AI Challenges & Opportunities Listening Sessions Summary

Introduction

Two listening sessions were held with Open LMS clients with the goal of better understanding the challenges they’re currently facing with respect to use of AI on campus, and the opportunities they see to improve teaching and learning.

Attendees were solicited from our current client base, with 10 attendees invited to each session.

Key Findings

Four main themes emerged from the sessions:  

• Education & Understanding
  The group indicated a strong need to more fully understand the technology itself, what’s possible, and its strengths and weaknesses.  A general lack of knowledge is leading to concerns about job loss – creating both fear and a very strong sense of urgency to learn how to benefit from its capabilities. The pace of change and rapid pace of innovation, also caused concern, as does the accuracy of information provided by AI tools.
• Policy
  The lack of understanding has created a critical and immediate need for clear policy on the use and expected and  is leading to institutional misalignment between administration, faculty, and students in terms of expectations of how AI can be used in education.
• Practice & Implementation
  What are the best practices for both faculty and learners? How do we use AI as an asset to teaching and learning?  Where can it become a productivity aid for instructors?  How can we use AI to help learners think more critically?  
• Plagiarism
  A mix here.  Some saw an immediate need for tools that would help learners and instructors identify machine written content as a learning tool and assurance that the learners were getting full benefit from their education and not just outsourcing the work to an AI.  Others were skeptical if plagiarism tools would be able to keep with the pace of innovation of AI tools.

Suggestions and Recommendations

The assembled teams had several recommendations: 

• Facilitate Education
  Anything we can do to help improve the knowledge on campus is of great value.  Of particular note was the lack of knowledge about the series of educational events we’ve been holding on AI.   
• Community Collaboration
  Great support for the notion of creating a community group where best practices, policy examples, etc. could be shared with the goal of easing the burden and increasing the confidence of creating and deploying policy and best practices.
• Plagiarism
  More information on available plagiarism tools, their effectiveness, and cost.

Limitations

It’s important to note that these findings were based on a very small sample size.  The findings align well with anecdotal evidence we’re hearing from the rest of the market through less formal sources.

Conclusion

Open LMS will investigate the notions of hosting community groups that can focus on policy and practice, while working to do a better job of communicating available training sessions and webinars.