4 AI Imperatives for Higher Education in 2024
— Trey Conatser, Ph.D., director, Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching, University of Kentucky
In 2024, higher education needs to take a holistic look at the positive impacts AI can have across the entire campus. This year will see a broadening of conversations about the impact of AI beyond teaching and learning to look at how AI can enhance the student experience, provide operational efficiencies, improve research, and perform other aspects of our missions. Careful thought will need to be given to how our curriculums will evolve to prepare students to enter a workplace where AI is pervasive. We also need to take a deeper look at the skills and roles needed from our own employees and necessary changes to policies and governance to provide guiderails and structures for the adoption and use of AI.
AI holds great promise for transforming the way students will obtain services by leveraging AI's ability to understand natural language and provide smart automated responses and actions based upon a wide variety of information we know about each student. Schools that spend 2024 developing a unified strategy to leverage AI to reduce the friction our students encounter in obtaining services and provide actionable insights and interventions will have an advantage in being able to adopt and benefit from these tools as they mature.
Institutions will also need to develop ways to understand the ROI and total cost involved in AI solutions, while navigating a rapidly evolving set of AI tools being developed by a wide variety of companies attempting to gain a piece of this marketspace.
The service improvements, insights, and efficiencies that this new generation of AI tools will provide will set a new bar for student expectations for how they interact and receive services from their schools and enable new services and efficiencies. 2024 is the year to be planning and organizing to take full advantage of them.
— David Weil, vice president, Information Technology & Analytics, Ithaca College
About the Author
Rhea Kelly is editor in chief for Campus Technology, THE Journal, and Spaces4Learning. She can be reached at [email protected].