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New View EDU Episode 93: Educational Design in the Age of AI

October 20, 2026

Available October 20, 2026

Find New View EDU on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and many other podcast apps.

“I think the big rupture that's happened in education recently is AI.” That’s how Carl Hendrick begins his conversation with host Debra P. Wilson, identifying a clear dividing line between the educators who approach AI as “this is the end of the world,” and those who see potential for its use. Coming from a background in the science of learning, Carl has a unique perspective on what he thinks the exciting opportunities are to advance our understanding of learning in new ways, and where he believes a more traditional, human-centered approach remains invaluable.

Carl Hendrick headshotDuring the conversation, Carl points out that our understanding of how learning happens often clashes with what we’re able to enact in a classroom. While teachers may understand how to deliver curriculum and assess student understanding, the ability to adapt in real time so each student truly retains the knowledge is highly variable. With the aid of AI, Carl says, we may be able to get better, more granular data on student learning to help inform classroom practice, and offload some of the more time-consuming and less effective tasks that take up teacher time, like administrative work. He says teachers’ real strengths lie in their ability to mentor, motivate, and inspire, and the advent of AI tools in education can free them up to do those things in a more targeted and informed way. He also notes that AI can help resolve concerns about the reliability of human grading, assessment, and curriculum design, offering the opportunity to level-set appropriately for students and minimize quality differences across different settings.

Paradoxically, Carl theorizes, dismissing the opportunities inherent in using AI may mean missing out on making education even more human-centered. He muses that increasing the efficiency of learning design and delivery can allow for greater socialization and exploration, making school more relational without diminishing the educational outcomes. He also admits to being a “traditionalist” when it comes to matters like curriculum, arguing that the rise of AI doesn’t have to mean the fall of the humanities. Carl shares his philosophy on choosing curricular materials, speaking about foundational concepts, discoveries, and classic literature like Shakespeare as students’ “birthright”—the shared cultural touchpoints that reinforce the human experience, even in an increasingly technological landscape.

Key Questions

Some of the key questions Debra and Carl explore in this episode include:

  • This feels like a time when many common understandings about education are on the table. What are some of the most exciting changes you see as possibilities?
  • How do we bring what is learned in the lab into the classroom more effectively? Where do you see more possibilities for this now than ever before?
  • There is a theory out there that if you just set students loose with AI, they will teach themselves—or that an AI tool can be loosely coded with instructional design, and this will create a personalized learning panacea for enterprising students. What are your thoughts on this possibility? Is there a way for this model to work?
  • Where is the hope for using AI productively in learning design? What are the aspects of curriculum, instruction, and assessment that you think are non-negotiable regardless of technology?

Episode Highlights

  • “I think probably in 10 years' time, we're going to see a world in education where a lot of the stuff that teachers do that they instinctively know is not effective, you know, marking books, grading books, a lot of administrative stuff, is just not that important. And we'll probably free up a lot of that and hopefully we'll see a world, we'll see a classroom or a school environment where teachers can really do the thing that teachers are so good at, which is being a mentor, being a coach. Inspiring, motivating kids, because that's the thing that is the sort of hard constraint in schools.” (5:49)
  • “The accountability is very much front-loaded with the teacher for things that they're really unaccountable for, whether that be student motivation, poor curricular materials, bad behavior, a whole range of things. So we could create a system where the accountability is a lot more like, in that model where you have—and by the way, when the kids are working on laptops, there's no chatbots. They're doing a knowledge-rich curriculum, used spaced retrieval practice. They're, you know, they're kind of doing the same thing as like a lesson would be, you know, or a really well-planned lesson, but they're just getting, they're cognitively, like learning happens when you think hard, when you have to take knowledge and apply it. And in a lot of our lessons, kids are not thinking at all. They're daydreaming, they're cosplaying thinking.” (24:25)
  • “And so that's the kind of birthright of kids. I think we owe it to the kids to pass on that knowledge and give it to them. Now, whether they like it or not is irrelevant. You don't look at a science curriculum and go, you know, Darwin's a bit boring, so we'll do something else this year. Or we'll, you know, we'll leave out Newton and we'll, you know, we're doing physics, but we, you know, we don't like that, so we'll do something else. And so in literature and culture there's these kind of hugely important points that, just to be a kind of citizen and to be a part of our democracy, it's really helpful to know what these things are.” (29:15)

Resource List

Full Transcript

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About Our Guest

Carl Hendrick is an internationally recognized expert in the science of learning and instructional design. He is a professor at Academica University of Applied Sciences in Amsterdam and leads research projects that bridge cognitive science, educational psychology, and classroom practice. He is a member of the UNESCO International Bureau of Education Science of Learning editorial board and works with government education departments and large school networks internationally to support evidence-informed teaching, curriculum development, and teacher professional learning. One of his current roles is as a chief learning scientist for Alpha School.

He began his career as an English teacher in an inner-city London school before completing his Ph.D. in education at King’s College London. His work focuses on helping teachers and school leaders apply evidence-based strategies such as retrieval practice, spacing, and explicit instruction to improve student learning. Carl is co-author of How Learning Happens and Instructional Illusions and regularly delivers keynotes and workshops around the world on responsive teaching, curriculum design, and professional development.