Academic Integrity in the AI Era: A Conversation with Ian McCullough

Elana Leoni:

Hello and welcome to All Things Marketing And Education. My name is Elana Leoni and I've devoted my career to helping education brands build their brand awareness and engagement. Each week I sit down with educators, EdTech entrepreneurs, and experts in educational marketing and community building. All of them will share their successes and failures using social media, inbound marketing, or content marketing, and community building. I'm excited to guide you on your journey to transform your marketing efforts into something that provides consistent value and ultimately improves the lives of your audience. And now let's jump right into today's episode.

Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of All Things Marketing And Education. This episode I got to sit down with Ian McCullough. He is the Director of Marketing for Global Secondary Education at Turnitin. And Ian isn't your typical Director of Marketing. You can tell immediately that this man comes from Broadway. He has a boisterous voice, he is passionate about education in his job, and he's just a funny human. A side note of how I know Ian is I met him through a mutual friend in the Haas Business School where I got my MBA, Monica Brown. So we talk about her a little bit and it's just fun to be able to have these lighthearted conversations, but really dive deep into things that are quite timely. And with Ian in particular, we talk about ChatGPT and AI writing, and specifically how do we deal and navigate with all of these tools and tech innovation in the world of academic integrity and plagiarism.

So he dives into all the nooks and crannies around that. If you're an educator, this is an interesting one because he talks about a little bit of where plagiarism came from, and some tips and tricks to understand is this plagiarized or not. So lots of fun things to unpack in here. But before we get into the episode, a little bit more about Ian. So Ian McCullough has built a 20 plus year career in educational and creative technology. He has been in consumer marketing, corporate training, institutional market. He's led the North American K-12 marketing team as the academic integrity leader for Turnitin for the past five years. And this year, he has seen his team's scope expand to bring greater focus to serve secondary institutions globally. I always am curious about leaders that are expanding EdTech in a global perspective too, and he brings a little bit of that in the episode. So enjoy this episode about all things ChatGPT, AI writing, and academic integrity. Welcome Ian to All Things Marketing And Education, we're excited to have you on.

Ian McCullough:

Thanks, Elana. A pleasure to be here. It was great having lunch with you the other week. Great seeing you at ISTE and really excited to be able to chat with you and everyone else who's listening in.

Elana Leoni:

t knowledge we had [inaudible: 00:03:41

Ian McCullough:

Yeah, well Monica and I collaborated. So we're talking about that 20-year career. I consider the backbone of my career of LeapFrog toys, which is not only where I met Monica, but where I met my wife Laura, who was Monica's quad mate. So Monica has quite literally followed me for quite some time. And as I was making a career transition from product development and supply chain and various other pieces and started contracting and taking on more marketing projects, it was none other than Monica Brown who brought me back to Leapfrog and brought me into a product marketing role, and really played a key part in that transition. And so yeah, if Monica introduces someone to me, of course I'm taking the call.

Elana Leoni:

nnections. There's [inaudible: 00:04:51

Ian McCullough:

Amongst my other accomplishments, I was a member of the pilot class of Carnegie Mellon University's Master of Entertainment Technology Program. And being the first through anything, I feel a certain responsibility to students who have come through since, that program is celebrating its 25th a year, but they routinely make trips out to the West Coast and do an LA and San Francisco Bay area visit. And one of the points that I make to them, and as far as the professional side of it is that there are words... Especially for those of us who do this, anybody who spends any time on LinkedIn, when we talk about networking and selling, they become these really loaded emotionally kind of fraught words. And the point that I make to the students based on my experience is when we talk about networking and self-promotion and selling your services, having that sort of mindset, all we're really saying is, "Make friends and make fair trades."

So networking is just a really... An adult professional code word for make friends. And then when you have to make a case for yourself, whether it's a job interview or you're working as a contractor consultant and you have to highlight your value, it's make fair trades for your time. And then just go Robert Fulgham on it because kindergartners can make friends and make fair trades. And so the more that we unload it and approach it with the spirit that you just highlighted, yeah. So it's a pleasure to have become your friend, Elana.

Elana Leoni:

n it comes in your [inaudible: 00:07:06

Ian McCullough:

In terms of... It depends on how far back we want to rewind the clock. We're going for a 20-minute episode and I could take two hours going into the history here where we can trace back to Ancient Greece, we can trace back to the enlightenment, where fundamentally and really coming out of what we have historically referred to as the European Enlightenment, or at least that's how it's headlined in most history. Fundamentally at the heart of it is this need to advance humanity through original thought. And so when people are thinking originally, then human society advances, there is progress. However, when people are in a position to take expressions of ideas or ideas that have already been expressed and claim them as their own, that's a problem for all of us, where that stunts the growth of humanity. And where things start to get really into the educational sphere, plagiarism has been a concern in academia for centuries.

It was really at the dawn of the internet that we started getting into the barriers to doing so becoming that much easier and more tempting. And especially in the K-12 space, a lot of it is... There's a confluence of social factors that's really worth digging into because it also ties into social media as well where we talk remixes and memes and how do things go viral? Well, you do trace back and there is sources of ideas and there's a balance between cultural evolution and credit where credit is due. And if we have to look at the history in terms of academic plagiarism over the past 25 years and where Turnitin comes to it, the easiest thing to point to as a precursor step would be Wikipedia. Where if we think about this from the point of view of a student who has an assignment due the next day, it's always the next day. That's that time dependent story that always comes into any EdTech conversation.

ste from a webpage [inaudible: 00:10:02

Elana Leoni:

[inaudible: 00:10:34

Ian McCullough:

Yeah, no. Turnitin has multiple ties to Berkeley, so we'll get into that in a little bit as well. But it was founded out at Berkeley and the founding generation, John and Christian and we celebrate our founder's day, they really tried to build a peer review tool that just made handling peer feedback easier. And what they learned really quickly is they put this tool out there, but a lot of student assignments had an awful lot in common. And so two years after that, they introduced the original originality check service that Turnitin has become synonymous with for any student who's graduated over the past two decades or so. Where having tools out there that can rapidly match up against an array of sources, paywall journals, other student papers, tens of billions of internet articles both current and archived, that became a value to teacher. And having something that as they evaluate whether or not students are actually doing the thinking required for learning, having the ability to do so at scale and somewhat concrete.

oment if you can't [inaudible: 00:12:31

It's an incredibly stressful world where there's pressure and confusion and the expectations are ever shifting. And educators need tools to identify where there's an issue so that they can sit down and help a student with that. And certainly that's the case in secondary, and the position of turn it in, we firmly believe that that should be the case in higher education as well. But we also recognize that in higher education, the consequences for intentional academic misconduct can get really serious really fast. So some of something that I take a lot of satisfaction in working in the secondary business on is being able to work with institutions to set the skills earlier so that students can thrive later on in their career.

Elana Leoni:

even listening in [inaudible: 00:13:58

we've got ChatGPT, [inaudible: 00:14:50

Ian McCullough:

ver, OpenAI has existed since: 2016

And then ChatGPT comes out, where OpenAI releases itself, where all of the sudden as a showcase for what this technology is capable of, they put ChatGPT out there and suddenly it's free, it's simple, and it's amazing. And so I brought up Wikipedia earlier and there's multiple types of large language models, but ChatGPT is the definitive place that people are going. And the challenge in terms of helping educators identify when students are or aren't doing the work, and then asking why. Why is really important. It is one thing for Turnitin to be able to have huge student paper database of all of the papers that have been submitted to Turnitin and a global student paper database where we can crosscheck.

We have our own proprietary search engine, we have relationships to have access to paywall journals, that at the end of the day is if we can find matching texts, we can present the matching texts and the teacher can say, "That doesn't look like it should be the way it is." It's a little bit more... It's a lot more sophisticated than that. In the case of generative AI, the educational challenge is that in essence what a large language model is generating has never been published, it's unique.

Elana Leoni:

Do you feel [inaudible: 00:17:42

Ian McCullough:

t doesn't know any [inaudible: 00:18:21

But it doesn't know anything and it's not thinking anything about the information, it doesn't have that concept. So in terms of advancing humanity and original thought, I think that the people who are thinking about how to build large language models, that is absolutely advancing humanity and advancing thought, and I think that that's worthy a lot of scrutiny. But in the case of a student who submits the prompt that their teacher handed them and gets five paragraphs of text and then submits that as their own, for whatever reason that is, I think that's something worthy of intervention because the student hasn't internalized any of that information. And there's the broader community and social impact, but they're just shortchanging themselves in their own education at this point.

And one of my caveats to educators to pass along to students is if you are using this technology to take shortcuts... There's multiple ways to look at the purpose of education. On one hand, we can take the humanistic point of view about well-rounded human beings. On the other hand, we have to have the economic conversation. And from an economic point of view where there are lots of people who are motivated to get an education because they want a better job, if you are using a large language model to generate your work and not developing the skills, that large language model will do the job that you think you're going to be able to get a credential for, cheaper than you can. And so students today have a challenge where the jobs of tomorrow, it's all evolving so rapidly.

And so for teachers, it's in the student best interest to identify that and know that something's going on, and sit down and have that talk about what are the real consequences here, both in terms of academic norms and standards for potential higher education career, whether that is trade school, professional school, or Bachelor's, Master's. And then getting into the world where you can just see all of the headlines of all of these major companies that are rushing to adopt AI technology as quickly as they can. And so if AI cannot think at this point, cannot generate original thought, that's something that students should be really focused on making sure that they have those muscles well-developed.

Elana Leoni:

Yes, and I can't imagine the retention of knowledge is superior to somebody just becoming good at prompt engineering. Like, "Oh, okay, I'll get these prompts five times in a row, I can get something and then maybe copy and paste it," and then we're in a different type of copy and paste plagiarism for sure.

Ian McCullough:

es in the training [inaudible: 00:22:07

that you can trace [inaudible: 00:23:24

Elana Leoni:

Slightly ironic, right?

Ian McCullough:

Yeah. And it's slightly ironic when the key to all of it is when we look at original thought and coming back to that, all original thought is built up thoughts that have come before. Human progress is built on ideas that have come before, cite your sources, that's the magic thing there. Where understand the building block blocks that you're using in your new ideas and recognize them in your work. And for the time being, there's a lot to sort out on the ChatGPT question. But a lot of institutions as a bare minimum if students are using ChatGPT, like, okay, there's value there, cite it.

Elana Leoni:

Yeah. So I know we could talk about this forever. I'm going to ask you a couple more questions-

Ian McCullough:

[inaudible: 00:24:40

Elana Leoni:

ion, I remember at [inaudible: 00:24:52

Like, I gotcha type of vibe. But he's saying, "Gosh, why aren't we talking about people boasting about how they've altered assessment strategies? Or gotten to the heart of why students cheat in the first place?" And that still gives me goosebumps because that's ultimately... The technology is going to evolve over and over. Before George was like, "Hey, Google exists. Let's not reinvent the wheel. Let's leverage. Let's leverage phones that are now the power of computers in a kid's pocket. Let's move it and continue on." But how do we move the critical sinking needle? And at the same time really get to the heart of why. Sometimes when kids are acting out or cheating, there's a deeper reason too. So any thoughts around that? Because I know educators are like, "How do I even... If I don't use Turnitin, how do I catch students from cheating now that there's multiple ways?"

Ian McCullough:

So first and foremost, Turnitin, we provide tools and services, but we also make free resources for educators available. And I will send you the link to the page full of resources we have for educators on how do you redo your assignments? How do you take a look at this? How should you look at your classroom and institutional academic integrity policy so that you can set good expectations, make it so that prompt you've been using for 20 years requires more of the student. And that you are actually upping the level of challenge. And how to have conversation. And those are things that we make freely available to everyone.

e general politics around the: 2020

hings that came up [inaudible: 00:28:36

That sounds pretty valid to me. And so it isn't the case where it's all going to be misuse. There are cases where it could be perfectly appropriate, there could be cases where students should generate essays. I think that something that many educators have run too quickly is, "Wow, you can create exemplars all you want." If there's a topic that you're trying to get at and provide an example of, it's perfectly appropriate, as far as I'm concerned, for an educator to generate an essay from ChatGPT or a similar tool that has an issue that they want students to go find. We like saving educators time. But it's all so, so, so complicated and it's the question of how do we navigate the nuance? And where do we get the information so that people can know, it's a nuanced question.

Elana Leoni:

me. I think that's [inaudible: 00:30:04

Ian McCullough:

[inaudible: 00:30:05

Elana Leoni:

... Use but Monica Burns, Alice Keeler, there's so many out there right now. Holly Clark, they have book. I think it's such a fascinating conversation because even at ISTE I was talking to people and they had books that they just came out. I'm like, "How'd you write that book?" And some of them on the side whispered, "ChatGPT helped me with some of it." And so there's these ethical things of like, "Wow, okay, what is original? What great area is plagiarism?" Love how you frame ChatGPT as it really doesn't know anything. It's just like maybe this... I think of it like a hyper-good librarian who's trying to find stuff for you.

Ian McCullough:

The analogy that's most apt is at this point, lots and lots of people have smartphones, and most smartphones have auto complete features. And so essentially the fundamentals of what tools like ChatGPT are doing, it's auto complete at a much more massive scale. And that's it.

Elana Leoni:

Yeah, that's interesting.

Ian McCullough:

This has been evolving for a very long time technologically.

Elana Leoni:

u're like, "Quick, [inaudible: 00:31:52

Ian McCullough:

I work for an integrity company?

Elana Leoni:

We always ask people around how... What are the things that you do to keep up with life? What are the things that are inspiring to you? And in particular, I'd love to know if there's anything recently that you've read or watched that has inspired you. I want to tell marketers, EdTech professionals, and people every day in the classrooms that it's okay to be a human. And what are some things that are inspiring you beyond your day-to-day work?

Ian McCullough:

week vacation. And [inaudible: 00:32:31

ecent refill of my [inaudible: 00:34:00

Elana Leoni:

t back when I come [inaudible: 00:34:21

Ian McCullough:

allergy issues, so [inaudible: 00:34:39

Elana Leoni:

Beautiful.

Ian McCullough:

A [inaudible: 00:35:08

Elana Leoni:

re learning around [inaudible: 00:35:28

Ian McCullough:

Yeah, it is. It's been a really exciting year for me as someone who's ultimately a professional storyteller, to have this rich topic of interest to really explore and to have a great company to represent. I love working for Turnitin, and it's been a blessing.

Elana Leoni:

Awesome. Well, thank you again. For those of you listening, we will put all of the information in the show note. Thank you all for listening.