When Taylor Eighmy talks to people about the growth of artificial intelligence in society, he doesn’t just see an opportunity: he feels a sense of responsibility.
The president of the University of Texas at San Antonio said the Hispanic institution northwest of the Alamo City needs to make sure its students are prepared to understand what their future employers expect of them about this rapidly evolving technology.
“It doesn’t matter if you work in healthcare, in banking, in oil and gas or in national security companies like we have here in San Antonio,” Eighmy said. The Texas Tribune. “Everyone is asking for AI skills.”
This is one of the reasons why the public university, which enrolls 34,000 students, announced earlier this year the creation of a new college dedicated to AI, cybersecurity, computer science and data science. The new college, which is still in the planning stages, would be one of the first of its kind in the country. UTSA wants to launch the new college by fall 2025.
According to UTSA, Texas will see a nearly 27% increase in AI and data science jobs over the next decade. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that data science jobs nationally will increase by 35% during this period. UTSA leaders say they not only want students to be knowledgeable in the field, but also prepare them to be part of the conversation as it grows and evolves.
“We don’t want (students) to spend time early in their careers just trying to understand AI,” said Jonathon Halbesleben, dean of UTSA’s business school, who co-chairs a working group responsible for creating the new college. “We would love for them to be ready to make a career and jump right into being able to shape AI and how it is used in their organizations.”
How Colleges Will Prepare Students
Over the past year, much of the discussion around AI in higher education has focused on generative AI, applications and search engines capable of creating text, images or data based on prompts. The arrival of ChatGPT, a free chatbot that provides conversational answers to users’ questions, has universities and professors scrambling to understand how this new technology will affect teaching and learning. It also raised concerns that students might use the new technology as a shortcut to writing papers or completing other assignments.
But many public higher education leaders think beyond that. As AI becomes part of daily life in new and unpredictable ways, universities across Texas and the country are also beginning to think about ways to ensure that professors keep up with the new technology and students are ready to use it when they enter the job market.
“This is a technology that is clearly here to stay and is advancing rapidly,” said Harrison Keller, commissioner of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, the state agency that oversees Texas colleges and universities. “It’s really critical that institutions collaborate, share content (and) work with (the) industry so that the content truly reflects the state of the art. This is evolving much faster than expected.
AI Assessment Across Campuses
Next month, the The state agency plans to launch an assessment of AI activity at all community colleges and four-year universities in the state and use it to build a collaborative system that can help all schools get up to speed on AI.
“The majority of institutions are trying to identify what skills are needed for our faculty to be able to engage with this new and evolving technology (and) to provide experiences for our students to acclimate to the skills that will be needed in the global workforce,” said Michelle Singh, deputy commissioner for digital learning with the coordinating council.
UTSA isn’t the only school offering completely new programs. Other schools, notably the University of North Texas and the The University of Texas at Austin has launched graduate programs and short-term certificate programs. Houston Community College recently became the first community college in Texas to offer a bachelor’s degree program in AI and robotics.
“As a community college, we are blazing new trails to ensure AI education is accessible and inclusive,” said Margaret Ford Fisher, interim chancellor of HCC, in a press release last fall. “The goal is to cultivate the talent that will shape our future in this growing field full of promise for good. »
UT-Austin recently declared 2024 the “Year of AI,” highlighting an increased focus on technology research and the creation of a new online master’s program in AI launching this year. The program is priced close to $10,000, making it one of the most affordable AI graduate programs in the country.
Elsewhere in the state, colleges and universities have created internal committees to see how AI can be used to improve university operations, including identifying at-risk students, increasing retention, and boosting student learning. Others are creating resource guides for teachers to help them adapt to the impact of AI in the classroom.
“We just have to get out there and start tackling this problem, and we have to be able to adapt it and evolve it and grow our understanding of it,” said Marty Alvarado, vice president of postsecondary education. and training at Jobs for the Future, a nonprofit focused on improving education, workforce and economic opportunities for students.
While other experts agree that university leaders need to have these conversations with each other and with students, they worry that adapting to AI could become an additional burden on already exhausted faculty.
“Where does this time and money come from? said Lance Eaton, director of educational development and innovation at College Unbound, a national nonprofit focused on adult learners. He also has writes a newsletter on AI and higher education. “Because they were already overloaded long before this happened. »
Faculty of Education
Keller acknowledged that many discussions about AI have “overlooked” the need to appropriately support faculty.
This spring, the coordinating council is launching a webinar series to educate teachers across the state about general AI concepts. Meanwhile, four Texas institutions – UT-Austin, UNT, Austin Community College and San Jacinto Community College – are creating a basic AI course for Texas teachers that goes beyond theory and offers teachers direct ways to apply AI in their classrooms, curricula, lesson plans and assignments. Possible topics include how to use chatbots in the classroom and how to develop class assignments and research topics with AI.
“We need to support faculty at scale in different settings, at small community colleges and large research universities,” Keller said. “The idea is you don’t want every institution to have to reinvent the wheel. »
Keller said any future conversations about AI will also need to involve employers and students. Employers should share with schools their evolving needs, and schools should recognize that students are often more proficient in using AI than faculty and administrators.
“We will all be better off if we work together on this,” he said.
Try to be thoughtful
Eaton said that while it is important for higher education to have conversations about the future of AI, it is equally important for universities to ensure they are not rushing to adopt the new technology too quickly, especially since there are still clear limitations in terms of how it can be used and how it interprets and processes the information fed into it.
“AI has become ubiquitous in many places in a very short time,” he said. “There are ways in which it is useful in a simple way, but there are many ways in which it fails in terms of sophistication… it’s still not something that we can really trust the lives of people with. people.”
For example, Eaton expressed some skepticism toward schools creating completely new AI programs.
“Right now it feels like it’s a money grab,” he said. “If you want to see an institution that takes this seriously, it’s going to be one that actually looks at the curriculum, looks at their programs and asks, ‘What will this curriculum look like if AI is a more ubiquitous tool?’ »
As AI develops and spreads, Eaton said the critical thinking, analysis, communication and strong reading and writing skills that students gain through traditional liberal arts degrees will be essential to navigate technology and recognize where it can be useful.
Keller agreed. He said employers have emphasized to him that students will need these skills to learn and adapt to emerging AI technologies.
At UTSA, leaders like Halbesleben say they’re trying to both put themselves at the forefront of AI and figure out how to prepare all students for the ripple effects this technology will have on the rest of the work force.
“It will be a significant challenge for us to ensure that even though we concentrate our capabilities in one college, we still need to maintain our ability to ensure that all of our students have that kind of understanding,” he said.
This article was originally published in the Texas Tribune. You can read the original here. The Texas Tribune partners with Open Campus for higher education coverage. Disclosure: Houston Community College, the Institute for Economic Development – UTSA, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Texas at San Antonio, and the University of North Texas have provided financial support to The Texas Tribune, a news organization non-partisan and partly funded non-profit. thanks to donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial support plays no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a suit list of them here.
