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There’s a lot of doom & gloom around how AI is affecting higher education. To a certain extent, I get it. AI is making some things harder. But I’ve found that AI has in some ways greatly enhanced my teaching. For one, it’s opened up applied activities that weren’t possible before. One example: 🧵

Recently, I used Claude, ElevenLabs, and D-ID to make a budget simulation for my Politics of Public Policy course. In it, the students make a federal budget that aligns with the Trump administration's budget priorities. They had researched the administration's budget positions before class.

The budget wasn't comprehensive. But they did have to make some key decisions all budgeters need to make. All of the numbers in the simulation were real and were pulled from CBO estimates. Deficit projections updated in real time based on students' choices. AI made all of this super easy.

Once they felt like their budget aligned with what the Trump administration is prioritizing, I had the students pause and reflect on the decisions they had just made. We discussed which choices were the hardest. I made it sound like the simulation was over then. But it wasn't!

The draft budget then leaked to the public. An AI generated attack ad from the opposition then played. The attack ads were tailored to their group's specific budget decisions. It mentioned each group by name.

They then had to whip on the fence members. To up the ante, I had AI make (watermarked) videos of conflicted members explaining their positions. Students could then try to persuade these members. I had AI build in noise to make persuasion difficult, but possible.

Students then got a whip count and could make choices of what to do next--e.g., revise the bill, proceed anyway, etc.

Could I have done all of this without AI? Sure. But it would have taken weeks (if not more) focusing on this one class period simulation and only this one simulation.

I was able to put it together with AI's help in a few days. I had to do lots of prompt engineering. But Claude, ElevenLabs, and D-ID made it pretty seamless.

If you are interested, here are the classroom materials you would need to replicate what I did. Link to the budget simulation: johnholbein.org/teaching-act... Accompanying slides (human generated with AI feedback): github.com/johnholbein/... Replication materials: github.com/johnholbein/...

I'm also having a tremendous amount of fun with data visualizations. Here are some I made for my day on Bureaucracy.