Performance is not Learning: The Human-AI Interaction Challenge
- Date: Friday 24 April 2026, 11:00 – 12:30
- Location: Coach House
- Cost: N/A
The Centre for Research in Digital Education (CRDE) is happy to host Distinguished Professor Dragan Gašević from Monash University, Australia, to address current challenges of AI and learning.
Location: Coach House, Hillary Place/Hybrid (Teams link here)
45-minute talk followed by 30-minute question and answer session.
Abstract
AI holds the promise of making us more productive. But is it making us better learners? Evidence is mounting that the same AI assistance that boosts performance can gradually erode the very skills and knowledge we need to thrive in an AI-integrated world. At the heart of this paradox is metacognition: when AI not only supports task completion but also takes over monitoring, planning, and evaluation that learners would otherwise need to carry out themselves, learning and performance begin to decouple in ways that are hard to see and easy to ignore. This talk maps that divide across distinct patterns of human-AI interaction, from overreliance to effective synergy, and examines what it takes to reach the latter. Drawing on evidence from a series of empirical studies, the talk identifies implications for AI systems, learning environments, and evaluation approaches that sustain human capability development alongside productivity.
Bio
Dragan Gašević is Distinguished Professor of Learning Analytics in the Faculty of Information Technology and the Director of the Centre for Learning Analytics at Monash University. Dragan’s research interests center around AI, data analytic, and design methods that can advance understanding of self-regulated and collaborative learning. He is a founder and served as the President (2015-2017) of the Society for Learning Analytics Research. He has also held several honorary appointments in Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America. He is a recipient of the Life-time Member Award (2022) as the highest distinction of the Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR) and a Distinguished Member (2022) of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). In 2019-2025, he was recognized as the national field leader in educational technology in The Australian’s Research Magazine that is published annually. He led the EU-funded SHEILA project that received the Best Research Project of the Year Award (2019) from the Association for Learning Technology.
The Centre for Research in Digital Education (CRDE) is located in the School of Education, at the University of Leeds. The Centre is working towards a future where all individuals across learning contexts engage with and benefit from critical and aspirational human-centred research into the relationships around digital technologies in education and society.