Proactive Decision-Making Leads to Stronger Policies and Procedures
Everyone on campus wants to adopt AI, from back-office staff to faculty and students. To get a handle on AI tools, policies and governance, many institutions are establishing cross-departmental task forces to shape how the technology is used. These teams are helping to develop universal practices for adoption across an institution, so policies remain consistent and the IT team has visibility into the tools that are part of the campus ecosystem.
This visibility is extending to all third-party application providers. Higher education is no stranger to vendor data breaches, and security leaders are ramping up their risk management to ensure they can trust that their institutional information is safe. This means developing assessments that vendors must adhere to and procedures for how to act in case a breach does occur. These institutions are proactively addressing this risk to ensure they’re ready for anything.
In the classroom, rather than piecing together disparate audiovisual tools that work in a pinch, institutions are standardizing classroom design to ensure that no matter what room a faculty member enters, they will know how to operate the technology. This forward-thinking design strategy eliminates headaches for all parties and streamlines teaching and learning. And the device loaner initiatives implemented during the pandemic have evolved into thriving programs that make hardware available to students in need year-round.
Higher education institutions are pushing back against their pattern of improvised solutions, redundant technologies and reactive postures, and are opting to flesh out their policies and procedures and act with purpose. For an industry long defined by having to do more with less, doing things intentionally is most important.
