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The Syllabus Is Not the Course: AI, Course Design, and the Junk Playground
AI can produce a complete-looking university course in minutes. But the most important part of a course may be the part it can't build. On AI as instructional designer, learning as a journey, and what a 1943 Danish junk playground might teach educators now.
Generative AI can produce a "complete-looking" university course in minutes: learning outcomes, weekly topics, readings, assignments, rubrics. For anyone who designs courses, that is both an extraordinary capability and a quiet trap. In Episode 107 of Modem Futura, Sean Leahy and Andrew Maynard reflect on more than a year of using AI as a private instructional designer, and on why the most important part of a course may be the part these systems are least able to build.
From sounding board to finished product
Used as a thinking partner, AI can be remarkably helpful. It can test whether a sequence holds together, surface readings no single person would find, and catch overlap between weeks. It is also good at turning existing material into worksheets or self-contained interactive pages that work around the limits of a learning management system. The trouble starts when the tools move from responding to finishing. Ask for help thinking through a course and, increasingly, they return a complete one: plausible, polished, and conventional. These systems are very good at reflecting what has worked before and much weaker at imagining what hasn't been tried (which is no surprise, but increasingly frustrating).
Content is abundant; journeys are designed
The distinction the hosts keep returning to is between content and journey. What remains scarce is the intentional design of experience, the sequence of challenges and moments of realization that carries a learner somewhere new. It echoes John Dewey's argument that education should build on learners' natural impulses toward inquiry, communication, construction, and expression rather than fill them with facts. A course that a single AI prompt could reproduce may be telling its designer something.
A junk playground for the AI age
The episode's most generative idea comes from 1943, when a playground designed by Danish landscape architect Carl Theodor Sørensen opened in Emdrup, Copenhagen. Sørensen had noticed that children were more drawn to piles of scrap than to the playgrounds he designed, so he gave them a space full of loose materials and a play leader to support rather than direct them. He later described it as both the ugliest and the best of his works. Andrew is now exploring what a digital junk playground might look like: a curated space where students build with whatever AI tools they choose and learn through the making.
For educators, that points to a different role, less authority over learning and more what Sean calls an elevated co-participant in it. When nobody yet knows the rules for learning alongside AI, play, experimentation, and care may be among the most rigorous approaches available.
Listen to the full conversation on Modem Futura.
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Subscribe to Modem Futura wherever you get your podcasts and connect with us on LinkedIn. Drop a comment, pose a question, or challenge an idea—because the future isn’t something we watch happen, it’s something we build together. The medium may still be the massage, but we all have a hand in shaping how it touches tomorrow.
🎧 Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/4yZg4X0
🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/55Z17htCK9S3HKDEGDQd7w?si=D99hOJiUQdOK7jaKn5kHJA
📺 YouTube: https://youtu.be/Ob6PjC4tGVg
🌐 Website: https://www.modemfutura.com/
What an AI Hallucination Tells Us About First Contact
There's a thought experiment that keeps surfacing in futures work, and it goes something like this: if a genuinely alien mind tried to communicate with us, would we recognize the signal, or would we just call it noise?
On the latest episode of Modem Futura, we play another round of Futures Improv — a format where an AI-generated scenario lands cold on the table and the two of us have to think our way through what it might mean. This time the scenarios kept pulling us back to one question: what counts as a mind, and what do we do with the ones we don't recognize?
The first scenario — a riff on Stanislaw Lem's Solaris — imagines first contact with a moon-sized organism that communicates only by generating vivid hallucinations inside our astronauts, drawn from their own repressed memories. It isn't hostile or friendly. It may not even know we exist as separate beings. The premise sounds outlandish until you notice that we already struggle to have a real conversation with an octopus.
The second scenario hands humanity a single question to ask a time traveler from the year 8,002,701, who carries one piece of verified information — humanity survived — and a sad expression. What do you ask, and what do you deliberately choose not to ask? It's a thought experiment about scarcity, priorities, and the difference between surviving and flourishing.
The third — the one that sticks with you — imagines a service that backs up your consciousness to the cloud every night while you sleep. Ten years in, the backups begin to diverge. They dream differently than you do. Who, then, has the right to your name, your relationships, your sense of self? And the question that arrives quietly behind it: how would you know you weren't the backup already?
None of these scenarios resolve, and that's the point. Futures Improv isn't about predicting which of these worlds will arrive. It's about practicing the kind of imaginative attention we'll need for the technologies that already are — embodied AI, longevity research, neural interfaces, the slow erosion of the line between physical and digital selves.
The conversations get weird. Occasionally they get genuinely strange. And sometimes, in the middle of joking about Elon Musk being reconstituted as a banana, we land on something serious about what it means to be human in an age that keeps redrawing the edges of mind.
🎧 Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts, or watch on YouTube.
Subscribe and Connect!
Subscribe to Modem Futura wherever you get your podcasts and connect with us on LinkedIn. Drop a comment, pose a question, or challenge an idea—because the future isn’t something we watch happen, it’s something we build together. The medium may still be the massage, but we all have a hand in shaping how it touches tomorrow.
🎧 Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/4vodLdY
🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1242zwOf2ZsHgpN1UnF5OM?si=dLiVkWUjTv2f-XdAHS8x3A
📺 YouTube: https://youtu.be/4vCILufh2RU
🌐 Website: https://www.modemfutura.com/