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Artificial intelligence has taken the reins and universities are at the forefront in equipping students with the right tools to navigate the next revolution.
“I believe AI (artificial intelligence) will have the same impact as the global network,” said David A. Armstrong, president of St. Thomas University. “I think it’s going to be very big. I believe the dangers are there and could be very catastrophic if we don’t have guidelines and ethical considerations around AI, but certainly the potential for AI use, success and The help to society and humanity is just as great. like the potential of the Internet when it first appeared. It changed everything.
When ChatGPT began to gain popularity and it was discussed that students would begin using the AI system for their research papers and assignments, President Armstrong said, the choice of whether to avoid it or not ‘adopt showed up.
“I challenged my professors at university and law school to be at the forefront of issues of ethical considerations, guidelines and standards for the ethical use of AI” , did he declare. “Why? St. Thomas University is a Catholic university with a values-based education that is part of our Catholic intellectual tradition, seeking all the answers no matter where that leads us, knowing that ultimately ultimately, God is at the center,” he said. “We have to have values in what we do. We have to have ethics in what we do. We have to have a moral code in what we do .
AI has been around for a while, said Dr. Ricardo Jimenez, chair of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science and associate dean of undergraduate studies at Barry University. Algorithms used for machine learning have been around for several years.
The difference now is that the algorithms are more efficient, Dr. Jimenez said, “but there are also voluminous amounts of data that can be used to… guide AI in terms of how neural networks work, and these are not all neural networks. , but the vast majority.
“I think what has happened is that AI has been accelerated by the release of ChatGPT and now Gemini and a few others,” Dr. Jimenez said. “People are starting to see … that this is essentially the next generation of computing.”
AI is used for a wide range of tasks and plays a central role in many students’ academic lives.
“When it comes to higher education, it’s definitely seeping into higher education and for good reason: it has a lot of positive aspects that can benefit students,” Dr. Jimenez said. For example, a student working on a research paper can ask the AI to find journals on the topic.
“You can generate guidelines, you can generate diagrams, you can generate additional support complementing the learning experience,” Dr. Jimenez said. “You can think about it. There are so many things that students can do that will benefit their learning abilities and their metacognition, and even their ability to understand how they think and draw conclusions and things of that nature.
Concern for AI and its ethical use is a topic that many believe goes hand in hand.
Ultimately, it depends on how students decide to use AI, Dr. Jimenez said. “One of the things we often see in universities, and in colleges in particular, is the discussion of some of the ethical questions and concerns that we see. But in many ways, these concerns are not new, just as machine learning is not new.
Plagiarism has been a significant problem since the advent of Wikipedia, the Internet and more sources that can be copied, Dr. Jimenez said. However, plagiarism from different sources, including ChatGPT, can be detected with platforms such as Turnitin, which is a similarity detection service, “and it comes down to – that’s why we put it in the program school, particularly in the area of ethics. technology class – it really comes down to an ethical question. Do you want to cheat, that’s really what it comes down to and, yes, with ChatGPT you have the option to cheat, but it’s just (not) ethical and the right thing to do.
Teachers can also benefit from using AI, Dr. Jimenez said. Teachers can create lesson plans and generate quizzes and exams.
“You can routinize and automate many tasks and provide specific feedback to the student, not general feedback to the class, but be able to analyze what each particular task does – again, back to metacognition – where the student is deficient, what the problem is. area that needs to be strengthened,” he said, “and it’s a very powerful thing if we can target it down to the student level – and we can, (by) using the different tools that we’re talking about .
The technology has become more popular.
Artificial intelligence was everywhere, but we just didn’t notice it, President Armstrong said. Now that AI is allowed to be used by the masses, it has gained popularity.
“When the Internet was invented, it was first designed for military and government use, and then once it opened up to the general public, that’s when you saw all the innovations and problems, and here’s what’s happening now: AI has “There’s nothing new, but now the power is going to the masses,” President Armstrong said. “And that’s where we end up, once again more, by seeing great possibilities, but also by seeing greater problems.”
Universities are aware of the double-edged sword that is AI and are therefore providing students with important tools to navigate the technology.
St. Thomas is launching an applied AI certificate, President Armstrong said. Classes start this summer. Students of any major can obtain the certificate.
“We are also developing tools and processes for developing courses and open educational resources that use AI tools as part of workflows to add efficiency and accuracy to these processes” , said President Armstrong.
Barry is also preparing to provide students with more knowledge on the subject.
“We are currently in the process of creating a bachelor’s degree in data science,” Dr. Jimenez said. Data science is a broad umbrella that covers AI. Two main areas falling under data science are AI and data analytics. The hope is to start the bachelor’s degree in data science in fall 2025.
“Currently we have a specialization where we teach students an introduction to data science where they will get a little taste of AI,” Dr. Jimenez said. “They take data visualization and analysis courses and then a machine learning course which is strictly a course (in which) they focus entirely on algorithms and how AI is created, what are the different types of AI, how can we program using practical approaches, experiential approaches – programming our own neural networks – what are AI networks using Python, for example. This course focuses specifically on AI and does part of a specialization intended for computer science students.
An important aspect to remember is that AI cannot be viable on its own and is a subset of computer science, Dr. Jimenez said.
“There’s a lot of thinking that maybe I’m going to get a degree in AI,” Dr. Jimenez said. “Well, to do that you first have to have the fundamentals. In particular, you need to be able to understand data structures, algorithms and the things that computer scientists do. This is why we have it as a complementary element of the major.
An ethics component is also taught and will be integrated into the data science degree, Dr. Jimenez said.
Any new technology comes with unintended consequences, he said. There are many “that need to be looked at in terms of bias, in terms of using incorrect information, incorrect data and things of that nature.”
The ethics component is taught in the ethics and digital technology course that is required for all computer science and mathematics majors, Dr. Jimenez said.
“Each semester, the time spent on AI has increased over the past year,” he said. This adoption is linked to student interest and the evolution of AI.
Additionally, he said, a section of the machine learning course addresses “AI bias and general ethical issues related to AI security concerns, privacy concerns and provenance data, copyright issues… things that need to be resolved.”
St. Thomas has hosted various events on campus regarding AI, President Armstrong said. One of them was the “Multidisciplinary Roundtable on AI and its Impact on Higher Education”. “It was a combination of the main campus and law school faculty merging their experience to present on this topic.”
Another event was “Student Insights: Exploring AI in Education,” during which there was a “professional development session with a panel of students sharing their experiences with AI, so faculty could hear from students on how they perceive AI and how they use AI in their studies. Professors then gained insight into the impact of learning and explored ethical considerations from students’ perspectives and the current role of AI in the future of education.
As technology evolves, what is expected of students should evolve along with it.
Currently, digital competence is considered a requirement, Dr. Jimenez said. However, perhaps within a year or so, people will need to start considering AI competency as a necessary requirement for getting a degree, he said. We’re going beyond digital skills because most of those are learned in high school, he said. Perhaps the new digital skill could become AI.
“I think there is interest (in AI) because there is a lot of curiosity,” Dr. Jimenez said. “From a higher education perspective, there’s nothing more beautiful than curiosity, because that’s what it’s all about. It’s about thinking, coming up with ideas, synthesizing ideas and having that curiosity to want to learn. I think because it’s so new, people want to know, people want to learn.
