Embracing AI | Education | insightonbusiness.com

• By MaryBeth Matzek

Instead of worrying about how his students may misuse artificial intelligence (AI) in their assignments, Paul Belanger, a writing professor at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, encourages students to use the new technology.

“It’s our responsibility to teach students about the guardrails around AI and how to ethically use it,” he says. “We want to help students learn how to use AI in a professional way.”

Belanger, along with UW-Green Bay colleague Kris Purzycki, were presenters at a June event at Lakeshore Technical College designed for higher education faculty and staff to learn more about AI and the role it can play in higher ed. Microsoft TechSpark U.S. Program Manager Michelle Schuler says the event was about helping people go from “talking about AI to using AI.”

Two hundred people from colleges and universities across Wisconsin attended the event, which LTC President Paul Carlsen says created a level playing field so everyone felt they were in the same place when it came to AI implementation.

“It provided us with an opportunity to get our arms around how big AI is and that we should not be afraid of it, but should embrace it,” he says, adding that following the event the college purchased several licenses to Microsoft’s Copilot AI program to help make some back office work run more efficiently. “It’s not going to take anyone’s job away. It will help us increase output.”

AI in the classroom

Belanger and Purzycki were early AI adopters, adding it to their classes in the fall of 2022 when generative AI chatbot ChatGPT was released. Purzycki says it’s important for students to stay updated on the latest technology and most students were already checking it out.

As writing instructors, Belanger and Purzycki say they can both tell when students turn to AI to “write” their assignments. “When I see words I used in my grad school in homework for an intro to writing course, I can tell it’s AI,” Purzycki says. “There are certain words that just stick out.”

Belanger agrees, adding that AI writing has a certain formality behind it. “There’s no touch of personality,” he says. “We can also quickly find out by asking a question like ‘why did you choose that adjective?’ We teach them AI is just another tool in their writing toolbox.”

While students may use AI to conduct research, Purzycki says they are also taught it’s not always accurate. Students have also completed assignments where they identify some of AI’s failings.

“I tell them, let AI do the polish work, but make sure you’re doing the important work, such as the research, yourself,” he says. “An employer is going to hire you for what you can do, not what AI can do.”

Fox Valley Technical College is bringing AI into the classroom to help students become better prepared for careers after graduation, says Jay Stulo, director of AI strategy. Written communications instructors are tapping into AI, for example, to help students improve the quality of their assignments by ensuring grammar is accurate.

“Our graduates will see AI in the workplace, and it’s important they understand how to use it,” he says.

Carlsen says LTC is also bringing AI into the classroom. And with a low student to teacher ratio (11 to 1), staff members can identify if AI was used inappropriately to complete an assignment.

“Our staff knows our students and would pick up on a student using AI to write a paper since it would sound so different,” he says.

Users, developers and leaders

The June event was an initial step to get colleges and universities on the same page when it comes to AI, says Schuler, who is based in the New North region. In July, Microsoft teamed up with the Wisconsin Technical College System for an AI for Educators Bootcamp at Gateway Technical College.

“We discussed how to integrate AI more in the classroom, creating more developers,” she says. “We need developers since they can help create more AI users. From that group of developers, we hope to create AI leaders who will further help with implementation.”

Besides implementing AI in the classroom, FVTC is also using it to improve college services, Stulo says. As one example, the college created an AI app called Persist with a chatbot of which students can ask questions. The AI-powered chatbot is populated with information from the college website.

“Students are comfortable interacting with a chatbot and are more likely to do that versus asking a person a question,” Stulo says. “Going to a website to search for information is not their first instinct. They want to ask their question and provide a direct link to the information they are searching for.”

FVTC also invested in Copilot. Since it’s connected to Microsoft 360, the AI tool can search Teams, meetings and emails to answer an employee’s question about what happened in a meeting, for example. Copilot can also help schedule meetings, meeting agendas and communications.

“We want to be an AI emergent organization. AI can do a lot more than write text. We are also using it for data analysis,” Stulo says. “We can feed data sets into the generative AI and then fire questions at it to get the answers we’re looking for. It’s real time information instead of waiting for three or six months to get a report.”

And just as students need to vet the information they receive from AI, so do staff members. To help employees better understand how AI works, FVTC will provide them with AI literacy training. “We want them to learn more about AI’s capabilities,” Stulo says.

Schuler says it’s important to help students and all AI users access the technology responsibly. She says AI can help users with everyday tasks and find information.

“Soon, it won’t be ‘I’m going to Google this,’ but let me check with AI to find that answer,” Schuler says, adding AI is only as good as the data it’s given. “I wouldn’t trust it 100%, but I would leverage it to help find my answer.”

What’s exciting for Schuler is the prospect AI can have in research. Earlier this year, Microsoft and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory used AI and high-performance computers to zero in on a new material that could be used to make batteries in just 80 hours.

“It was able to narrow down 32.6 million potential materials to just 18 in four days,” she says. “Usually something like that would take years.”

In K-12 schools, AI can also help teachers if they need to differentiate assignments for students. For example, Schuler says a teacher could use AI to take an 8th grade history assignment and rewrite it for a student with a 6th grade reading level.

“That could help level the playing field for students, and teachers can better reach students where they’re at,” she says.

With his students, UW-Green Bay’s Belanger likens AI to receiving a wish from a genie.

“Be careful what you ask for. Just as in stories where the wish isn’t exactly what you were looking for, the same can be said for AI answers. If it doesn’t have what you are asking for, it likely will have a hallucination or make up an answer,” he says. “You always need to verify.”