#91 Agentagogy: What Learning With AI Actually Requires - with Mark Deschaine

In this episode of Why Distance Learning, Seth, Allyson, and Tami conclude their conversation with Dr. Mark Deschaine — Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Mississippi — with a look at the practical frameworks for building and sustaining institutional knowledge in a period of rapid change. Deschaine traces the Five Cs of digital curation from its origins as a college-level literacy tool to its current life as an organizational knowledge management system, and closes by announcing agentagogy — a forthcoming framework for learning with agentic AI, grounded in the specific role of productive struggle.

Together, Seth, Allyson, Tami, and Mark explore the Five Cs — collect, categorize, critique, conceptualize, circulate — and how they've evolved from individual educator practice into a knowledge management container layered above continuous improvement cycles, allowing organizations to hold onto what they know across staff turnover and structural change. Mark revisits No Child Left Behind's standardization mandate as a case study in the gap between quantitative accountability and qualitative story-telling, and asks whether 30 million individualized stories can ever aggregate into policy — or whether the market is already answering that question by moving outside the system. He drops news that Andreessen Horowitz is building its own AI-driven university, framing it as the clearest signal yet that innovators have stopped waiting for traditional structures to catch up. The conversation closes with two connected ideas: that distance learning, from correspondence courses to TikTok, has always existed outside the formal system — and that agentagogy, the framework Mark is currently developing, asks what happens to learning when the agent is no longer the learner but the AI. His answer is specific: productive struggle is the mechanism learning runs on, and an AI that removes all friction may be training us to stop developing the capacity to do the hard part ourselves.

Key topics:

• Five Cs of digital curation as organizational knowledge management
• Continuous improvement and the Process Improvement Guidelines framework
• No Child Left Behind and the limits of quantitative accountability
• Andreessen Horowitz building an AI-driven university
• Distance learning as always-existing informal practice (TikTok, YouTube, correspondence courses)
• Social learning, Zone of Proximal Development, and the role of productive struggle
• Agentagogy: a framework for learning with agentic AI
• ADIL 34th Annual Conference

Links & Resources:

• "The Five Cs of Digital Curation: Supporting Twenty-First-Century Teaching and Learning" — Deschaine & Sharma, InSight: A Journal of Scholarly Teaching, 2015. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281641256
• "Digital Curation: A Framework to Enhance Adolescent and Adult Literacy Initiatives" — Deschaine & Sharma, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 2016. https://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jaal.523
• ADIL — Association for Distance Education and Independent Learning (34th Annual Conference, online, free for students): https://adeil.org/adeil-34th-annual-conference/
• Journal of Contemporary Research in Education (JCRE): https://egrove.olemiss.edu/jcre/

Guest Bio: Mark E. Deschaine, PhD

Mark Deschaine is a Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Mississippi, where he prepares MA, EdS, EdD, and PhD candidates for school and district leadership roles and serves as editor of the Journal of Contemporary Research in Education. His research focuses on online learning policy, special education in virtual school settings, and differentiated instruction — grounded in a practitioner career spanning building-level principal, special education teacher, and paraprofessional. He is a Research Fellow at Michigan Virtual and a Leadership Team Member for the National Standards for Quality Online Learning.

About the Hosts:

Seth Fleischauer is the founder of Banyan Global Learning and a host of Why Distance Learning, a podcast for education leaders and practitioners making real decisions about how virtual learning gets designed, adopted, and sustained. Through Banyan, he designs live virtual programs that connect K-12 classrooms to global peers and expert facilitators. See https://www.banyangloballearning.com/programs/global-cohorts

Allyson Mitchell and Tami Moehring are co-hosts of Why Distance Learning and members of the team at CILC — the Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration — which connects students to real experts through live virtual field trips and experiences. See https://cilc.org