Managing Learning in an Era of Generative AI

The rapid adoption of large language models (LLMs) in education has reignited long-standing concerns about cheating, academic integrity, and the erosion of student effort. These concerns are understandable, but they risk obscuring a more fundamental issue. Long before generative AI became widely available, many educational systems already struggled with a deeper pedagogical problem: students are often positioned as passive recipients of information rather than active participants in the learning process. From this perspective, generative AI does not create a new crisis for education; rather, it exposes an existing one. The central educational challenge raised by LLMs is therefore not whether students will use them, but whether educational institutions will teach students how to use them in cognitively active ways.