In EP 37, John and Jason sit down with Anna Mills to discuss the reality of "agentic AI"—browsers that don't just assist students but can potentially become the student. We move past the panic to discuss advocacy, "humanizing" strategies, and how we can respond without giving up on online learning.

See complete notes and transcripts at www.onlinelearningpodcast.com

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Guest Bio:

Anna Mills is a leading voice in the responsible integration of AI in education, drawing on nearly two decades of teaching experience and a deep commitment to open educational resources. Her expertise spans AI literacy, academic integrity, and the critical use of AI in higher education, work informed in part by her role as the sole education specialist invited to test GPT-4 pre-release for OpenAI. She is widely recognized for her influential resource curation, national and international faculty development sessions, and published contributions in major higher-ed outlets. Mills also authors the widely adopted OER How Arguments Work and advises multiple AI-focused initiatives—you can find Anna Mills here on LinkedIn.

Resources:

Anna’s Substack (great summary of Agentic AI and Education / lots of links and resources) https://annamills.substack.com/p/the-time-to-reckon-with-ai-agents
John’s LinkedIn post on how Comet Browser can impersonate a student in an online course
John’s YouTube video showing Comet impersonating a student
Anna’s LinkedIn post about Yun Moh’s request of Canvas.
Annotated reading conversation
- Perusall
- Hypothe.sis
Forbes’ Article “Colleges and Schools Must Block Agentic AI Browsers Now, Here’s Why” https://www.forbes.com/sites/avivalegatt/2025/09/25/colleges-and-schools-must-block-agentic-ai-browsers-now-heres-why/ (not mentioned but a good one!)

Theme Music: Pumped by RoccoW is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial License.

Transcript

We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions or can help with any corrections!

EP 37 Anna Mills - Oct 28, 2025

[00:00:00] John Nash: Hey. Quick pause we're collecting listener testimonials, and so if this show has influenced your thinking or your practice in any way, you can share that with us at onlinelearningpodcast.com. There's a link at the top of that page. You can't miss it. Just click that it takes just a second and we'd love your testimonial.

[00:00:19] Jason: That's right, just right at the top in kind of obnoxious yellow font, to be honest. But it's a black background and so it's accessible, but still, you should see it at the top.

We'd love your feedback.

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[00:01:03] John Nash: So many steps, but I tell you it's worth it. Alright, to the episode.

[00:01:08] Jason: To the episode.

[00:01:09] John Nash: I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston.

[00:01:11] Jason: John. Hey everyone. And this is Online Learning in the second half the Online Learning Podcast.

[00:01:15] John Nash: We're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation we've been having for the last three years about online education. Look, online learning has had its chance to be great, and some of it is, but there's still some ways to go here. So how can we get to the next stage? Jason,

[00:01:32] Jason: Well, how about we do a podcast and talk about it?

[00:01:34] John Nash: I love that idea. What should we talk about today?

[00:01:37] Jason: John, there's a lot of a lot of people talking on LinkedIn. This might be the end.

[00:01:41] John Nash: Do you think so?

Is this where I disclose that I am not actually hosting today, that my Comet browser is hosting for me today?

[00:01:49] Jason: This is Comet John. You're doing a great job. It's very, it's almost as believable as the real John, and maybe we're not so bad off after all. But yeah, the, all the talk this week on LinkedIn has been about, agentic AI taking over. The one quote that I took away, I won't name the person, but, on a comment on LinkedIn, said, online asynchronous learning is cooked. And um, I've learned this is not a good thing from my son who uses this term. It can be a good thing somebody can be cooking like in a good way, but cooked means bad.

[00:02:24] John Nash: Yep. Yep. So, we have someone in the house today who's going to take us down a path of thinking this through. This may actually be one of the episodes where we may accelerate this one out because this topic is so hot. And so, who have we got today?

[00:02:39] Jason: Today we have Anna Mills, and we actually just met on LinkedIn because of some of the writing. She was doing around this, and so Anna, welcome to the podcast.

[00:02:48] Anna Mills: Thank you. I'm very excited to be here and talk with you. I think it's pretty urgent and,

[00:02:54] Jason: Yes, I wish.

[00:02:55] Anna Mills: can do.

[00:02:56] Jason: I wish it was under better circumstances, let's just say. No, this is actually the very circumstances why we have this podcast to talk about these things. And Anna, maybe first to give us some context - give us just a little bit of background for yourself and what your role and work is right now.

[00:03:12] Anna Mills: Sure. I'm a community college writing teacher. I've taught for many years in the San Francisco Bay area, and I wrote an open educational resources textbook that's free online. I dove into discussions of AI in education and writing education. Before ChatGPT was released and I did some testing for Open AI early on and I an advisor on an app that invites students to use AI feedback. So, I've been interested in both using and critiquing AI. And I've been teaching online for some years now as well. And I've just been really active in social media discussions because I think we have to come together and join to find our way in this terrain.

[00:03:55] Jason: Yes.

[00:03:55] Anna Mills: glad there are a lot of educators out there doing that.

[00:03:58] Jason: Yes, exactly. What do you teach online? Just out of curiosity? Do you use some writing?

[00:04:03] Anna Mills: I teach English composition required academic reading and writing. Fundamental kind of support for thinking in college. You know, I think it's even more important now with AI to be able to read and write and edit and think critically but, doing that online asynchronously. How do we maintain some accountability - how do we maintain the value of that course credit when it can be outsourced? So that's where we are. I think it's going okay, it's shifting terrain, so.

[00:04:32] Jason: Yeah. So, if you're teaching writing online, my guess is, as soon as the public ChatGPT went public three years ago now, that was probably a significant concern from you from the beginning, right?

[00:04:44] Anna Mills: Yes, sure. And I give a lot of workshops on building your own multi-pronged strategy for reducing AI misuse if you're teaching writing online, asynchronous. think it starts with, good pedagogy and designing for intrinsic motivation and bringing in relationship and all the things that we do know how to do and can lean into. but I don't think that's enough. We have to have some guardrails too. So that's where I've gone into some process tracking, some AI detection, used non punitively very cautiously.

[00:05:18] John Nash: So Anna, I'm wondering if you could give us a little level set on the main topic we're going to talk about today, because we might have new listeners that come in or are wondering, oh, agentic ai, and what are you talking about and what are we worried about? And there's probably just a baseline we could start from about what is mechanically occurring, and then we could talk about a little bit about what the growing concerns are.

[00:05:43] Anna Mills: Yeah. It's really pretty simple. It's just a differ...