Coach or Crutch?: Using AI to hone self regulation (not outsource it)

May 6, 2025

Inge Molenaar, a Professor of Education & AI at Radboud University, shares insights on the critical role of self-regulated learning (SRL) in education. They discuss how AI can serve as a coaching tool rather than a crutch, enhancing students' ability to monitor their own learning. The conversation dives deep into the need for careful AI design, fostering independence, and ensuring technology supports, rather than diminishes, student autonomy. Inge also weighs in on navigating personal AI use for effective learning.

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INSIGHT

Core of Self-Regulated Learning

Self-regulated learning involves setting personal learning goals and monitoring progress to achieve them.
It integrates cognitive and metacognitive strategies to guide learning effectively.

ANECDOTE

Volleyball Serve Learning Example

A student intuitively corrected her volleyball serve without verbal feedback from her coach.
Immediate visual feedback helps learners monitor and adjust their performance autonomously.

INSIGHT

AI Makes Learning Visible

AI can analyze and visualize students' learning strategies and metacognitive processes through log data.
Such tools provide students with clear insights into their learning progress, enhancing self-regulated learning.

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In this episode, Libby and Owen talk to Sanna Järvelä and Inge Molenaar, two of the world’s leading scholars on self‑regulated learning (SRL).

Together they cover SRL 101: what self-regulated learning is and why it is a valuable skill. Self-regulated learning is students setting their own goals and then monitoring their learning to achieve those goals. Self-regulation can come more naturally in informal learning settings like sports, but it can be harder to monitor your learning and know if you're on track in school.

Sanna and Inge explain how technology can help to address this, and make the learning process more visible. AI systems offer valuable opportunities for better understanding and measuring of self-regulated learning, but need to be carefully designed. We want AI to be a coach not a crutch: AI systems need to reinforce self-regulated learning, not encourage students to offload it.

They also touch on the increasingly important question about how we self-regulate our own use of AI. When do I need to proofread this, when do I use autocomplete, and when do I turn AI off?

Guest biographies and links

Sanna Järvelä is Professor of Learning Sciences & Educational Technology at the University of Oulu, Finland, where she leads the LET research unit. She is co-Director of CELLA, the Center for Learning and Living with AI supported by the Jacobs Foundation.
Inge Molenaar is Professor of Education & Artificial Intelligence at Radboud University and founding Director of the Dutch National Education Lab AI (NOLAI). She is co-Director of CELLA the Center for Learning and Living with AI alongside Sanna.

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Credits: Sarah Myles for production support; Josie Hills for graphic design