Maybe someday, "I taught an LMS today..."--but not yet

AI--yep, it's been infringing on fundamentals of writing instruction, as almost every professional conversation in the field would indicate. Teachers are scrambling to find reliable plagiarism checkers. Blue books and oral exams are re-emerging. People are eyeing retirement so they don't have to deal with this.

I have clearly staked out territory in my career as an advocate for asynchronous online writing courses (OWCs), working from my conviction that the written digital exchanges among OWC students are arguably better for their learning than onsite courses. I wrote in my 2009 book Teaching Writing Online: "The online environment also provides us with an opportunity specifically because of the subject matter of the writing course [...] Our constant efforts to work with student texts are unique and irreplaceable, and our model of technology use can be perhaps the most humanistic in the academy" (xxi)

"Unique and irreplaceable"--I feel like this been a wheelhouse for writing teachers, and a space that allows us to maintain student writing--as well as identity--authenticity.

But recent coverage of the release of Einstein, an agentic AI program that allegedly connects with common LMS systems and basically completes all coursework for students, has (even) me wondering about the endeavor. As reported in a February 26, 2026 Inside Higher Ed article by Kathryn Palmer, Einstein "logs into Canvas every day, watches lectures, reads essays, writes papers, participates in discussions, and submits your homework—automatically.”

This program and others that will undoubtedly follow carry the threat of a non-human agent making its way through a course in ways that may be indistinguishable from a human. Damn, I could teach a bot!

Michelle Kassorla, Associate Professor of English at Georgia State University | Perimeter College, Dunwoody, provided a good write-up/review of Einstein on her Academic Platypus Substack. Kassorla signed up for Einstein using a debit card with no money on it and her son's computer (to avoid institutional IT woes). She immediately saw that it's pricey for a college student: The Plus plan, the apparently lowest-tier, is $40/month. She recorded her experience and then quickly (in 2 minutes and 30 seconds) discovered "that Einstein is just a wrapper over OPENCLAW! AAAAAAAH I had just installed an agent that runs in the terminal in my son’s computer—potentially exposing EVERYTHING on it to the agent. I got off the recording ASAP to delete the program from my son’s computer." (1)

You can read more about Kassorla's take on a program of which she says, "However, it is probably duping students, who have no idea how dangerous it is."

Yet she ends with a glimmer of hope--at least for now. Kassorla makes some suggestions that online writing teachers can certainly relate to: "What can we do about this? Design your courses carefully, scaffold, make them process oriented, and put in some hard stops where students have to do a hard thing that you grade before they can move on."

At this point, there's still teacher volition, and I want to emphasize that the IHE article perked up my antenna a little because it says Einstein (my emphasis) "can help with any subject, including math, physics, computer science, history, literature and economics, and even keeps working when students are asleep." In that list, I didn't see writing--I see all content courses.

We're still teaching humans. There are challenges out there, but we're not spending our time only making bits in Canvas "smarter," not yet. 

Note:

1) According to Wikipedia,"OpenClaw serves as an agentic interface for autonomous workflows across supported services. OpenClaw bots run locally and are designed to integrate with an external large language model such as Claude, DeepSeek, or one of OpenAI's GPT models."