Solving the classroom puzzle

In a suburb of Detroit, Michigan, Chris Ostro discovered a passion for puzzles—a skill set that he would use to piece together his career of helping students and faculty navigate modern classrooms.  

Relishing challenge from an early age, Ostro—a learning and AI strategist and an assistant teaching professor of writing for CE Evening Credit at CU Boulder—pursued a degree in engineering and math at the University of Michigan.  

“I like math because I like puzzles,” said Ostro. “I like things where I'm looking at a problem and I'm just trying to figure it out.”

Becoming disinterested in pursuing engineering midway through his studies, Ostro discovered an aptitude for language that would eventually lead to his study of Latin, Greek and German. 

“The thing I like about language is that it is just math with words. It is made of patterns and puzzles, but the rules are more hidden,” said Ostro. 

Triple majoring in classics, history and comparative literature, Ostro then went on to get his MA in Latin Language and Literature before beginning a PhD program in classics at CU Boulder. Noting Ostro’s enthusiasm as a research assistant for a Latin course, the former chair of the classics department at CU, Jackie Elliott, asked Ostro to help her develop Classics 1020: Argument from Evidence, which he went on to teach for a year and a half. 

Also recognizing Ostro’s passion for teaching was the Program for Writing & Rhetoric, which offered Ostro the opportunity to teach intro-level writing classes. 

“At first, I was just teaching WRTG 1150, but then immediately I took on upper level and online courses as well,” said Ostro. “Very quickly, it became clear to me that in higher education you really need to make yourself an oddly shaped puzzle piece. The harder you are to replace, the less likely you are to be replaced.”

Ostro’s willingness to take on online instruction put him on a collision course with the Learning Design Group—a Continuing Education team that supports CU Boulder faculty in creating engaging, inclusive and effective online learning experiences—where he would be increasingly tapped to provide feedback and design assistance for other online courses. 

With experience teaching hybrid, in-person and online courses and a solid foundation in course design, Ostro positioned himself to help students and faculty face the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and the uncertainty of AI in the classroom. 

Reassembling the Classroom

In the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ostro, like countless others around the world,  grappled with a changing personal and professional landscape. The difference, however, was that Ostro had the unique advantage of having operated in a virtual world for the past several years. In his course design and faculty mentor role, Ostro used his understanding to help his colleagues transition from teaching in-person only courses to hybrid or fully remote or online courses. 

“The pandemic represented no difference in my work, but it represented a difference in the work of all the people I was supporting,” said Ostro. “There were lots of faculty who had classes that worked really well in person and they had never thought that they would be teaching online.”

While the transition proved challenging for some of his colleagues, Ostro learned invaluable lessons about course design, faculty and student dynamics, and teaching in a hybrid setting that he would use to further develop his CE Evening Credit WRTG 1150 class.  

Instead of designing a course that was intuitive to him, Ostro began designing around how students actually access and process information. Like another puzzle to be solved, Ostro approached this unique task with open-minded optimism. 

“It takes a different type of humility to design for online,” said Ostro. ”Part of the process involves realizing that everyone uses the internet differently, and you just have to live with that. You have to make your class navigable in ways you never thought you would.”

In addition to the online portion of the course, Ostro’s students gather together once a week in person, pushing him to make the most of their face-to-face interactions.  

“With a hybrid in-person/online course, I have to focus on the ways I can be materially helpful for my students and be honest with myself about where I make the most impact,” said Ostro. 

“I need to make myself approachable. Part of the reason for that is not just because I'm a social person, but also if my students trust me, they're going to give me more valuable feedback about what is and isn't working. In classes with an online component especially, that's extremely important.”

But it is not only the course modality that presents a challenge, it is also the dynamic composition of his WRTG 1150 course. 

“Every semester, I have a few first-year traditional undergraduate students who just want an evening class. But I also have some students who are parents or who work full-time, and they need a class that’s after their shift—it’s just such an interesting hodgepodge of students.”

Using a variety of modalities and technologies, Ostro welcomes the challenge of teaching to diverse learning needs. 

“Rather than trying to hyper-focus on the things that make these students different, I see a lot of value in looking at the commonalities they share,” said Ostro. 

A New Challenge

While simultaneously thinking through the nuances of a hybrid class and his diverse student group, as an AI strategist Ostro is also looking ahead to the emergent tools in education and their impact on student learning—helping educators and students alike address the presence of AI in the classroom. 

“These tools are just tools,” said Ostro. “There are absolutely better and worse ways to use them. The vast majority of students who make bad decisions with AI are not mustache-twirling villains, they’re students who got called into an extra shift, went through a breakup or had a bad day—so they fell behind on an assignment and tried to cut some corners.”

“More than anything, knowing and caring about my students, and building those one-on-one relationships has helped me address this issue the most,” said Ostro. 

In addition to relying on strong interpersonal connections in his teaching, Ostro builds in learning exercises around AI and highlights the importance of conscious usage. 

“I want students to be mindful about when they use AI and to understand how much they're actually figuring out versus what they're offloading. Sometimes friction is the only place learning happens. When I was learning Latin, I learned vocab because I got sick of opening the dictionary to the same page every time, so eventually I remembered the word. If I remove that and I have a tool that automatically prompts that vocab for me, I probably wouldn’t have ever internalized it.” 

However, Ostro is not putting the impetus for learning about AI solely on students, he is also challenging instructors to recognize when students need help. 

“We as faculty need to really step up our game. If my students can't self-assess their learning, I need to be better at helping them assess that learning,” said Ostro. “I need to build in more small checks like oral assessments, presentations or conversations where we're just talking. Something where I can get a feel for what the student does and doesn't know.” 

Though the challenge of AI is ever-evolving, Ostro nevertheless continues to work diligently to solve the classroom puzzle, utilizing his personality and understanding of hybrid classroom dynamics and technologies to provide a quality education to his diverse group of students—and eventually to other students and faculty inside and outside of the university.  

“There are clearly parts of AI that are unsolved, but there are parts that are solvable and that's what I'm trying to nail a solution for. Then I want to let other faculty take my rough draft solution and really tailor it to their course,” said Ostro. 

“Like I said at the very beginning, I'm a puzzler.”

Read more about Ostro's approach to AI in the classroom.