Kevin A. Bryan
Assoc Professor of Strategic Management, University of Toronto; Chief Economist, Creative Destruction Lab Toronto; cofounder, AllDayTA; cofounder, NBER Innovation PhD Boot Camp. http://www.kevinbryanecon.com and @AFineTheorem on Twitter
- Folks who know things: what has led so many universities to make speakers "register as suppliers" to get reimbursed? There is no way the law requires this and it's incredibly annoying. I assume the answer is "bureaucrats create bureaucracy", as always, but am I missing something?
- Something I didn't expect that we can see in www.alldayta.com data: study effort is so correlated with exams. Across courses, if use on Finals week is "1", relative use on midterm week is .7, and on non-exam weeks .05-.1. For courses with no exam, use always sticks at the lower level.
- So much studying & revision in All Day TA classes happens via platform that I can see exact day, time, nature & type of studying students are doing. Gap (in my classes but also for customers) between exam weeks and others makes me thing we need more testing, not less, and more spread out over term.
- (Also, we set a new one-class weekly record for use this week! This is a big Principles class at a large public univ, but 39k uses of Intelligent Quiz (an AI-driven adaptive quiz) + 3k direct questions in one week. Wild. Across term- with exams + your good setup- 40-80 uses/student is normal.)
- A must watch - Mokyr's Nobel Prize speech on how ideas matter for progress, where AI fits here, and where bad institutional decisions might harm things. His ageless energy and unlimited memory for history are exactly today as I remember as his student 15 years ago. www.youtube.com/live/jQCkCcu...
- A theorem: AI debate today is a rehash of CP Snow's Two Cultures & the Bluesky-level-hostile response by Leavis. But Snow was right - it *should* be as embarrassing for educated people to not know to Laws of Thermodynamics (or basics of how ML works!) as to not read Shakespeare.
- Hiring this year in economics or management? I try to read every JMP on innovation, entrepreneurship, or econ of AI; why not make the list public? Here's 54 candidates on the market this year (link below). Many great papers + NBER Innovation PhD boot camp grads! kevinbryanecon.com/2025innovati...
- Doing my part on CBC's natl econ show to get normies to learn what 'feeling the AI' means. (More importantly, "compute sovereignty nonsense b/c you don't control stack" & "options aren't adopt AI at car plant or don't adopt, but adopt & keep plant or it goes to China".) www.cbc.ca/listen/live-...
- What a great day: legends of innovation economics Mokyr, Aghion and Howitt win the Nobel. Joel was a PhD advisor of mine, so need a full article! Included: good & bad explanations of the Indus Rev, Aghion's charisma, influence of Jon Hughes, French fashion houses: kevinbryanecon.com/mokyraghionh...
- I know it's my company, but All Day TA AI-driven quizzes are so good. Student cheat on all take-home work. How do you get them to learn? Do even better than we used to by having them learn *as they do low-staked hw*. Here's use just this week in a Texas univ course - students really use this. 1/4
- Toss my lecture audio, slides, handouts into a module. A crazy AI workflow pulls out learning goals. AI then spins up questions (you can approve or not) from your docs plus context on why students might get them wrong. 2/4
- For students, *I don't care* if they get right answers. Why? If wrong, they have to explain to AI what they were thinking before moving on. Cheating doesn't save time b/c I don't grade on correctness, just whether you work through the quiz! Try it here app.alldayta.com/university-o... 3/4
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View full threadPS - 1) Yes, we're building this out even further. Everything a student does, it should be as close as possible to a tutor who knows what you want to teach sitting by their side. 2) And All Day TA also *reports back to you* summaries of these conversations so you know where students went wrong!
- New class on Progress starting tomorrow - I'm amped! Trying to put some rigor from economics, economic history, and philosophy on a topic very much in the air. It will be awesome. (And first class running slides in my all html browser-based slideshow program - details soon!) 1/2
- Syllabus here: kevinbryanecon.com/Bryan-Progre... Course AI here on AllDayTA (to be updated weekly as we progress, including with AI-driven adaptive quizzes!): app.alldayta.com/university-o... 2/2
- Perhaps of interest to folks with social science PhD programs: at Rotman, we added an experimental 3 session "tech stack" training in addition to the math boot camp. My lecture was "how to do reproducible, open, quick research", aka version control, LaTeX, AI. 1/2 kevinbryanecon.com/techstack.html
- I cover project setup, version control, my daily very simple workflow, what to use for code (Python or R), what AI is high value, why LaTeX, how to do it easily, why all this matters even for qual projects, and links to exactly what to d/l. My own practices were very sloppy-this is a better way. 2/2
- I know lots of skepticism about AI here, but let me show you something we put out which I think is a huge improvement for university assignments. This is "Intelligent Quiz", a feature on All Day TA (www.alldayta.com). Assignments now have tons of cheating + little feedback to us or the students. 1/9
- The whole deal with All Day TA is "AI for university classes that is pedagogically-sensible, uses your language, and emphasizes your content only". What does that mean for assignments? Questions at level of your class, covering your learning goals, and giving students feedback the way you would. 2/6
- That's exactly what we built. Our system already interpreted the learning goals of your course, topic by topic. For question banks, we propose these using our AI, and once you edit and approve, we spin up question banks of varying difficulty. You can manually add, edit or kill these, of course. 3/6
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View full threadPS - An awesome dev of ours was testing the featureand told me "I got it wrong on purpose at first for testing, but then forgot to divide by 2 for expected value until the system brought me there!" Exactly. Imagine this help for the student, and then summed up & reported back to you for each hw!
- Beautiful Day 1 of school here at U Toronto! Love seeing the students back, and that the undergrads all dress exactly like we did in '98 (I saw 3 Nirvana T-shirts, literally). I'm doing my best to crank up the rigor in my courses - we're taking the role of univs back to '98 also!
- (Btw, anedcotes on "the times they are a-changin'", for the student club booths set up on the main drag, the busiest was the Bible Club - I was equally surprised -, second was the Baking Club. The more political booths were very empty...)
