Disclosure. This story trends more toward commentary than is normal for this newsletter.
In a letter sent to students the Centre for Accessibility (CfA) expresses their excitement and enthusiasm for adopting AI notetakers:
We are excited to share a major update … Beginning in September 2026, students approved for note-taking … [will] receive access to Genio Notes.
This recent change in direction by the CfA unleashed a torrent of debate on reddit. Many UBC student commentators expressed concern with the displacement of student notetakers and the accompanying environmental harm of large data centres needed to power AI technologies. Some were more sanguine.
What the CfA has to say about dropping student notetakers
I asked people at the CfA what motivated the change in direction away from human-based labour. I was told:
As you are an instructor who will be implementing this change, [we are] happy to provide some background and answer questions related to its implementation. However, if you are seeking comments for publication in your newsletter, [we are] required to obtain approval through UBC Media Relations (July 9, 2026).
This rather puts me in a bind. I had told the author of the above note I intended to publish a story in A Campus Resident. I made my intentions explicit. Their email response provided a great deal of detail as to how and why student notetakers are being dropped in favour of a software program. I can’t really comment on what they may have said because of their opening (quoted above).
I do on occasion get these kinds of responses: the “don’t quote me or use any of this publicly, but here it is on the downlow.” I would rather not be told anything, than being told things under confidentiality constraints. With some university officials I now begin my emails with “please only tell me what is publicly available” in order to avoid the confidentiality trap.
When I was an elected Director of the UNA (2012-2016), I was was part of a meeting between the UNA Executive and some members of the UBC Executive. We (the UNA folks) weren’t told why we were meeting, just that it was important and please come. When we got there the UBC folks handed out an info sheet and told us everything was confidential. I wrote about it at the time (Feb. 29, 2016):
This space is where I would have talked for about three paragraphs about a set of new issues. But I can't say anything about them because I have been placed in a situation in which I am compelled to be complicit with something I find ethically galling. In fact I will likely be criticized for saying as much as I have said already. However, it has become clear that the problem here at UBC is that the senior administrators have run this place like their own private fiefdom and use secrecy as a tool of governance. Some people feel a sense of self-importance when included in a special secret. Others of us feel used.
CfA’s response wasn’t about pulling a veil over anything, it was motivated by a desire to inform an instructor of the details of a policy change that will have an effect on his teaching while conforming to the constraints placed on them by their employer. Nonetheless it complicates navigating between what I can find publicly available and what may be privileged information in the email. It effectively limits my ability to comment even if the email only contained publicly available information.
Here is UBC’s official Genio FAQ
Testing the free version
Lacking a voice to draw on from CfA to inform this story I turned instead to experimenting with Genio myself. I signed up for a 30 day free trial. I created an ‘event’ (what Genio calls a lecture or class), uploaded my powerpoint slides and an audio recording of the accompanying lecture and proceeded to play along.
My first thought was thank goodness I don’t have to use this system. I didn’t find it particularly intuitive. But that’s probably just me.
Students can mark the lecture as they listen. They can indicate things that are important, add their own headings, and add annotations. The AI summary will then incorporate all that in its own review.
I found the AI summary focussed on content (facts, terms, definitions) over lateral or creative thinking. That is to be expected. But it did it in a way that froze out an individual’s understanding, centring instead the AI’s ability to create coherence from my storytelling. This is reflected in how it summarizes and generates quizzes.
The quizzes stay close to the literal content. There is no higher order thinking. No attempt to apply understandings in novel situations. No ability to take, say, a lesson about the TRC and use it to reflect on a more recent public commission. Nor is there capacity to consider parallel but different social justice issues. These are all things I would encourage my students to do while they are taking notes themselves. I encourage less time recording what I say, more time on making sense of it and trying to deploy it in new ways.
The thing about taking one’s own notes by hand is that in doing so we make them part of us, we infuse aspects of ourselves into what we jot down. We might get something wrong, but it is uniquely wrong and true to oneself. Wrong in creative ways AI notes never will be.
To attend to the actual learning objectives in courses I teach a student does need to master the content of the readings and lectures. But that is just a starting point. Learning goes beyond memorizing details. I assume mastery of the details. However, I assess students on how they can integrate conceptual knowledge, how they might deploy it in novel circumstances, how they take what they might learn from me and see it’s utility in their other courses. A focus on remembering details can overlook transformative aspects of learning. Learning involves making knowledge part of who we are, to be able to use it to think with, to reflect on, and to guide our actions. Learning and taking on knowledge as our own is critical to being a thinking, feeling person. Learning is more than just memorizing what the prof said. But the Genio form of note taking seems to be based in a ‘what the prof said’ mentality
Genio seems to create a platform to assist memorization. It appears to leave higher order integrative thinking out of the picture. It might be ‘reliable,’ but I fear it may regress too fast to the mean.
The focus on memorizing details rather than synthesizing information makes one wonder which disciplines the creators had in mind when it was developed.
As a former student note taker: having the responsibility of providing good notes for someone else was a motivating factor to go to class and pay attention in undergrad. Sometimes I knew who I was assisting and we’d meet up outside of class to chat—I met some lovely people. There’s a lot to be lost in removing the humans out of the service, although I can imagine a machine ensures some uniformity in the quality of notes.
- Cailin
Thanks Charles. I am mindful of your difficulties in finding the balance between public versus whispers versus lived experience against employment relationships. I appreciate your perspective and thanks for pursuing this topic. And a quiet thanks to Callie for providing such an eloquent response/comment.