Campus Technology Insider Podcast April 2024
Rhea Kelly 18:57
Oh, that's great. That'll be a fantastic resource for really anybody.
Lev Gonick 19:01
For everybody. I mean, I mean, we, that site is serving, you know, for things like policies, they're serving for things like technology choices, ethics considerations, case studies, stories that are being told, videos of our students and our faculty testimonials in terms of what they're using. We just had a great event here last week, which we called the FOLC Fest, the FOL in FOLC is the Future Of Learning Community, FOLC Fest. And there were many, many presentations by our faculty and our students who've been going through these first sort of early stages. And, you know, the truth is, you know, they were able to share what excited them, what disappointed them, where they think the technology needs to get better. Some of the students, you know, were enthusiastic; others were quite cynical. All the things that you would imagine, but there was, you know, I think a really good community gathering, over 1,000 people came to that event from across ASU. And so you know, I think that's kind of, I think that's the way we roll here at ASU.
Rhea Kelly 20:10
So if you've got hundreds of projects going on on a rolling basis across multiple large language models, how do you evaluate which ones, you know, have potential for broader implementation?
Lev Gonick 20:24
Well, again, those are all done with our partners, again, our academic partners. The whole idea of kind of what works in the classroom is for our academic colleagues, and of course for the provost and her team. We're here largely in service to them. But again, thought partners, design partners, and we have an excellent relationship with the provost and her team in that work, we learned a lot, hopefully we're able to share things that are relevant to their world as well. On the technology front, you know, the commitment that we have here, that I think is informed by our long-standing institutional commitment, is that we're not waiting. I think there is a challenge right now: The world will divide into those who waited for perfect and those who got going when it was good enough. I think there's a debate right now as to whether or not we're at the "good enough" point. ASU is all in on good enough, with all the guardrails that we think are thoughtful, intentional, by our design, and we know we're gonna learn a lot because the technology is changing. The good news is we're in the room, and helping not only OpenAI but a number of our other technology partners, help framing the needs that we have here. And rather than just waiting for things that can be bought on a subscription basis across the entire university, to solve, you know, a challenge with getting through math using AI, or getting through biology using AI, we're actually designing our own sort of approaches to that work and offering an opportunity for startups as well as sort of this, the usual leaders in the space to join us in that journey. So I mean, just as an example, ASU has created a fabulous new way of learning STEM subjects, which is called Dreamscape Learn. It's an immersive, fully virtual reality environment that allows students to actually experience a discovery or an exploration of solving a major, either species-level or global-level crisis, and actually solving as a team, as a, as a group of explorers, solving those issues, also learn the science associated with those issues. That work is, literally has had over, well over 20,000 of our biology students, for example, through that process, and now we're working on how do you introduce AI into that environment, so that every student or at least every student group has in their actual virtual reality experience, essentially, either a, an expert, or a study partner, or a creative partner, who can help prompt them. And again, we, you know, we are tuning these so that it's not about getting the answer, because we won't give the answer, that's how the machines have been, are being tuned. But can actually help to keep students engaged, because we know a couple things about how students learn. Student engagement is one, and students love the virtual reality immersive experience. Keeping them engaged is about prompting them on a regular basis, and so again, the AI is able to serve really as a prompter. And over time, helping students be able to do, actually take more ownership of their own learning journey by them working with their AI tutor to help solve the problems at hand and not just waiting for the tasks to come down from the professor.