BRUNSWICK — On Monday at the University of Maine Augusta building in Brunswick, students sat down for an afternoon class on artificial intelligence — what it’s good for, what it’s bad at, and how to responsibly harness new and ever-evolving technology.

“Can you tell it to do it in large type?” one student asked during an exercise as the teacher pointed to a ChatGPT response on the board. The class mumbled in agreement. They couldn’t see the text, either.

The instructor, Bill Davenport, asked the chatbot to increase its text size. And, to his surprise, the next answer displayed in 20-point font.

The moment was a prime example of how Midcoast Senior College students are constantly teaching their teachers, Davenport later said. It’s a welcome side effect of having a student body with decades of life experience.

Midcoast Senior College has been providing college-level courses to local seniors for the past 26 years. With courses from “the romantic era” to “the intelligence of plants,” the classroom environment resembles a college lecture hall, but with a different age demographic.

The college is one of 17 similar institutions in Maine aimed at low-cost learning experiences for seniors, according to the Maine Senior College Network.

The Midcoast-area college has four terms a year and typically offers more than a dozen courses each term. About 250 students register every term, said Donna Marshall, the college’s executive director.

MSC teachers — especially those accustomed to the younger population — said it’s rewarding to interact with students who truly want to learn.

“Unlike the teenagers I spent my life teaching who think they know everything but don’t really know much, the seniors bring so much life experience,” said John Haile, an instructor who joined the senior college after retiring from teaching high school English. “So, if I’m teaching a Shakespeare poem about love, teenagers think they know — but they really don’t — whereas the seniors bring lots of true experience.”

SENIORS ‘ENGAGING WITH AI’

When it comes to the topic of AI, Davenport said seniors who start off anxious about the technology come to embrace it and challenge him with interesting and thought-provoking questions.

Doug Zyskowski, 80, said he had no experience or knowledge of AI before taking Davenport’s class.

“I’m a technical dunderhead,” he said.

So far in the course, he has learned that it’s important to double-check answers provided by AI. He has also learned about the most effective ways to prompt AI models to get the answers you’re searching for.

“[AI is] something that I think a lot of people realize they need to learn,” Zyskowski, of Boothbay, said.

Student George Sergeant, of Brunswick, said he can’t see himself using AI after Davenport’s class, but wanted to understand it better. He said he worries about AI’s potential for spreading misinformation and what damage it could do in the hands of bad actors.

“[It used to be that] you could rely on newspapers and Walter Cronkite — you could trust them as a truthful source of information. But people don’t have faith in that [anymore],” said Sergeant, 84.

In response to students’ concerns, Davenport said that emerging technology has always been “disruptive” — from ChaptGPT to the printing press. Later this term, the class will have conversations about the ethics of AI and how it fits into our lives, a lesson Davenport calls “AI citizenship.”

THE ‘JOY OF LEARNING’

Marshall, the executive director, has worked for the college for about 10 years. She said she has been struck by the “vast experience” that senior learners bring to classes, recalling a lecture she attended on “The Brothers Karamazov.”

“I was sitting next to historians and theologians, people who knew their Russian history, they knew languages, they knew their religious theology; it was like sitting in an upper-level graduate seminar,” she said.

Outside of the classroom, MSC also hosts “wisdom” speaking series in the summer and winter, held at local churches. The free lectures consistently draw at least 150 people of all ages, Marshall said.

MSC teacher Haile serves on the college’s curriculum committee along with Leona Dufour, a fellow retired English teacher. The committee interviews potential teachers — who all work on a volunteer basis — and helps them build their syllabi.

Both have participated in MSC courses from both sides of the classroom, teacher and student. One of Dufour’s favorite courses she has taken was about Thucydides, the Greek historian. Haile loved teaching the poetry of Robert Frost and enjoyed learning about writer Edward Thomas as a student.

Without tests, papers or expectations, students can focus on the “joy of learning,” Dufour said.

“We don’t have to write papers; we don’t even have to answer questions in class,” Dufour said. “We can sneak by not having read the assignment but get what we need from the lecture or from the discussion, and then go back and read what we should have. It’s just purely enjoyable.”

Triggered by its growing popularity, the college recently signed a lease on a new, bigger home just next door to the current office on Middle Street — with space for administration and a multipurpose room for meetings and smaller classes.

And for seniors looking to learn something new, course registration for the second spring term of 2026 opens on March 9.