At the start of the 2023-2024 school year, thought leaders from four universities came together at one of our Digital Literacy Café webinars to share how they had established initial guidelines and policies around the use of generative AI in academics.
On August 28, 2024, we gathered in our first Digital Literacy Café session of the new school year to revisit this topic. We learned that, in just 12 months, higher education leaders have evolved their approaches to AI in profound ways.
We heard from leaders at three schools that have come up with innovative programs to responsibly integrate AI across the curriculum, as well as one EDUCAUSE researcher who recently coauthored a report on AI integration in education. Read on to discover their strategies and learn from their insights.
Elevating AI in the curriculum at California State University, Fullerton (CSUF)
Our first guest was Dr. Amir Dabirian, Provost and Vice President of CSUF. He shared that his institution has followed a three-stage process to begin embedding AI into the curriculum:
- An informational stage that began spring of 2023 and involved a series of presentations about AI technology and its capabilities
- A developmental stage that ran from summer 2023 through spring 2024, in which CSUF established a Faculty Development Center to create resources on engaging AI critically, developed AI guidelines, created an IT infrastructure for AI tools, and more
- An operational stage that began in spring 2024 and continues today, and has involved a survey of faculty and students, workshops on generative AI, and a financial incentive for faculty to infuse AI into one of their spring 2025 courses
In one success story, Dabirian said that a team that connects writing and AI pedagogies reported that 94% of faculty who attended their workshops have already incorporated AI into their teaching.
“Generative AI will be part of our day-to-day lives — it’s going to be our assistant, our co-creator,” he said. “We think the pedagogy is going to change…generative AI will be embedded in everything, and it will elevate what teaching and learning is going to look like and what the curriculum looks like in the future.”
Promoting new digital literacies at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA)
Our next speaker was Dr. Melissa Vito, Vice Provost of Academic Innovation at UTSA. She said that, from the beginning, she and her colleagues set out to develop a community that could support teaching and learning with AI. They decided to examine their current policies on academic integrity rather than lead with generative AI policy changes or new guidelines, because they wanted to create a safe environment for experimentation.
“We have a massive focus on promoting digital literacies,” she said. “We also have a very strong classroom-to-career approach where we want all of our students to leave fully prepared for careers. And we knew then that [AI] would be a skill and an understanding that our students would need to leave with.”
She and her team took a multi-pronged approach that included:
- Drawing on a cross-discipline community of faculty champions to establish a peer learning network
- Presenting webinars with faculty speakers as well as national experts on AI
- Regularly surveying students and faculty to understand their perceptions of AI
- Hosting a UT-wide conference on generative AI and teaching, learning, and ethics
- Establishing badging and micro-credentialing programs in AI for students in professional and continuing education
“We are supporting faculty innovation and creativity in a big way,” Vito said. “We really want our faculty to feel free to try things, to pilot ideas, and know they can take some risks.”
Embracing experimentation at the University of Delaware (UD)
Dr. Matt Kinservik of the University of Delaware spoke next. A Professor of English and Associate Dean of Humanities, Kinservik agreed with Dabirian and Vito that “policy is not going to get you where you need to go” when it comes to thoughtfully and ethically integrating AI into the curriculum. He said that each school needs to embrace “experimentation guided by your institutional mission and values.”
UD has launched its own experimentation with the following initiatives:
- Establishing an AI Center of Excellence and a Provost’s Working Group on AI for Teaching and Learning
- Joining 18 other universities in the Ithaka S+R initiative, Making AI Generative for Higher Education
- Establishing a proprietary generative AI teaching and learning tool that’s based not on all of the content available on the web, but on all instructor-generated content from UD
- Set up a working group of over 36 faculty, staff, and students to get people moving on implementing AI in the classroom
“We're not rewriting policy, but we are kind of interpreting our policy and providing guidance to help people navigate this,“ Kinservik said. “We’re really flooding people with opportunities to learn and experiment and implement in their own practice.”
Surveying
Our final guest speaker was Jenay Robert, Senior Researcher at EDUCAUSE. Robert talked about the shift she and her colleagues have seen from the early days of ChatGPT, when educators were primarily concerned about academic integrity, to today, when they’re more curious about generative AI and how it will impact people’s daily lives and the workforce. “This connects to our responsibility to prepare our students for this digital world and a workforce that may look very, very different in a few years,” she said.
EDUCAUSE recently worked with a panel of educators to create an action plan for establishing AI policies on campus. A big takeaway, she said, was that institutions can look to their existing policies on privacy and security, procurement, data governance, and more. “You don’t always have to reinvent the wheel,” she said. “There’s already quite a bit of infrastructure in place.”
To learn more about the perspectives and experiences of these educators — and to hear their strategies for change management and more — you can watch the webinar video.
