Campus Technology Insider Podcast March 2024
Rhea Kelly 23:45
Yeah, I wanted to talk a little about opportunities and risks, but I think we've touched on the risks already. But what are some of the opportunities that institutions are seeing, I guess, from, from their perspective?
Jenay Robert 23:57
Yeah, I think probably the biggest one people are excited about and are talking about is the opportunity to serve our students better. And we see this in a couple of different places in the study. So in the beginning of the report, I talk a little bit about institutions' motive, the motivation that they had for engaging in AI-related strategy, and then the goals of their AI-related strategy. And so really kind of interesting result here, where institutions were very much motivated by kind of this need to keep up, basically. So saying that, you know, students are already bringing this technology to the classroom, and we don't want to fall behind the times, that sort of thing. But then in terms of goals, those goals are very much focused on student success. So things like preparing students for the future workforce, creating new and better ways of teaching and learning, and so forth. So yeah, I think in terms of opportunity, that's the major one is what can we do for better personalized learning experiences, streamlining things that students don't need to take up their time with, meeting students where they're at, 24/7 sort of support for students. I can say that we did, as part of the summit this week, we did a little like hackathon, where folks kind of designed these, what would, what would be like a dream tool that you would bring. And many of them focused on student success and supporting students holistically, even outside of the classroom. And then I think, sort of distant second, third, fourth to that, we see people interested in opportunities to reduce workloads and streamline operations at institutions. And again, that's an area of mixed sort of, will, will AI really help us streamline our workloads, or will we just offload some stuff and pick up some new things? Our editor at Educause made the, made the observation that we all thought the washing machine was going to free up our time, but look how that turned out. So an appropriate comparison.
Rhea Kelly 26:06
Are there any other takeaways you think are important to mention?
Jenay Robert 26:12
Yeah, I really just want to reinforce this idea that the jury's still out, you know, we, we still haven't made these decisions. And I really want folks to feel that they can take an active role in the future of AI in higher ed. We spent a lot of time talking about that both in the research and in the summit this week. I think all too often, we're so busy in our institutions, that we're kind of trying to keep up with what's coming at us. But through research like this, and through the research of things like our Horizon Reports and our Horizon Action Plans, we're trying to give our community the tools that they need to create the future that they want to see instead of being recipients of just whatever the world decides. So that's, that's probably one of my biggest takeaways. And then the other is, I would love for folks to really pay attention to what is not being talked about in the popular discourse. So there's lots of talk about academic integrity and students cheating and what's, what, what can we, what should we be limiting, and concern about data privacy and security. We don't, we don't see quite as much as we need to around the access and equity issues, thinking about the accessibility of the tools. I know that people kind of hand wave a lot of times about reinforcing various biases, but those are some of the most central issues that we need to keep top of mind. Yeah, and so, and, and the other one I always like to make sure, even I forget, because it's not that much in the discourse, is environmental impact of large-scale computing of any kind, including AI. And so I hope to see that becoming something talked about a little bit more soon.
Rhea Kelly 28:03
Yeah, definitely some very real problems out there that, that tend to get overshadowed by the teaching and, like the plagiarism concerns — those are important, but, but definitely not the most, or the only important thing.
Jenay Robert 28:17
Yeah, absolutely.
Rhea Kelly 28:21
All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on. It was great hearing all about that survey.
Jenay Robert 28:26
Thank you so much. It was great to chat with you. And I'm happy to chat about any research anytime. I'm a huge research nerd. So any research that you want to have a conversation about — I'm there.
Rhea Kelly 28:42
Thank you for joining us. I'm Rhea Kelly, and this was the Campus Technology Insider podcast. You can find us on the major podcast platforms or visit us online at campustechnology.com/podcast. Let us know what you think of this episode and what you'd like to hear in the future. Until next time.