- AI in Education
- Higher Education
- Adult Learning
- Terrabase
Vibe Coding in Education: Useful, With a Few Caveats
A few universities and colleges are now running short workshops where people who have never written a line of code build a working app in an afternoon. You describe what you want in plain English, an AI writes the code, and you keep nudging it until it does roughly what you had in mind. It’s been given the name “vibe coding”. Not necessarily an ideal term, but it seems to have stuck.
Oregon State University’s AI Literacy Center has a 90-minute session on it in November. Gateway Technical College in Wisconsin is running a four-part series with Microsoft for people with no programming background, and IBM SkillsBuild has a series open to adult learners and university students.
Why I think it’s a good thing
I’ve been using AI tools in my own work for a while now, for software and for putting together teaching resources. What I keep noticing is that the person who knows the problem is usually the best person to describe it. A tutor knows where their learners get stuck. An administrator knows which part of the enrolment process wastes everyone’s time. Being able to knock up a rough version yourself and show it to someone saves a lot of back and forth. It also gives people a far better feel for what AI can and can’t do than a set of PowerPoint slides ever will.
Where it gets harder
An app built in an afternoon is a prototype. That’s fine, as long as everyone knows it. Once something holds learner records, attendance or marks, a different set of questions comes up:
- Who can log in, and what can they see?
- Is personal data handled properly under UK GDPR, particularly if it’s being sent to an AI service?
- Does it work for someone using a screen reader or just a keyboard?
- Can you tell who changed what, and when?
- Who looks after it once the person who built it moves on?
None of that is a reason not to try it. It’s just why the prototype and the system you rely on usually end up being two different things. Most of our work at Terrabase is on the second sort: enrolment, attendance and reporting systems that need to keep working term after term.
A course in the Chester area
We’re considering setting up a local vibe-coding course in the Chester area, run by qualified educators. The idea is a practical, hands-on introduction for staff and adult learners: build something small and useful, and find out along the way where the limits are and when it’s worth bringing in a developer.
If you’re interested in finding out more, do get in touch.