Campus Technology Insider Podcast February 2024
Rhea Kelly 21:22
So any policy should definitely be a living document that kind of gets revisited often.
David Wiley 21:29
Yeah, absolutely. You had mentioned the big partnership announcement between ASU and open AI. I think that that is absolutely a portent of the future. I think from, from the procurement side of things, generative AI is the new LMS. I'm not saying that generative AI will replace the LMS, or that it has the same features of the LMS. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying from a procurement perspective, 25 years ago, no institution had a learning management system. Today, every single college and university has a learning management system. They figured out how to budget for it, they figured out how to run it, they figured out how to support it. It was, it's too important a piece of infrastructure for them to not have. Now some institutions drug their feet and some were early movers, whatever, every school has an LMS now. Generative AI will be exactly the same. And I think it will even follow the same kind of contours. Like with learning management systems today, there are several big vendors, they compete for contracts, there are these decision-making processes where an LMS selection committee gets spun up, and they review them and they have criteria and they pick one. And then typically what happens is, at least today, is the vendor hosts that in their cloud somewhere. They provide the kind of technical support and hosting. And they give uptime guarantees and all the SLA kind of work that needs to happen around a piece of core technology infrastructure. And I think that will absolutely happen for the majority of colleges and universities with their generative AI tools. However, there are always institutions of a certain kind who don't want to buy things from things from vendors — they want to go build their own, and they want to host their own, and sometimes they want to form big consortia and do that together. You might think about Sakai, in the learning management system space, right? Where schools with a lot of resources and a lot of technical capability and certain outlooks toward the world, they just, they want to make their own and they want to host their own and be in control of their own. And you'll see stuff like that happen in the generative AI space as well. There'll be consortia of these more technical, better resource, resourced schools that will come together, probably not to build foundation models, but probably to work together on fine-tuning models and refining models that they will host and they will run and they will provide to consortium members as a benefit of membership in the consortium. I think if you just look at the last 25 years of the LMS market, I think that is a great roadmap for where generative AI is heading on campus, except I don't think it's going to take as long.
Rhea Kelly 24:39
That's really interesting. But it's basically going to become part of the tech stack that is centrally managed, I suppose, you know, by IT, with all of that governance process in place for selection and implementation and stuff. That kind of sounds like policy to me, you know, if you're going to be doing a technology implementation of that scale, there's going to be boundaries, I guess. Like, how is that going to affect the capacity for innovation?
David Wiley 25:14
Well, remember back in, back in 1998, when schools were adopting Web CT, there was no faculty committee. Like it didn't work the way then that it does now, because it was early days, right? And it was a lot more, I don't know if fast and loose is the right phrase to use. But it was, there's, there were a lot more things that were unknown, and a lot more experimentation happening. A lot of campuses, one college would have adopted Web CT, and another college at the same uni, inside the same university might have adopted Blackboard, somebody else was using ANGEL. Like it wasn't even coordinated on a campus, right? It took a while, it took a decade or more for people to start to think that actually, this is a critical piece of infrastructure. It should not be Moodle on a desktop computer, pushed under a desk in somebody's office, that's running the LMS supporting the entire College of Business. Right? That's how it started during the kind of experimentation phase, but eventually the technology matured, the hosting capabilities that were available matured, people's understanding of how important that infrastructure was developed more. So I think all those things are coming for generative AI, but we're not there yet. It's like 1998 for generative AI right now. There's a lot of experimentation. There's a lot of different things going on. I've got students in my class, some of them are using Chat GPT, some of them are using Claude, some of them are using Bing Chat, and there's different reasons why they've each chosen those. And I've purposefully not tried to kind of force any consolidation, because I don't know. Right? We're all learning these things together and trying to feel our way forward. I think it's too early for, you know, very restrictive policies here.