OSUIT professor forging new frontier for online learning

OSUIT professor forging new frontier for online learning

Friday, January 30, 2026

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An upcoming national conference will feature the work of a renowned OSUIT physics and mathematics professor who is making STEM online education more dynamic and accessible for OSUIT students.

Dr. Joseph Hébert will present his work during the AAC&U Transforming STEM Higher Education Conference, which will be held online from March 18-20. The conference is dedicated to advancing science, technology, engineering and mathematics in higher education by spotlighting the perspectives, worldviews, voices and desires of STEM educators.

The conference's ultimate goal is to make STEM a more vibrant and vital part of higher education.

"Frankly, I've been working on doing precisely that for about seven years now," Hébert said.

Hébert was ahead of the game when the COVID-19 pandemic forced schools to switch to remote learning in 2020.

"I'd already been working on putting my courses online for the previous year," he said.

Hébert said he has been leveraging technology to improve education since he was an undergraduate student in the late 1980s.

"It's something that I've carried over throughout the years," he said.

An accomplished physicist, Hébert has been teaching at OSUIT since 2018. He is co-leader of the AI Integration Committee. This OSUIT subgroup develops modular training materials on AI for faculty and staff professional development and for incorporation into existing courses. His career began in 1992 as an application physicist at the Superconducting Super Collider Laboratory in Waxahachie, Texas. He also owned and operated an electronics fabrication facility in the North Dallas telecom corridor.

"Dr. Joseph Hebert is setting a new standard for online education through his unwavering commitment to student-centered learning and technological advancement," said Dr. Melissa Dreyer, assistant dean for the Division of Leadership & Academic Foundations School of Technology, Arts, Sciences & Health.

Hébert is fully committed to making online learning a stimulating educational experience for his students.

"Since 2020, everything is new, everything is different. We have fully embraced online learning, and it's not like we're going back," he said. "It falls to us to pioneer this new frontier of online learning. And we need to make sure that however we do it, that we do it effectively, that our students get the education that they're paying for, and not just get so many points for clicking on an online forum."

Early into his online education expansion effort, Hébert put his physics labs, assessments and other educational materials online. However, he knew it wasn't enough.

"I quickly realized that the students were not going to come to me to get help with what they didn't understand, that I had to bring the information to them where they were, which was in their dorm, at a cafe, sitting in their backyard or on their front porch or wherever, working on their computer," he said.

Hébert also wanted to address faculty members' concerns about online cheating and students using Google when taking exams online.

"To my mind, the focus was, 'Why are the students asking Google instead of asking me?' And the truth is, with the one or two rare exceptions, I don't think that they were asking Google because they wanted to cheat," he said. "I think they were simply looking for the path of least resistance, for the most accessible interaction they could find that would answer their questions. And guess what? It's a lot easier to whip out your smartphone and ask Google a question than it is even to email your instructor. Because Google is right there, live, on the spot."

Hébert made his quizzes and assessments more formative and began relying on dialectical assessments.

"In other words, in a math course, it's not sufficient for the student to simply write out the formula for calculating permutations. They need to explain how it calculates permutations," he said.

He also emphasized instructor-student interactions, providing students with feedback on how they could improve their responses to quizzes and other classroom exercises.

"It dawned on me that the first casualty of the move to online learning was the interaction between the instructor and the student. Because I'm not there when the questions are occurring to them, and so they go to Google," he said.

Hébert developed coding that led students through assessments, quizzes, laboratory exercises and other assignments.

The coding provided students with a dialogue box to interact with.

"It would actually check their work, give them feedback on the spot right then, right there," he said.

Creating code for each quiz, assessment and laboratory exercise was time-intensive.

"Each and every one of them requires somewhere around 200-300 pages of programming code that's embedded into the document itself. That meant that I was looking at probably no less than two years of continuous development to fully finish transferring just my physics courses to this approach," he said.

Hébert is now working on using generative AI to optimize and expedite the process. He plans to embed AI apps directly into Canvas or whichever online classroom his students are using. One such AI app is a tutor bot for his math courses.

"It basically becomes a type of chatbot that the student doesn't even have to leave Canvas. When they have a question, they just type in the question right there, and the AI app gives them their answer based on the instructional material in that module of the course," he said. "Obviously, using a large language model, an AI engine, I can get a much broader range of responses than I could writing the code myself."

Hébert's work is helping both students and educators, according to Dreyer.

"As a campus leader in integrating artificial intelligence into instructional design, Dr. Hébert is leading professional development that empowers educators to effectively leverage AI tools in the classroom," she said.