I took an online graduate level course last month.

The course was called “AI and Society: Redefining Learning, Work, & Human Potential” and it was offered through an accreddited instution of higher learning. I earned three semester workshop hours, which means that I can use those hours to renew my professional license. If I were a teacher, I could also use those hours for salary advancement.

It took me 51 minutes to complete the course.

The course consisted of eight modules. Each of those had a number of articles to read and videos to watch, along with a discussion forum and a quiz. The whole course included nine articles in pdf format, along with 121 videos totalling 22 hours. I didn’t read the articles. I didn’t watch the videos. For the discussions, I typed whatever came to mind. All of my contributions were about AI, but they rarely related to the actual prompts. I did take all of the quizzes. But after the first few, I realized that the correct answer to each multiple choice question is usually the longest one. I didn’t really need to read the questions to get more than 80% correct, which was the threshold for passing the module.

I wasn’t trying to learn anything. I was trying to get credit. I needed the credential. Those two things are different.

It seems like a lifetime ago when I decoupled learning from credentials. The truth is that I was disappointed in the amount of work I did in school related to the amount of useful learning I accomplished. The most valuable professional development experiences I’ve ever had were informal and didn’t involve getting credit. Whether that was participating in online communities, attending conferences, jumping into MOOCs, listening to podcasts, or just exploring ideas on my own, I learn a lot more outside of the classroom than I learn in it.

As a successful student, I learned early on that getting the credit requires me to jump through the necessary hoops, to give the teacher what they need in order to get the grade I want. That doesn’t have anything to do with learning. It’s all about playing the school game.

And our students are so good at it. The most academically successful students quickly learn how to navigate the things they have to do in order to get the grades that they (or their parents) expect. If they’re motivated by grades, they learn how to be efficient about getting the grades. And that usually comes at the expense of learning.

According to Phil Schlechty, there are three reasons our students do the things we ask them to do:

• They love their teacher, and will do anything to please them. This is very common in the younger grades, and it becomes harder to sustain as the students get older. Most kindergarteners will do whatever their teacher asks because they want to please the teacher. Most 11th graders need something more than that.
• They’re genuinely interested in the work they’re doing, and want to do it. If the learning tasks are fun, enagaging, and truly interesting, the students will do them just because they want to. Sometimes, this is the primary motivator, especially in elective classes. But it’s rare that every student is fascinated by every subject, and it’s hard to keep students engaged, especially when they don’t necessarily see the relevance in the subject matter.
• They want something that they can only get by doing the work. In many, many cases, this is a grade.

This last one is called an extrinsic motivator. It’s a factor outside the student that gets them to do the thing we want them to do. Extrinsic motivators are very effective to motivate behaviors. But they’re problemmatic when it comes to learning.

If I’m motivated by the grade, then I will do the things necessary to get the grade. I’ll make a checklist of the things that have to be done, and work to check them off as efficiently as possible. I’m focused on the deliverables. Answer these questions. Complete this worksheet. Write this essay. If doing those things forces me to learn something along the way, that’s fine. But my focus is on getting the grade as efficiently as possible. So when the tasks are not aligned to the learning, I’m going to focus on getting the grade instead of learning the stuff. That’s going to be the case as long as we continue to measure what students DO instead of what they LEARN.

Our district administration is upset that teachers are hoop-jumping through these online courses without doing much work or learning anything. It’s going to be very expensive as dozens of teachers reach the top of the salary schedule over the course of a few months. And there’s not a lot of evidence to suggest that our teachers are better professionals with new strategies and a better understanding of teaching and learning as a result of these courses.

But they got the credit. And that’s what we measure.