Frederick Wehrle: Optimizing Adult Learning with AI

Frederick Wehrle, Assistant Dean for Academic Innovation and Learning at UCLA Extension, discusses his research on using AI to optimize adult learning. Wehrle focuses on developing AI-powered instructional tools and approaching learning and course design from a neuroscience perspective. He shares practical strategies for educators and learners to keep pace with the changing needs of industry, including advice on the best ways to use AI for learning and development. 

 

Transcript

Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning. 

Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. 

Kaitlin LeMoine: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in.  

Julian Alssid: We spend a lot of time in the show, in our consulting engagements, talking about best practices for building effective, engaging programs and learning experiences for adult learners. It's a topic I find endlessly fascinating.

Kaitlin LeMoine: As do I Julian, building programs grounded in the principles of andragogy, and allowing adult learners to demonstrate what they know and can do is so critical. 

Julian Alssid: Couldn't agree more. And I often think back to our time at Southern New Hampshire University, where we helped to build College for America that project based, competency based online program was a real breakthrough moment in higher ed. 

Kaitlin LeMoine: It really was. College for America was designed to reach adult learners who had many skills but had not previously earned a college degree. The program offered them a way to demonstrate mastery of competencies through projects aligned to real world deliverables that met academic requirements in an online and asynchronous format. 

Julian Alssid: Our guest today is doing some really fascinating work in the space of adult learning and course design, taking the notion of learning, design and optimization to a whole new level. 

Kaitlin LeMoine: He certainly is. We're excited to have Frederic Wehrle on the show with us today. He's the Assistant Dean for Academic Innovation and Learning at UCLA Extension. Frederick joined UCLA in 2023 after serving at UC Berkeley Extension since 2018. Before immigrating to the US, Frederick led accreditation and International Relations at business schools in Paris, France. He's held faculty and administrative positions in France and in the US, and served as an advisor and mentor to startups, nonprofit organizations and universities worldwide. Grounded in research on innate and in learned behavior, Frederick focuses on developing AI powered instructional tools and applications of those tools to adult learning. Essentially, he's approaching learning from the perspective of neuroscience and exploring how we can optimize it. Welcome to Work Forces, Frederick.  

Frederick Wehrle: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, and thank you so much for the very kind intro. I'm very excited to be with you.

Julian Alssid: Well, and we're excited to have you here as well, Frederick, welcome to get us rolling here. Caitlin said a bit about your background, but we'd love to hear in your own words about your background and what brought you to your work.  

Frederick Wehrle: Most fundamentally, I would say my background is in behavioral sciences, human behavioral sciences. I specialized during my studies, actually, back in Germany, on behavioral ecology, neuroscience, anthropology and bioinformatics, and my key interest there was innate behavioral patterns and pre existing biases. So things that we are born with in terms of mental pathways, and I've been fortunate to be able to do a PhD in Paris at the Sorbonne where I was specializing in consumer behavior, which is kind of this subgroup of management and marketing sciences that actually looks how marketing and marketers are able to manipulate people, and then tries to explain how that works and give the tools to corporations and policy makers, I would say, to regulate if necessary. So when I was saying hey, I actually study, from a biology or biological perspective, how humans react without knowing that they do or act without knowing that they do, that was very interesting for the people in that field. And so that really was, let's say, my education background, I was able and lucky to become a faculty relatively early on in business scho