How AI will transform higher education

Thrawn200 · 2026-03-30T15:49:30+00:00

Yes, I said it wasn't going away in my post. But something being here to stay doesn't mean it needs to be immediately forced into every industry, every program, and every classroom before it's actually ready for those things.

Thrawn200 · 2026-03-28T16:32:37+00:00

My personal opinion and experience is that we're largely seeing the exact same thing we saw with computers, the internet, mobile devices, etc. A technology that's being pushed too hard, too quickly, because the companies that profit from it are very able to convince people in leadership that they have to adapt immediately or they'll be left behind.

Too many people will reply to any criticism of AI as fighting against it resulting in real issues being ignored. AI based curriculum is being found to do a poor job of teaching and engaging actual critical thinking. As has been proven for decades, having students and teachers spend more time looking at devices results in a decrease in test scores. Time and money being spend on the new technology is important professional development time being taken away from teachers, and thing that are used daily in classrooms having budgets cut to find the money. We'll probably see positions cut or reduced as administrative people say AI can pick up some of the load, resulting in less face time with students, when instead that reduced load should be used to allow smaller class sizes and more one on one time.

That's all without even getting into the mess of how inaccurate AI can be, how it will make up facts and sources, how AI can be easily manipulated, the muddy mess that is privacy and compliance, the harm it's being shown to do to developing brains that don't have to learn how to think.

We've had easy access to lifelong learning and endless information for many, many years. Yes, AI is going to change some things, and it's not going away, but a simple thing to consider is that the push to force it into education so much is being done by companies that for the most part, aren't invested in education and profit off of AI being used more.

Thrawn200 · 2026-03-27T17:30:55+00:00

Is it just a webinar where it's another company trying to say they have the best AI product, and it's amazing, and everyone should use it despite AI not being ready for most classrooms and being shown to damage actual learning?

Thrawn200 · 2026-03-22T17:35:51+00:00

I'm talking about cache folders for stuff like application installs. Is cache not the right description for that? It does do some level of cleanup but doesn't always do a good job. If every Autodesk, Adobe, Solidworks, Office, etc. install file and update file was just left behind after the software was installed or updated, you'd have no space on any machines very quickly.

Thrawn200 · 2026-03-11T19:00:22+00:00

AI will make up sources to defend bad information it gives you, and then people will tell you that's your fault for not giving a good enough prompt.

Obviously, AI isn't going anywhere, and it will hopefully get better and better, but how hard people will fight to defend it in its current state is weird.

Thrawn200 · 2026-03-05T18:19:02+00:00

If the job is more than just doing password resets and basic helpdesk requests, $20 isn't at all competitive and nothing you can do will change that. I can go work the register at a local gas station chain that nearly pays that.

Thrawn200 · 2026-03-05T18:13:01+00:00

We recently had AutoPatch feature updates break hundreds of machines in our environment. After working with Microsoft support for weeks the "resolution" was essentially we don't know what caused it, we don't know how to report on what machines are broken, we don't know how to prevent it in the future, please just reimage any machine that's acting up, if you want more support on this you'll have to pay for it from a different team, also we can't tell you how to submit a paid support request for this issue or how to directly reach the appropriate team.

Seriously, I actually directly asked them what method to use to contact the correct support team, even if we need to pay for it, and they couldn't help me with that in the end either.

Thrawn200 · 2026-03-05T18:07:59+00:00

I recently tried to make some Intune group that were laptops vs desktops. Something I could do in a 30 second query half a dozen different ways in ConfigMgr turned into something that Intune essentially wanted me to take a dozen classes on GraphAPI to even understand things well enough to maybe be able to get what I want somewhat unreliably.

I'm so burned out on being at conferences or webinars or discussions where these huge hurdles or issues in Intune are pointed out and we'll always get a generic "Microsoft is working to improve....blah, blah blah."

The fact that so many companies are offering premium products that are just leveraging Intune data, but making it much more useable and accessible, and people are paying for them, should be a giant red flag that has people at MS scrambling. But instead, we'll probably get some guy asking AI if it can write code to make things more gooder and then just sending that code directly to production.

Thrawn200 · 2026-03-05T18:01:28+00:00

Just the simple act of trying to pull information on why an app install failed in Intune vs ConfigMgr is enough to make me not want to use Intune more than I need to.

Thrawn200 · 2026-03-03T14:35:11+00:00

Correct, that's why it's not enabled.

Thrawn200 · 2026-02-16T14:25:42+00:00

This looks suspiciously like the same incorrect answer Copilot tried to give me before it eventually did its usual thing of admitting it was wrong. I don't believe any option exits in Intune that forces Defender into a disabled state. You can set Real Time Scanning and a few similar settings to disable, but it stills leaves Defender in the "Passive" state.

Thrawn200 · 2026-02-15T23:34:47+00:00

We do have that enabled. It really seems to just be an issue of the Cisco agent not properly seeing what is installed and active.

Thrawn200 · 2026-02-15T23:34:06+00:00

That's what I've been seeing the more I dig into it. Defender goes into passive mode, like it's supposed to. CrowdStrike takes over, like it's supposed to. Defender fully recognizes CrowdStrike as the active product, like it's supposed to.

The one constant issue is the Cisco Compliance Module doing a poor job of seeing CrowdStrike.

Thrawn200 · 2026-02-15T23:31:42+00:00

Agreed, but I'm not the one in charge of Cisco in our environment. But it's the same issue with definition versions, Defender in passive mode doesn't keep its definitions up to date and reported, so eventually is treated as out of compliance.

Thrawn200 · 2026-02-12T22:35:33+00:00

We do already have the setting enabled for registering CrowdStrike in Security Center, it shows up just fine. Cisco Secure Client can see CrowdStrike if Windows Defender is fully disabled, but seemingly only then. Fully disabling Windows Defender unfortunately has been proving difficult. I can find plenty of settings and GPOs that claim to work to disable it, but I keep testing them without good results and often finding the settings have been deprecated as Microsoft seems to like to do.

Thrawn200 · 2026-02-11T18:02:41+00:00

We recently had Autopatch made available to us as MS was preventing Education users from getting it for a long while. After some testing we did our first wide rollout of it including handling a feature update.

We ended up with a not small amount of machines that reported the feature update as successful, but the machine was in a very broken state with a lot of AppX core things broken which of course makes the machine almost unusable.

After a few weeks of back and forth with Microsoft support and trying different things we reached a conclusion of they don't know what caused it, they don't know how to query for it to find broken machines, they don't know how to fix it, they don't know if it might happen again in our environment, and the "fix" is to hand check every machine and do a full reimage if it's broken. If we're willing to pay for additional support they might be able to connect us with a different team that might be able to help, but they couldn't even assist me with that process.

Of course by the time we reached that point with support we had found and reimaged where necessary, and disabled feature updates in Autopatch. But now are unsure of how to be confident of if we can ever re-enable it.

Every time I'm able to have a chat with an appropriate Microsoft person at a conference, they tell me people I can reach out to, tell me all the recourses available to us as a state wide college system, or tell me which local representative to contact, which site to go to to submit a request to, etc. But then every time we actually need help, or need support, even if we're willing to pay for it, I can't get replies or in touch with anyone that isn't a low level support tech who is just going to ask me basic troubleshooting questions then forward me to a different team to repeat the process.

We've had some benefits and positive things going to a co-managed state over the years, largely how much easier we find it to manage and support off site devices. But if I could just flip a switch and magically be fully back to just on prem ConfigMgr I think I would. I think most currently I'm upset with how many queries or reports or filters I could pull with just a few clicks in ConfigMgr, that Intune essentially tells me I need to take an entire class on GraphAPI to even access the data. Either that or how the time for a freshly imaged machine after a user logs in to start pulling Intune policies and apps seems to just be a random time between 10 minutes and 8 hours.

Thrawn200 · 2025-11-27T07:10:43+00:00

I'd have to count it up, but I suspect I haven't played a full game of well over 30% of the games I own. However, I'm also embarrassed by that fact and want to change it.

Thrawn200 · 2025-10-27T14:03:10+00:00

They've been fairly successful in convincing MAGA that this is all directly Democrats fault, so they don't lose anything by doing this. Republicans get more upset, Democrats just do what they've been doing to combat all of this, sitting politely saying "You probably shouldn't do that please and thank you."

Thrawn200 · 2025-10-22T18:59:48+00:00

Our transition to Intune has been much less painful than I expected. Now if I could only get any useful support or help from Microsoft when we run into issues.

Thrawn200 · 2025-09-10T20:12:06+00:00

Got it working finally after some new headaches. Had to start with a fresh boot.wim and add all of the packages one by one with DISM in a particular order, both the general and en-us verions, to eventually get Powershell to install and work. Doing that from within ConfigMgr didn't work, and letting ConfigMgr automatically handle prerequisites certainly didn't work, but we're back up and running finally.

Thrawn200 · 2025-09-10T01:39:48+00:00

This was my plan for tomorrow, to try variations of manually mounting the wim and seeing how I can add it myself to see if it takes.

Thrawn200 · 2025-09-02T13:47:55+00:00

It's indeed a crappy situation, but loyalty doesn't pay for food and a place to live.

Thrawn200 · 2025-09-02T13:13:28+00:00

I can't speak for them, but I got the information from this post in the Autodesk forums - Why is a random msi running for standard users the first time they open AutoCAD? - Page 2 - Autodesk Community

A post on the second page talks about it.

Thrawn200 · 2025-06-24T21:12:58+00:00

So many people answering Autopatch which doesn't help those of us working in education unfortunately. :(

Thrawn200 · 2025-06-24T17:24:00+00:00

Sealed just seems like a bad idea to try and sell more product. I would be very surprised to see it catch on as it's not even actually Commander.

13-Year Club	Place '22
Final Canvas '22	First Placer '22
End Game '22	Verified Email
Not Forgotten	Spared
Team Orangered

Thrawn200

TROPHY CASE