Episode 46: Soroush Sabbaghan

“Every time you engage with these systems, you gain something—but you also lose something.”

“Human agency is your capability to make informed decisions, to act with intention, and to exercise judgment.”

What happens when the red lines we draw around generative AI start to blur? In this 46th episode of The Opposite of Cheating, Dr. Soroush Sabbaghan reflects on how he’s crossed the lines he once swore he wouldn’t—assigning AI-generated readings and using AI in student feedback—not out of compromise, but in service of integrity, transparency, and pedagogy.

As the first GenAI Educational Leader-in-Residence at the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning at the University of Calgary, Soroush has developed tools and frameworks to support educators and students navigating GenAI with nuance. He argues for assignment-level AI policies, aligned with specific learning outcomes and ethical goals—not blanket rules—and introduces his system that distinguishes between AI-free, AI-scaffolded, and AI-integrated tasks.

Soroush shares his deep concern for student agency, the asymmetry between human and machine learning, and the risks of a purely transactional approach to education. He invites us to live, teach, and design with a mindset of intellectual humility and epistemic integrity—recognizing that every AI interaction has tradeoffs.

You can follow Soroush and his work on LInkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/soroush-sabbaghan/) and at https://soroushsabbaghan.com/

Episode Resources:

Communicating Generative AI Use: https://teaching-learning.ucalgary.ca/resources-educators/course-outlines/communicating-generative-ai-use-your-students

AI Bot for Designing Courses: https://www.smartie.dev/

AI Bot for making AI Policy: https://ai-policy-mumf.onrender.com

(Disclaimer: episode quotes and summary were created using Youtube's Transcript and ChatGPT and edited by a human. Any errors are the responsibility of the human).