.

    33 min

  3. MAY 3

    Mollie Dollinger on the HE Decay Narrative — and Why It's Wrong

    Professor Mollie Dollinger, Director of Assessment 2030 at Curtin University, joins Dale and Nick to push back on the story dominating coverage of higher education — that universities are in decay, students are cheating en masse, and no one inside the sector knows what to do about AI. The conversation covers TEQSA's voluntary action plans, why 65% of students worry about their own cognitive development, what shadow IT says about overworked staff, why society no longer trusts graduates, burnout research, the Einstein agent thought experiment, and the argument that the academy has centuries of expertise the tech industry is currently ignoring. [00:00] — The decay narrative pushback  [05:00] — Brookings student cognitive concerns  [07:30] — Why the bad story sticks  [09:50] — What's actually happening inside  [13:30] — Shadow IT and unapproved tools  [16:00] — Chatbots and AI tutors  [19:55] — Student success beyond jobs  [28:46] — Burnout and admin burden  [33:35] — Redesigning learning around AI  [41:12] — Who counts as expert 🎙️ Adjunct Intelligence is the weekly briefing for higher-ed professionals who want AI as a cheat code—not a headache. Every episode: • Real tests of AI tools in education and professional workflows • Fast, Monday-morning actions you can actually try • Clear signal through the noise (no hype, no jargon) 👉 Subscribe on [YouTube] | [Apple Podcasts] | [Spotify] 👉 Share this with a colleague who still says “I’ll figure AI out later” 👉 Join the conversation on LinkedIn with #AdjunctIntelligence Stay curious. Stay intelligent. Stay the human in the loop.

    39 min

  4. APR 26

    The Closed Loop: AI Companies as Education Researchers

    In March 2026, OpenAI quietly published a measurement suite for how AI affects student learning. The data flows straight back into OpenAI's model development pipeline. Three AI labs released studies in the same month, and the pattern matters more than the individual papers. Dale and Nick examine OpenAI's Learning Outcomes Measurement Suite, Anthropic's 81,000-person qualitative study (where AI conducted the interviews, classified the responses, and pulled the quotes), Anthropic's labour displacement research using its own usage logs, and Google DeepMind's cognitive taxonomy for AGI. The throughline: the companies building the most consequential technology of our lifetime are also defining how learning, work, and intelligence get measured. A frank conversation about structural conflicts of interest, what universities should be doing about it, and why on current evidence they probably won't. [00:00] — Three studies, one pattern [02:30] — Watchmen and vendor capture [05:00] — Inside the measurement suite [06:30] — The closed-loop problem [09:30] — 81,000 interviews by AI [11:00] — Cognitive atrophy among educators [15:00] — Observed exposure, broken ladder [17:00] — Disclosure versus actual accountability [19:30] — A cognitive taxonomy lands [22:00] — Three options, none easy 🎙️ Adjunct Intelligence is the weekly briefing for higher-ed professionals who want AI as a cheat code—not a headache. Every episode: • Real tests of AI tools in education and professional workflows • Fast, Monday-morning actions you can actually try • Clear signal through the noise (no hype, no jargon) 👉 Subscribe on [YouTube] | [Apple Podcasts] | [Spotify] 👉 Share this with a colleague who still says “I’ll figure AI out later” 👉 Join the conversation on LinkedIn with #AdjunctIntelligence Stay curious. Stay intelligent. Stay the human in the loop.

    27 min

  5. APR 19

    The data is in: Using AI impacts the classroom

    Dale changes his mind on air. For two years he argued that purpose-built educational AI tools — the "ChatGPT wrappers" that flooded Product Hunt after 2023 — were margin extraction, soon to be steamrolled by the foundation models underneath. A pile of new evidence has forced a rewrite. This episode walks through the OECD's Digital Education Outlook 2026, the Turkey maths randomised controlled trial showing raw GPT-4 users scored 17% worse on closed-book exams, the neuroscience work on cognitive offloading, the Australian Framework's procurement standard, and the UK's "progressive disclosure" mandate. The pedagogy layer isn't decoration. It's where learning either happens or doesn't. [00:00] — A confession about wrappers [02:30] — Flashback to 2023's wrapper panic [05:04] — A billion-dollar pivot, explained [07:52] — The Turkey maths study [10:16] — Cognitive offloading on college essays [11:04] — Revisiting the two sigma problem [12:47] — What good guardrails actually do [16:39] — Australia, UK, EU tighten rules [19:51] — What educators should ask vendors [23:16] — Field note worth trying 🎙️ Adjunct Intelligence is the weekly briefing for higher-ed professionals who want AI as a cheat code—not a headache. Every episode: • Real tests of AI tools in education and professional workflows • Fast, Monday-morning actions you can actually try • Clear signal through the noise (no hype, no jargon) 👉 Subscribe on [YouTube] | [Apple Podcasts] | [Spotify] 👉 Share this with a colleague who still says “I’ll figure AI out later” 👉 Join the conversation on LinkedIn with #AdjunctIntelligence Stay curious. Stay intelligent. Stay the human in the loop.

    26 min

  6. APR 12

    The AI Energy conversation just got some real data.

    Dale and Nick tackle the AI energy debate head-on, armed with Google's first transparent energy report showing a single AI query uses about 0.24 watt hours — a microwave running for one second. Drawing on Hannah Ritchie's analysis from Our World in Data, the Epoch AI research group, and Stanford's inference cost data, they argue that individual guilt over AI use is not only misplaced but actively useful to the companies making the real infrastructure decisions. The episode covers water usage myths, the BP carbon footprint parallel, Jevons paradox, the case for right-sized models in education, and why the better question isn't "how much does AI cost?" but "what does it enable?" [00:00] — The energy narrative you've heard [02:04] — Episode introduction [03:00] — Google's transparent energy report [04:12] — Hannah Ritchie's individual footprint math [05:00] — Kettles, washing machines, and query comparisons [05:27] — The "please and thank you" cost reframed [06:14] — Crypto as the real energy vampire [06:38] — 33x efficiency gain in 12 months [08:21] — Energy used to block AI adoption [09:03] — Jevons paradox: individual vs aggregate [11:11] — Water usage myths debunked [12:20] — BP's carbon footprint playbook [13:52] — Not all AI use is worth it [14:30] — Training costs: $43K vs $500 billion [16:07] — You don't need an F1 car for groceries [18:08] — Air conditioning uses 10% of global electricity [19:14] — What AI enables matters more than what it costs [21:00] — Why education shouldn't sit this out 🎙️ Adjunct Intelligence is the weekly briefing for higher-ed professionals who want AI as a cheat code—not a headache. Every episode: • Real tests of AI tools in education and professional workflows • Fast, Monday-morning actions you can actually try • Clear signal through the noise (no hype, no jargon) 👉 Subscribe on [YouTube] | [Apple Podcasts] | [Spotify] 👉 Share this with a colleague who still says “I’ll figure AI out later” 👉 Join the conversation on LinkedIn with #AdjunctIntelligence Stay curious. Stay intelligent. Stay the human in the loop.

    23 min

  7. APR 5

    Bonus Episode: Being Human in an AI World (feat. Better Student Leaders)

    Nick and Dale are on holidays, but we're dropping a bonus episode — Dale's recent guest appearance on the Better Student Leaders podcast with Josh. They dig into the "alien has landed" metaphor, why we've gone tribal on AI so fast, the shame creeping into how people talk about using it, a practical "line down the middle of the page" framework for deciding what AI should and shouldn't do, cyborgs versus centaurs, and what it takes for universities to be deliberate about AI rather than just letting it happen. Normal programming back next week. 🎙️ Adjunct Intelligence is the weekly briefing for higher-ed professionals who want AI as a cheat code—not a headache. Every episode: • Real tests of AI tools in education and professional workflows • Fast, Monday-morning actions you can actually try • Clear signal through the noise (no hype, no jargon) 👉 Subscribe on [YouTube] | [Apple Podcasts] | [Spotify] 👉 Share this with a colleague who still says “I’ll figure AI out later” 👉 Join the conversation on LinkedIn with #AdjunctIntelligence Stay curious. Stay intelligent. Stay the human in the loop.

    36 min

  8. MAR 29

    The Good News Episode: AI Breakthroughs That Actually Happened

    AI is doing extraordinary things that most people never hear about because the algorithm rewards anxiety over wonder. In this episode, the hosts go full optimism — running through real, peer-reviewed AI breakthroughs across weather forecasting, scientific research, medicine, creativity, and global access. From a two-person team outperforming IPCC climate models on a desktop computer, to an AI stethoscope detecting heart failure 2.3 times more effectively in NHS clinics, to a WhatsApp-based AI tutor reaching 4 million students across sub-Saharan Africa — these are the stories that got buried beneath the doom cycle. The episode explores what each breakthrough means for education: not just what AI can do, but who gets to use it, and what we should be teaching as a result. [00:00] — Bad news dominates AI coverage  [03:10] — AI weather models slash energy  [05:40] — Hurricane warning gains three days  [07:55] — Thousand-year climate in hours [10:29] — AI recommends overlooked cancer drug  [14:41] — Maths proof verified in days  [18:34] — Brain implant restores ALS speech  [22:14] — $12/month filmmaker wins festival  [26:12] — WhatsApp tutor reaches millions globally  [35:43] — AI stethoscope detects heart failure Links to resources available: https://www.adjunctintelligence.com/blog/let-the-good-times-roll 🎙️ Adjunct Intelligence is the weekly briefing for higher-ed professionals who want AI as a cheat code—not a headache. Every episode: • Real tests of AI tools in education and professional workflows • Fast, Monday-morning actions you can actually try • Clear signal through the noise (no hype, no jargon) 👉 Subscribe on [YouTube] | [Apple Podcasts] | [Spotify] 👉 Share this with a colleague who still says “I’ll figure AI out later” 👉 Join the conversation on LinkedIn with #AdjunctIntelligence Stay curious. Stay intelligent. Stay the human in the loop.

    43 min
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About

Adjunct Intelligence: Ai and the future of Higher EducationStay ahead of the AI revolution transforming education with hosts Dale, tech enthusiast and AI Nerd, and Nick McIntosh, Learning Futurist.This weekly espresso shot delivers essential AI insights for educators, administrators, and learning professionals navigating the rapidly evolving landscape of higher education.Each episode brings you a concise rundown of breaking AI developments impacting education, followed by deep dives into cutting-edge research, emerging tools, and practical applications that Dale and Nick are implementing in their own work. From classroom innovations to institutional strategy, discover how AI is reshaping teaching, learning, and educational operations.Whether you're working in the classroom, on the the classroom a university lecturer, TAFE teacher, or simply passionate about the future of learning, "Adjunct Intelligence" equips you with the knowledge to transform disruption into opportunity. Business casual, occasionally humorous, but always informative.

Information

  • Creator
    Adjunct Intelligence
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    34
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Adjunct Intelligence: AI + HE
  • Show Website
    Adjunct Intelligence: AI + HE

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