EDUCAUSE 2024: Institutions Embark on Cross-Campus Generative AI Initiatives

Use Cases for Generative AI Across Campus

At Oregon State University, one of these use cases lives in the student-staffed security operations center. CISO David McMorries said that while his main concern is making sure generative AI tools are secure, it has been a useful resource for students in the SOC.

“It levels the playing field,” he said. “The AI that we use for security doesn't solve security problems, just aids the analysts to do better work.”

At Indiana University, AI is helping students in career readiness. Microsoft Copilot helps students refine their skill sets, prepare for interviews and find job opportunities, said Ge Yan, executive director of digital technologies at IU’s Kelley School of Business. Feeding the AI model with information relevant to students’ interests and skills can generate personalized learning plans, sample interview questions and relevant job opportunities.

DISCOVER: Generative AI can enhance learning opportunities in higher education.

“The big benefit is access to these career options,” Yan said. “First-generation college students do not have the network or knowledge from their circles to guide them through school, and generative AI can ease the concern. It drives down the anxiety, because you can test with AI first, even before you ask a career coach or your professors.”

Patty Patria, CIO at Babson College, said employers are looking for graduates with AI skills, so she is making sure students are learning how to use generative AI now so they’ll be prepared in the future. Equity can be a barrier to generative AI use, but Patria said Microsoft’s model makes it easy for all students to have access to the tools.

“I think the nice thing about working with Microsoft and their license is the equity,” she said. “If you have a certain license level, all of your faculty, staff and students can have access to it, so there's no equity issues with the students.”

Navigating Generative AI Use in the Classroom

In the classroom, questions about generative AI use remain, particularly among faculty. In “Driving Instructional Value with Practical Generative AI Implementation,” representatives from the University of Texas at Austin discussed their partnership with Grammarly in development of a faculty toolkit with lesson plans and activities to implement AI for teaching and learning.

Julie Schell, assistant vice provost of academic technology at UTA, discussed some of the nuances present with AI use in the classroom. When ChatGPT first hit the scene, UT Austin banned the use of AI detection software because they believed this software is in conflict with the university’s academic honor code. Students want and will need to know how to use AI in the future, but to do so successfully and ethically, they will have to navigate AI’s ambiguity.

LEARN MORE: This university developed an AI use policy.

“I think it's really important to know that you're smarter than the generative AI,” Schell said. “It doesn't have your expertise, it doesn't have your experience, it doesn't have your ethics, and it doesn't have your creativity, and we need to help students see that.”

As the UT Austin team went through their internal learning technology adoption process to vet Grammarly as a partner in this initiative, the UT Austin Office of Academic Technology was also developing its AI Forward – AI Responsible Framework.

“We worked with stakeholders to identify the six key limitations of engaging with generative AI: security and privacy, hallucinations, misalignment, bias, ethics and cognitive offloading,” Schell said. “We wanted to make sure that whenever anyone introduced anything related to generative AI in the classroom, our students were also exposed to those six key limitations.”

Taking this one step further, in the fall of 2023, Academic Technology Manager Evan Daniel was brought on at UT Austin to begin development of the generative AI faculty toolkit, known as “The Faculty Guide to Getting Started With AI.” The goal was to design a guide that would be useful for a faculty members across disciplines with a range of AI experience.

AI can be either transactional or transformational, Schell said. Users can either feed it a prompt, get a result and accept that result without question, or they can enter a refined prompt and use higher-order skills to critically review the result.

“AI is full of so many paradoxes. It's a paradox cocktail,” she said. “It can teach you almost anything, but it can also teach you bad information. It can speed you up and help you do work faster, but it can make you sloppy. It can help you expand your creative voice and help you have more creative ideas, but it can also take new ideas from other people and make you less original.”

Taking this into account, the resulting toolkit is designed to help faculty think critically about the information they’re receiving from generative AI.

EXPLORE: Set guardrails for using generative AI at your institution.

“For the folks who are really just at the beginning, having a step-by-step guide is by far the easiest place to get started, and something that they can do feeling confident and having some agency over the process,” Daniel said.

The feedback on the toolkit has been “overwhelmingly positive,” Daniel said. The goal now is for faculty to build on this work and share their findings with each other.

“We are in the process of taking this this experience and developing these lesson plans, which are pedagogically forward,” Schell said. “We have the instructors thinking about what they want. What are some of the common challenges or misconceptions that students might have for the content that they're going to be learning? What are the learning outcomes? What do you want students to know and be able to do after engaging with this lesson plan? That's good pedagogy, and we want to scale that, particularly with our AI engagements.”

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