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James Genone has spent his career at the meeting point of two fields most people keep apart: philosophy and cognitive science on one side, education technology on the other. In this episode, Northeastern University's Senior Vice Chancellor for Learning Strategy joins Ryan Lufkin and Melissa Loble to argue that the design behind a tool decides whether AI deepens learning or just does the thinking for students.
His test is simple: does the AI behave the way a good human tutor would?
Drawing on his founding work at Minerva University, his product role at Atypical AI, and his current advising with the Digital Education Council, Collage AI, and SkillBench, James lays out what learning science actually asks of these tools and where institutions keep going wrong.
In this episode:
- The tutor test James applies to any AI assistant: a good tutor never writes the student's essay, and the AI shouldn't either
- Why engagement is the real engine of learning, and how connecting a subject to what a student cares about drives the attention that learning depends on
- His case against grades, built on an investor analogy: you can't tell two companies apart if all you see is a letter grade, and a transcript does the same thing to students
- The two ways institutions keep getting AI adoption wrong, either leaving faculty to fend for themselves or handing down blanket mandates, and the scaffolded, faculty-led approach he'd put in their place
