Artificial intelligence and digital technology are reshaping higher education worldwide , disrupting how students are assessed, fragmenting attention in the classroom, and exposing deep inequalities across global education systems. In this episode of Current History, I sit down with Dr. Lidia Lozano, a language educator and researcher with teaching experience at Princeton, Columbia, and Barnard, research experience at Harvard and the University of Barcelona, and advisory roles with the European Commission, the European Parliament, and UNESCO.
Lidia has spent her career at the intersection of language, culture, and education. She has taught Spanish as a foreign language at some of the world’s leading universities, collaborated with UNESCO on its Global Education Monitoring Report, and served as a cultural expert for EU institutions. She is currently completing a master’s in international relations at Harvard, where her research examines how AI interactions may be changing the way humans communicate with one another.
We cover how AI is upending traditional assessment in higher education. Take-home essays and written assignments are becoming unreliable as measures of student learning, and educators are responding by shifting toward oral exams, in-class presentations, and collaborative tasks that reveal how students actually think. Lidia sees this as a largely positive development: a long-overdue move away from evaluating finished products and toward understanding the learning process itself.
We also talk about what it means to teach in a screen-saturated world, where sustained attention is harder to maintain and the classroom has to compete with an endless stream of digital stimuli. And we examine the global dimension: AI systems trained predominantly on English-language and Western sources risk widening existing gaps between technologically advanced and developing countries, and disadvantaging the world’s multilingual education systems.
The conversation closes on what AI cannot replace. Lidia makes a compelling case that the authenticity, nonverbal presence, and genuine human recognition that great teachers provide are foundational to learning.
What You’ll Take Away
How AI is pushing some universities to rethink assessment, and whether that’s a change for the better
The shift from evaluating finished products to observing the learning process
How screen saturation is affecting student attention in the classroom, and what educators can do about it
Why AI’s reliance on English-language and Western sources may create disadvantages for multilingual education systems
What research suggests about authenticity, nonverbal communication, and human connection in the learning environment
How Dr. Lozano sees the future of the classroom, and where she thinks AI should and shouldn’t play a role
About the Guest
Dr. Lozano is an expert in language acquisition and cross-cultural understanding. She holds a PhD in Philology from the University of Barcelona. She has teaching experience at Princeton University, Columbia University, and Barnard College, and research experience at the Harvard University and the University of Barcelona. She has co-authored articles, learning materials, and a multimedia course on language acquisition. Dr. Lozano has also worked in project management and administration at the United Nations in New York and volunteered for UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring Report. Additionally, she has served as cultural expert for the European Commission and has been selected for inclusion on the European Parliament’s list of research experts.
For Further Reading
Statistics on teacher pay can be found here: UNESCO Global Report on Teachers (2023)
Nomophobia: Is the Fear of Being without a Smartphone Associated with Problematic Use? — Kaviani et al., International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2020
Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (Review) - David Fowkes, International Journal of Constitutional Law
The Importance of Non-Verbal Communication in Classroom Management — Özad & Uygarer, Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2009
Data on language distribution on the internet: W3Techs: Usage Statistics of Content Languages for Websites
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