Campus Technology Insider Podcast March 2024
Listen: Getting Comfortable with "I Don't Know": Educause's 2024 AI Landscape Study
Rhea Kelly 00:08
Hello and welcome to the Campus Technology Insider podcast. I’m Rhea Kelly, editor in chief of Campus Technology, and your host.
Recently Educause released its inaugural AI Landscape Study, which polled the higher education community about AI strategic planning and readiness, policies and procedures, impact on the workforce, and the future of AI in higher education. For this episode of the podcast, I sat down with report author and Educause Senior Researcher Jenay Robert for a deep dive into some of the thinking behind the study, what the survey findings tell us about institutions' AI journeys, and how "I don't know" might be the theme of the day when it comes to AI. Here's our chat.
Hi Jenay, welcome to the podcast.
Jenay Robert 00:59
Hi, thank you so much. I'm really excited to be here.
Rhea Kelly 01:03
So Educause recently released a pretty extensive survey report on the AI landscape in higher education, which is great, I think it's so interesting. But I always like, when you're talking about AI, I like to start with definitions. So could you talk about how you defined AI for the purposes of this study?
Jenay Robert 01:23
Yeah, and this is a great starting point. I have to say that I'm just back home from being at the very first Educause Innovation Summit, where we focused for a day-and-a-half on AI. And this was a big piece of setting the stage there too. And that was actually a big takeaway for a lot of the attendees saying, wow, I realized that I'm probably not meaning the same thing when I say AI and other people are saying AI. So it's a great starting point for any conversation around AI. In the survey instrument itself, right in the front matter, which I know everyone reads very carefully, we did define AI by the National Artificial Intelligence Act of 2020. So just briefly that reads, "a machine-based system that can, for a given set of human-defined objectives, make predictions, recommendations or decisions influencing real or virtual environments." So we were really trying to focus on that broad umbrella of artificial intelligence.
Rhea Kelly 02:26
I also noticed that the report mentions how common it is for individuals to conflate general AI with generative AI. So how did that impact your interpretation of the survey results? I mean, like, people, obviously they were given the definition, but that doesn't mean their brain's still not conflating those two things.
Jenay Robert 02:45
Yeah, exactly. And like I said, you know, I know everyone reads that front matter really carefully. So you know, we know people are probably skipping that. And we know that even if they did read it carefully, it's probably kind of hard to tease that out. And, but yeah, I think generally, just kind of keeping that in mind as we go through the results of the study, we, we just kind of know that for the most part, a lot of respondents have that in mind. It's, even if, even if it's someone like you or me, where we kind of know that there's, there's this difference and operationally things are happening differently for different types of AI at our institutions, that still just happens to be top of mind. So you know, I think for any survey, you have these sort of, you know, in research nerd speak, we'll say limitations of the study, but really, it's just about framing, kind of understanding the extent to which you can generalize findings, and so forth. So I think that as, as we kind of go through those results, we just kind of keep that in mind, and then have conversations like this where we say, hey, you know, we, we can look at these findings in this way or that way, but we know that there's probably a focus on generative AI when, when people are answering, and so what's happening with this other kind of AI, you know, and so just trying to tease it out a little bit more in, in more sort of like qualitative work.