4 AI Imperatives for Higher Education in 2024
This is the heroic age of generative AI, as it were, with major developments under way and many changes happening quickly. Things will settle down in a bit, most likely, as new technologies become productive level services and as the big money and governments start corralling AI for their ends, at least until the next wave hits. By this I mean colleges, universities, and individual academics have the opportunity to exert influence on the field while it's still fluid. As customers, as partners, as intellectuals we can engage with the AI efforts. The engagement can take various forms, including creating open source projects, negotiating better service contracts with providers, lobbying for regulations, and issuing public scholarship. I hope campuses can grasp and support such work.
— Bryan Alexander, futurist and convener of the Future Trends Forum (excerpted with permission from "From 2023 to 2024 in AI, part 2")
3) Advancing AI Literacy Will Empower Innovation in Teaching and Learning
Within the next year, higher education will undergo a pivotal shift from enhancing digital fluency to advancing AI literacy and empowerment. This change is vital to align with the increasing presence of AI, transforming it from a mere tool into an integral part of academic and creative work.
The first phase is fostering AI literacy, where institutions will enrich curricula with AI principles, applications, and ethical considerations. This ensures the campus community is not only proficient in using AI but also in critically evaluating its impact and implications. Educators will recalibrate teaching to emphasize human insights and skills not replicable by AI, while preserving intellectual autonomy.
The progression toward AI empowerment will see institutions enabling innovative uses of AI in personalizing learning, advancing research, and enhancing administrative efficiency. This broader incorporation will transition AI from a complex computational entity to a partner in academia's collaborative fabric.
Realizing this vision necessitates ethical guidelines, strategic educational approaches, and fortified secure digital infrastructures. The goal for the forthcoming year is comprehensive AI integration that enriches human capability and reflects academic integrity.
— Kim Round, Ph.D., founding partner, Instructioneers LxD
4) AI Will Expand Across Teaching and Learning and Beyond
Generative AI will appear in curricula across the disciplines. While the first year of generative AI saw many educators experiment with this new technology within existing curricular frameworks, we will now see more formalized curricula focusing on AI broadly, and generative AI specifically. And this won't be confined to computer science departments; we'll see it in all disciplines and professions given the wide-ranging the implications of this technology. This will reflect how generative AI is a transdisciplinary issue par excellence, and how one of the most important goals for higher education broadly will be the development of critical literacies and transferrable skills around AI.
Colleges and universities will also begin to integrate generative AI technologies into their everyday operations and administration. We didn't see this happen immediately when Gen AI tools became publicly available because they aren't usually compliant with the data privacy and data use requirements in higher education — FERPA, HIPAA, research integrity, and so on. But as both institutions and vendors work to establish ways to license and use Gen AI technologies securely, we'll see them take hold in two ways. First, Gen AI will be integrated into specific aspects such as student support, and communications. Second, colleges and universities will work to establish secure access to their own foundation models for general use by all institutional stakeholders including students, staff, and faculty. To do all of this, institutions may need to evaluate how they can sustainably make these transformations, especially in terms of budget and data/computational infrastructure.