Andy Churchill,  phd, mba

turn your audience into your champions: ignite curiosity 🔥 scaffold understanding ✔ maximize impact 🚀. The PresentBetter Program for lab research groups & academic institutes -now over 7,000 researchers served.

Every piece of research, when effectively communicated, can spark change. 

In academia. In careers. In society.

But too often, important findings remain hidden, their potential unrealized. 
The importance/impact of research gets:
●	Buried under layers of complexity
●	Communicated without connecting
●	Overwhelmed by scientific terms and processes

This is why I created PresentBetter: 
To transform how your researchers share their ideas with the world. 
Together we distill years of complex study into clear, compelling narratives that resonate with and inspire audiences.
By amplifying researcher’s voices, we elevate the ability to communicate research in ways that:
●	Moves people
●	Propels careers forward
●	Bridges the gap between academia and society

Through PresentBetter.org, I offer tailored solutions to meet diverse needs:
1.	Individual Coaching: One-on-one sessions crafted for your specific presentation challenges.
2.	Lab and Department Workshops: Small group training to elevate your entire team's communication skills.
3.	Institutional Programs: Comprehensive, scalable solutions for universities and research institutions.
4.	Conference and Event Preparation: Targeted coaching for high-stakes presentations that can define careers.
5.	Online Courses: Self-paced learning for researchers seeking flexibility.

We aim to create a future where every researcher's voice resonates with clarity and impact.



PS Wondering if too good to be true? Here's a link to the talk I coached that was voted the best 3 minute research presentation in North America last year. Scroll through the flipbook for the talk, key lessons, minute by minute breakdown, and a description of the program that I used to train the speaker: https://www.presentbetter.org/post/international-award-winning-talk

Co-Founder

I work with individuals and organizations to help researchers present better. I start with helping them find their story and then coach them to deliver it in the most effective way.  Since Covid, my work has focused around helping people navigate the shifts to presenting online: 
👉 your voice (tone, pace, volume, pausing) remains your most important tool, and embracing the attitudes and feeling you want to convey is your most critical skill.
👉 stories still rule: tech interaction tricks are useful, but don't get sucked too far down that rabbit hole because stories are still the most effective driver of deep engagement, learning and memory.
👉 understand the impact of body language: while it has become less impactful on the audience, it still influences your own confidence and energy.
👉 the movement of visuals in person competes with your ability to engage your audience, but online, that same movement helps capture and retain attention: adjust accordingly.

A short selection of past companies & organizations with whom I've worked:
MY01
Engineva
McGill DeSautels School of Business
Research Institute of McGill University Health Care
Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec
Pharmaceutical Sciences World Congress
MUHC Foundation
Bio-Sync
Integrated Program in Neuroscience

Andy Churchill, phd, mba

The AI Guy for Higher Ed / I help colleges create human-centered, AI-enhanced learning experiences / AI Strategist and Coach

I spend my days thinking about 3 things:

1. The future of higher education
2. Process-focused teaching
3. Alternative assessment
4. The rise of AI

Currently, I'm writing a book about how process-focused teaching can help us push against the transactional model of education and adapt to an AI age. (The book is currently under contract with University of Oklahoma Press.) 

On here I share my experiments, my research findings, and my questions. I believe in thinking and tinkering out in the open, and am active on here as well as on Substack. 

I'm also a Professor of English and Communications at Berkeley College -- where I chair our AI and Academic Integrity Committee and serve as a member of our AI Task Force.

I have a basic website with some of my publications and appearances:
https://sites.google.com/view/jasongulya/bio

I'm always open to collaborations. So, feel free to reach out!

Jason Gulya

Fun fact.

I was interviewed for this article in The Guardian.

My perspective didn't fit the narrative, so it wasn't included. 

(I don't blame the writer, Alice Speri, for this. I recognize that her job is to create a narrative, and I'm sure this is the dominant narrative that came out of her research.)

This is what I said.

**************************
"In both my in-person and online courses, I try to push against the incentives for overusing AI by (a) creating a culture of trust and transparency, (b) using alternative assessment to help us focus less on grades, and (c) focusing on process rather than product. The goal is to create a community of learning, where we’re thinking more about the learning process itself and thinking critically about generative AI, rather than simply embracing it.

During in-person meetings with my students, we rarely use generative AI: we annotate and write by hand, engage in debate and conversation, and complete communal projects. For the online components of my courses, I use different strategies to encourage critical thinking. For my Comp I course, for example, I often will ask students to read and annotate a text through our LMS and then engage with a “pressure bot,” a custom chatbot that I’ve designed to put pressure on students’ ideas and theses. Students submit the entire transcript.

For many of my larger projects, I also ask students to submit a Transparency Statement, regardless of whether they used AI or not. I ask them to critically analyze their process, their use or non-use of AI, and to take a step back to think about whether their process helped or hurt their own voice. I think that this kind of strategy will have much more staying power than AI detectors, and other methods of catching students.

I used to be very pessimistic about what this technology would do to my classroom, especially right after ChatGPT came out. But I’m becoming cautiously optimistic that changing the culture of my classroom can make a difference and encourage students to prize slow and intentional thinking even when the world wants them to move faster and faster."

Exploring the Connections Between GenAI, Alternative Assessment, and Process-Minded Teaching | Professor of English and Communications at Berkeley College | Keynote Speaker | Mentor for AAC&U’s AI Institute

What happened when I asked an AI agent to interact with a custom chatbot?

Yesterday, I set an AI agent loss on one of my "pressure bots" (custom chatbots that I use to put pressure on my students and encourage them to support their ideas and anchor them within evidence).

I asked it to complete the full chat with the pressure bot (writing like a college student), export everything to a Google Doc, and self-annotate their transcript to highlight their moves and reasoning. 

As this technology advances, I'm becoming increasingly convinced that (a) making assessments AI proof or AI resistant may just be a bandaid (that's ok. we need bandaids) and (b) that the hard work is to show students that the learning process matters and that offloading it has huge consequences.

I did a full write-up in my newsletter. 

I'll link it in the first comment!

Sometimes, I think we focus too much on scaling things.

When I teach my students in a way that “wouldn’t scale,” I remind myself that these are chances to show my value and to improve my relationships with students.

Again and again, my students tell me that their favorite class activities are ones that “wouldn’t scale”:

- Video feedback on projects
- One-on-one student conferences
- Feedback that took me 20 minutes to write 
- Open, wandering discussions about a topic (where I shut up and sit in the corner)

Now, don’t get me wrong.

We do need to be mindful of working ourselves to death, and giving ourselves enough breathing room to be present for our students. 

But not everything needs to scale.

And if we have a way to scale it. (I can already feel those AI CEOs starting to write a comment about how I could scale these with AI), I think there are always tradeoffs. 

Because the more I think about it…

I don’t think relationship-building acts scale. Maybe that’s part of the point.

I think we need to make distinctions between:

1. Teaching activities that we can and should scale.

2. Teaching activities that don’t need to scale. In fact, their power lies in their non-scalability.

Then…

We need to ask questions about what is gained and what is lost, when we use tech to scale something:

1. What do we gain and lose when we scale Socratic discussions with AI?

2. What do we gain and lose when we scale personalized learning with AI?

3. Wht do we gain and lose when we scale formative feedback in our own voice with AI?

In my experience, more often than not, a shift towards scaling is a shift towards automated learning. 

I think we need to proceed with caution. 

And the problem is that scaling something that is supported by solid pedagogy is automatically a good thing, without its own risks and tradeoffs.

We need to be more nuanced in our discussions about what scaling itself means for education.

Here’s the gist.

The Pentagon fires Anthropic, because the company expressed misgivings about genAI being used for surveillance and warfare.

(It’s performance theater: leadership at Anthropic were very aware of that already. It’s no surprise. But it’s also bad PR.)

So, OpenAI jumps in and says “Don’t worry. We’ll take the contract.”

Because here’s the thing.

1.  AI is political 

Generative AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are spearheaded by specific people with specific political motivations. 

2. AI Companies are mostly interchangeable.

This is what happens. A company, person, or government entity wants to do something with AI. One company doesn’t want to do it. So they just find someone else. 

****

I may be introducing this to my Writing and Research students at Berkeley, so that we can debate this development and what it means for using this technology.

Associate Professor of English, the University of Findlay, poet, teacher, & novelist, AI refuser, & lover of human-authored books

Just in case there remained any doubt in your mind that Altman is a low key monster, OpenAI donates millions to MAGA pacs and  rubber-stamped its AI to an incel addict with the intellect and impulse control of a frat boy on a bender. This is not a decision that impacts only Americans, and for that, I share my rage with the rest of the world. 

Here's a human-generated summary in case you haven't been paying attention:

Anthropic isn't woke. They gave up their safety red lines for AI implementation in education a long time ago. Good to know they've appeased their conscience by pretending not to know that mass surveillance & driverless bombs aren't for "the good" of humanity. AI was never about doing good for anyone except rich assholes. 

Mass surveillance is already happening to all AI users, but you probably knew that. 

OpenAI has the strongest foothold in the American education system. A system purposely deregulated & destabilized by this administration. We are their culpable handmaids when we allowed this beast to slouch into our classrooms. 

AI implementation is MAGA.

Open article: OpenAI strikes a Defense Department deal, hours after the Pentagon cuts Anthropic by businessinsider.com

OpenAI strikes a Defense Department deal, hours after the Pentagon cuts Anthropic

I agree that Grammarly has burned its brand, and now peddles an absolute trash-heap of a program. 

I disagree that it was because of one feature.

The company has gradually created a product that actively takes away students' voices under the guise of "writing assistance."

Seriously...

Show a group of educators Grammarly as it is right now.
Then, take an emotional inventory.

I recently showed it to a team of professors and asked what they thought.

Disappointed
Betrayed
Angry

And no, I'm not exaggerating.

I highly recommend going in and seeing what they've done, if you're not haven't gone in recently.

Author of AI for Young Learners: Balancing Tech Use with Authentic, Off-Screen Experiences (Jump Start Guide). I help educators explore AI and emerging technologies to promote confidence and creativity in learning.

View Nneka J. McGee, J.D., Ed.D.’s profile

Is nothing sacred anymore? 

I'm wondering who approved this? What was the meeting like when someone introduced this feature? This incident teaches me much more about who wasn't in the room than who was. 

The audacity of scraping people's work, training AI agents, and then using their names without approval or compensation...

I'm wondering if we need NIL for writers, editors and other creatives.

It's not AI taking creatives' jobs, it's people thinking it's okay to use the hard work of others for free.

This rush to "be the one" in AI at all levels is hitting the stratosphere of ridiculousness and frustration. For those of us who actually see the benefits of AI, particularly in education, actions such as the one Grammarly took make it that much harder to convince hesitant educators to learn about and use AI.

Open article: With 1 AI Feature No One Asked For, Grammarly Burned Its Brand by inc.com

With 1 AI Feature No One Asked For, Grammarly Burned Its Brand

"What Education Becomes: Teaching and Learning in a Post-AI World" was released today.

My chapter is titled "Ambient AI and the Future of Productive Struggle."

Here's my argument, in a nutshell.

Ambient AI (GenAI and otherwise) is making it harder and harder to force productive struggle onto students. Students are increasingly surrounded by "easy outs" that they can take, instead of sitting down to wrestle with wicked problems. 

In this light, I think our job as educators shifts to encouraging students to choose to engage in productive struggle even when companies are hellbent on creating an "age of convenience" when there is little friction or struggle to be found.

(In my experience, companies rarely distnguish between desirable friction and undesirable friction. All friction, so goes the pitch, can be eliminated and even learning can be easy.) 

I'll pop the link in the comments. 

Congrats to Patrick Dempsey and the other contributors!

"There's nothing you can do to make me less focused on my grade. Nothing. It's about pride. I want to do well in school. I want good grades."

This quote is from a conversation I had with a student a few semesters ago.

It has left a profound influence on me.

I can rail against grades (and I do).
I can create alternative assessment structures (and I do).

But I only have students for about 15 weeks.

By the time they get to me, they've been surrounded by the grade-centered form of education for 12+ years. 

I'm learning to align my grades with learning and skill more, for those students who (through no fault of their own) can't pivot in a few months, after years of being taught to see education in a certain light.

I'm learning that maybe the most I can hope for is poking at grades and the transactional model of education, putting a question mark next to something that had previously sat unquestioned.

I think assessment redesign is necessary, but not sufficient for adapting to the AI age. 

I think the bigger issue is that we need to practice creating micro-cultures through co-creation, critical engagement with the world, and (dare I say) slowness. 

This involves treating the classroom as a sacred space that pushes against larger cultural forces (speed, convenience, ease) in order to more fully engage with them.

I ran an experiment today.

Could I use an AI Agent to…

(1) Engage with a chatbot that has been designed to poke at me and debate me.

(2) Finish that entire chat, writing in the voice of a college student.

(3) Export the chat to a Google Doc.

(4) Mark up the Google Doc with metacognitive comments, from the student’s perspective. It would explain its moves and reasoning. 

And it turns out…

Yes, the agent was able to do it without a problem. 

I was able to fully automate a “grade the chat” exercise, where the AI agent engaged with the chatbot and marked up the transcript to show where it was displaying simulated metacognition.

I think one of the best things I can do -- as an educator -- is to embrace education's potential for disruption.

EdTech companies are pushing their AI-powered products into students hands. Cool. Let's spend some time putting them down, and connecting with each other in a shared physical space.

Culture wants us to move faster and faster. Cool. Let's spend some time going slower.

Social Media wants to make our virtual lives noisy, where we're constantly beset with new features and easy-to-press buttons. Cool. Let's practice tuning out noise, and see how that feels different.

Focus.
Contemplation.
Human connection.

The more I think about it, the more skeptical I become of the "this technology will give us the ability to do things faster, so that we can focus on being human."

I'm becoming increasingly convinced that this is an opportunity to create human, relational classrooms. 

But to build these spaces, we'll need push on in spite of companies that are building Transactional Education 2.0 while claiming to "democratize" or "personalize" learning. 





-------
Image: My recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, where I discuss Transactional Education 2.0. (Not sure if I coined it or not. But I don't think I've seen it elsewhere!) I'll link it in the comments.

Here's a legitimate question I'm thinking about a lot these days.

Does the rise (and fall) of programs like Einstein emphasize the importance of assignment redesign -- so that we are creating assignments that ostensibly can't be complete by LLMs and AI agents?

Or does it emphasize that assignment redesign is far from sufficient -- so that we need to encourage LMS and AI companies to help us safeguard academic integrity, and create small learning micro-cultures that push against the speed and convenience of culture more bradly?

I can't tell yet.

Here's one of the big challenges, when it comes to managing AI and higher ed. 

(Both in the classroom and institutionally.)

How do we manage pluralism?

In the classroom, we need to think about:

► How do we manage a class, when we have (a) students who adamantly oppose the technology, (b) students who rely on it on an everyday basis, (c) students who use it to help with a (diagnosed or undiagnosed) learning difficulty?

► How can we teach process, when some students use AI in their process and others don't?

Institutionally, we need to think about:

► How can we have an institutional AI policy, without requiring faculty and staff to simply toe the line?

► How can we encourage faculty to be AI-aware, without forcing them to incorporate AI into their classroom unnecessarily?

I think this is one of the challenges/opportunities for course design, and it's one reason why my students create their own projects and processes.

I think we need to be very purposeful about if and how we respond to flash-in-the-pan nuisance tech, like Einstein AI. 

We can’t panic, because (as Marc Watkins notes) it probably won’t transform the landscape immediately.

But we also can’t ignore it, because there’s a fine line between flashes in the pan and harbingers of what’s coming.

Assistant Director of Academic Innovation at University of Mississippi

Einstein isn’t really a threat to academic integrity so much as it is another distracting piece of marketing hype. It isn’t clear if it was a hoax, a failed app launch, or piece of tech posing as performance theater. Still, AI agents represent challenges to online learning and higher education needs to come up with a response to this technology quickly. Otherwise, we’re going to be continually facing a world where we cannot know if students are actually human within our courses or machines. 

👇 Link to full article in the comments.

The question isn't "how do I build assignments that focus on process over product?"

The question is "how do I build a classroom culture where we value our creative and learning processes as something to be made prized, made visible, and analyzed." 

There are different aspects to this.

We prize process, because (even if we're not focusing on it) we learn a lot by going through the process of creating, even if an AI could have done it more efficiently. We learn through the process.

We make it visible so that we can exercise our metacognitive and meta-strategic skills. It's hard to think about our thinking if we don't at least try to make it visible first. (Corollary: what matters is that we're giving a good faith attempt at making it visible, more than whether we can actually capture our cognitive processes.)

We analyze it so that we can better understand it. What does that process mean for how we interact with and understand our world?

The commitment to making process prized, visible, and analyzable needs to be wholesale -- rather than being limited to assignment design.

In these weird times, students need to practice creating processes that protect their cognitive independence and personal voice as they come into contact with tools that are specifically designed to take that cognitive independence and voice away from them.

The goal of the process-focused classroom is to make process valued (always), visible (sometimes), and analyzable (sometimes).

This doesn't mean that every assignment needs to make the process visible. Not only does this balloon your own work and the student's work (hello there, product-bloat). It's also counterproductive. You can demonstrate the value of process without necessarily making it visible.

This doesn't mean that every process needs to be analyzed and assessed. That prevents processes from arising organically through the creative process.

But...

This does mean we need to design the classroom intentionally, so that we're consistently showing the value of process and selecting specific moments when we want to make process visible, so that we can (a) analyze the process, (b) analyze what it means about how we create and interact with the world, and (c) move from abstract metacognition to concrete meta-strategic thinking.

One of the problems is that all forms of “teaching process” are lumped together.

- Debates
- Portfolios
- Chatbot transcripts
- In-person defenses
- Annotations (synch and asynch)

But these moments of “teaching process” (if that’s what they are doing) are all very different.

Sometimes, teaching process means observing the student at the moment they’re engaging in productive struggle. 

At other times, it means seeing something (usually, a set of mini-products) that allows us to create a narrative of progression. 

I think we need a better set of vocabulary and concepts for teaching process, and for how different forms of it connect with each other.

Check this one out!

I’m a panelist and moderator for a panel on “The Great Skills Reset.”

In some ways, I push against the title. 

I’m not 100% sure there needs to be a reset. Though I do think we need to put certain skills in a different context.

🔵Our first panel of the Q1 Mini Jam is tackling one of the biggest questions facing professionals right now: when it comes to skills, what actually matters in the #AI age?

Don't miss out on the expert insights from our panel of industry thought-leaders, featuring Jason Gulya, Courtney Teague, EdD, PCC, Keith McCormick, Michael Atkinson, PhD, Michelle Ament, EdD, and Phillip Alcock.

🌍 Online event. ⚡️Reserve your spot now!

#LinkedInWebinar #DigitalExperiences #RegisterNow

🔵 The Great Skills Reset: What Matters in the AI Age? | Panel

Tomorrow, my composition students and I start our unit on argumentation and debate.

Our central question: what does developing an informed perspective look like, at the current moment?

This question branches out:

► how do we find out if something we read is reliable?
► what does it mean to approach a topic with curiosity?
► what goes into developing and supporting an argument?
► how do we talk to others who don't agree with our argument?
► where does GenAI fit into our lives, as a source of information?

My goal is to choose some of the most pressing conversations right now. 

We'll practice how to engage others in constant conversation and debate, how to push through learning about a topic even if we're not initiallyl interested, and how to search for truth at a moment when truth is becoming both harder to discern and easier to manipulate.

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Andy Churchill, phd, mba

Jason Gulya

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Jason Gulya

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