Campus Technology Insider Podcast March 2024
Rhea Kelly 13:28
So now's the time to survey your constituents about AI and then and then benchmark against the Educause report?
Jenay Robert 13:37
Yeah, you know, and, and find out what the unique needs are for your, folks at your institution. So depending on geographically where you are or what, even just the culture of your school, the types of students you have, the, the sort of acceptance of technology of your faculty, right, the extent to which faculty are integrating technology, these all play such a role. How much funding you have — some institutions have the funding and the capability to hire a new VP-level AI director, for example, and other institutions are just trying to get by with the staff they have that have already gone through cuts in the last couple of years, and they're trying to figure out, okay, well now we have to add these responsibilities on top of existing job roles. So, you know, there's such a wide range of institutions and just people and needs, that collecting that local data is really vital.
Rhea Kelly 14:39
Yeah I love how you touched on how it's impacting job descriptions. That actually leads right to my next question, because there's a section of the report that focuses on that higher education workforce and how AI is, is like changing that up. So do you think we're going to see AI making its way into more job titles?
Jenay Robert 14:59
I, so I hope so, but I'll say not kind of in a blanket way I hope so. I think this really kind of connects to conversations we've had at Educause in the past around data governance, and you know, everything related to AI is just data heavy. It's just the nature of the technology. And so I do hope that data and data governance and privacy, data privacy and data security, I hope all of those topics start making it into formal job descriptions, and then as appropriate, AI to make it into job descriptions. So I think that for this question in particular, sometimes, the jury is still out in some ways, we're still trying to figure out how prominent the role of AI is going to be at our institutions. And that's why I'm hedging a little bit in terms of do I expect to see AI in all job roles? Well, I think our community needs to kind of make some decisions about how they want to use AI first, and that's not really my place to impose that. So I'll be interested to see the extent to which that happens. But what I, I do hope is that if an individual is asked to take on a significant role relating to AI, that that is codified in their job description. And I mentioned some reasons for that in the report. Folks are burned out in higher ed. We've got two recent workforce reports out of the research team at Educause and another upcoming workforce report, and across all three areas, which were, let's see if I can remember off the top of my head, teaching and learning workforce, the IT workforce, and privacy and security workforce. So across all three areas, we see that folks are saying they're overworked, they're overwhelmed, they're burned out. And so really what we're seeing now is a lot of new responsibility being added for folks without that formal description, job description, and so forth. So that, that creates more opportunity for burnout. It can limit access to resources that folks need to get those, to get that work done, and so forth. So kind of a yes/maybe answer to your question. But definitely if people are doing these things, they should be formally recognized and have a space and the resources to do them.
Rhea Kelly 17:21
I believe that in the teaching and learning workforce study, AI was one of the top sort of time-consuming parts of the, you know, people's jobs, and perhaps contributing to that burnout, I wonder.
Jenay Robert 17:36
Yeah, I think, you know, in the teaching and learning area in particular, it's a really interesting, we had a conversation, a few of us at the summit this week, around impact to teaching and learning in particular, where it's, of course, on a regular basis, faculty are always developing courses, keeping up with course content, modifying course content. That's sort of the standard practice and part of the job of teaching. I've, I've taught courses in the past, I know that that's the case. But the sort of splash that generative AI in particular has made over the last year, is really creating a need for that reworking and retooling sometimes in very dramatic ways. Sometimes a course is completely outdated overnight. And so I think that's where we're seeing faculty, yes, they are always needing to update their courses, but now in this very extreme way. And there aren't more hours in the day, and there isn't less research to do, there isn't less student advising to do, there aren't fewer committees, there will never be fewer committees at our institutions. But, you know, nothing has adjusted. It's just oh, by the way, before you start that class in three weeks, you're going to need to completely rewrite it. So I think that's really where there's sort of a unique challenge for teaching and learning folks.