How Portland State University Built a Cross Campus AI Academy

Institutional Profile

Portland State University is a public research university located in downtown Portland, Oregon. Founded in 1946 as the Vanport Extension Center, it was elevated to university status in 1969 and now includes colleges of liberal arts and sciences, urban and public affairs, and engineering and computer science. It also includes schools of business, fine and performing arts, social work, public health, and education. PSU currently enrolls more than 15,000 undergraduate students and over 4,000 graduate students. With its new BS in artificial intelligence, PSU offers Oregon’s only undergraduate degrees in AI and in linguistics and computer science. It also offers a number of certificates that introduce AI in disciplines across the university.

The Opportunity

As colleges and universities work to keep up with the influence of generative and agentic AI on their operations, teaching, and research, many have launched AI task forces responsible for digesting trends, convening campus conversations, advancing institutional literacy, and developing policies. Portland State University (PSU) did something similar in the summer of 2023 that eventually resulted in, among many other initiatives, a robust academy model for faculty and staff development that is drawing large numbers of personnel to participate.

The PSU task force, eventually renamed the AI Working Group, has members from the Faculty Senate, Research and Graduate Studies, the library, Student Affairs, and the offices of Academic Innovation, Information Technology, Equity-Audit-Compliance, and others. According to Michelle Giovannozzi, vice provost for academic strategy, innovation, and teaching and one of the co-chairs of the group, one initial goal of the AI Working Group has been to develop guidance and tools for PSU’s community of faculty, staff, and students. “We were really focusing on responsible and trustworthy use of AI, how AI can be used as a tool, and what our responsibility is as educators to teach students how to use AI,” she said.

For example, early on, the working group responded to faculty who were asking for a standard statement concerning AI use in the classroom that could be included as part of PSU’s syllabus template.^Footnote1 Similarly, a subgroup responded to needs they were hearing from faculty in developing ethical AI use guidelines.^Footnote2 As interest in using generative AI tools continued to expand across the university, the working group identified a need for campuswide access to a standard set of tools, with appropriate security and privacy controls. PSU launched the Google suite of generative AI tools to faculty, staff, and students in December 2024.

Another priority the AI Working Group identified was building AI literacy and fluency among faculty and staff to empower them to pursue efficiencies and innovations on their own in the full range of tasks employees engage in. When the group heard about the idea for an AI academy from the PSU Office of Research and Graduate Studies, it fully supported elevating the idea to a campuswide initiative encompassing operations, research, and teaching.

The Solution

InnovAIte Academy is a faculty and staff professional development program that takes cohorts through a series of asynchronous courses and real-time workshops called InnovAItion Circles. Several members of the AI Working Group collaborated with campus partners to design and facilitate the program, though once launched it has run in parallel to the working group. The goal in the design was a program useful for faculty and staff throughout the university and with any level of expertise, explained Ryan Bass, chief information officer and co-chair of the group. “We’ve heard feedback from participants that it is a really great experience—very uplifting, challenging, and interesting,” he said.

InnovAIte Academy organizes participants into three tracks:

• The operations track emphasizes process automation, communication, and improvement in service delivery.
• The research track focuses on scholarly applications such as literature review, data analysis, and proposal development.
• The teaching track supports instructional design, personalized learning, and enhanced accessibility using AI.

Giovannozzi leads the teaching group, Bass co-leads the operations group with Justin Moore, director for technology infrastructure and academic systems, and the research group is led by Rick Tankersley, vice president for research and graduate studies. All participants in a cohort get a one-year license for Google AI Pro for Education and begin with online modules in AI fundamentals such as responsible use of AI and prompting essentials. Then each track is covered in five in-person sessions digging into the tools available at PSU and areas of AI that are most relevant to them. Finally, individuals work on capstone or demonstration projects. Upon completion, participants earn the InnovAIte Foundations microcredential.

Despite the fact that participants must do that work without stipends or course release support, the academy enjoys a high level of participation, with nearly 150 employees volunteering for the first two cohorts. A third cohort began in summer 2026. “This was something we spun up without any additional resources or staffing, on top of other work,” said Giovannozzi. “For some employees, it has taken a really concerted commitment to set aside the time and effort to participate in the program, although what I’ve heard consistently is, ‘This sounded like a lot from the beginning, but now that I’m in it, I’m really glad that I’m taking the time.’ It’s actually a short-term investment for a pretty significant long-term gain.”

Positive feedback tends to be particularly enthusiastic at the concluding InnovAIte Symposium, where participants share their demonstration projects:

• In the operations track, projects have included using AI for marketing communication and to evaluate course scheduling and registration data to identify gaps and opportunities to improve scheduling.
• In the research track, participants have built AI tools for funding proposals and to review contracts as part of the procurement process.
• In the teaching track, faculty have built AI study companions to help students gain confidence in fundamental concepts in a discipline and an AI research instructor and project manager that prompts students to engage critically with sources, identify gaps in their arguments, and stay on track with structured pacing support.

One participant in InnovAIte Academy, Kerry Wu, business librarian at the PSU library, used the capstone project to address the longstanding challenge of fragmented storage of internal procedural documents. In an article for Technical Services Quarterly, Wu described using NotebookLM to create a database of source documents users could interact with to receive answers.^Footnote3 Ultimately, Wu found the current technology was still too limited to adequately solve the problem she outlined, but the InnovAIte Academy inspired her to think more about the library’s potential leadership role in educating students about AI. She wrote, “Before we can effectively teach others about AI, we must first strengthen our own understanding. Participating in initiatives such as the InnovAIte Academy provides the perfect foundation for that journey.”

Lessons Learned

When Giovannozzi saw the EDUCAUSE Higher Education Generative AI Readiness Assessment in an EDUCAUSE newsletter, she thought it would be an opportunity to get a broader perspective on both the current state and future goals for AI at PSU. The AI Working Group distributed the assessment survey to stakeholders in the university who had a line of sight to the challenges and opportunities AI was presenting.

In reviewing the responses, the AI Working Group did identify gaps, including the fact that the university didn’t yet have discrete funding for AI initiatives. They also discovered an opportunity to look at how job descriptions account for emerging AI responsibilities. Moreover, they identified a gap in communication—some survey respondents didn’t know about the programs the AI Working Group already had underway.

A main takeaway of the assessment, however, was that the existence of the AI Working Group itself and of the InnovAIte Academy indicated significant AI maturity at PSU. Levels of AI literacy are growing at the university, which has established a foundational vision for AI, has developed a philosophy statement and guiding principles, and is addressing issues, monitoring trends, and managing communication at an institutional level.

One common conversation in InnovAIte Academy is about ethics and the responsible use of AI. Various fields of study and areas of operation have had different reactions on campus, noted Giovannozzi and Bass. For example, the computer science department has embraced the use of AI more readily than some of the humanities departments. PSU’s official stance is to uphold the principles of academic freedom and encourage faculty and staff to use their own judgment about how to employ this technology. Giovannozzi has seen a range of responses among faculty to AI. Some see opportunity for AI, both in their teaching and for students. Others see AI as a threat and would prefer it not be used in the classroom.

Participants in the InnovAIte Academy tend to be receptive to AI because of the nature of the program they’re signing up for, said Giovannozzi, but she has also seen people join who are more reluctant to use AI, appreciating the time and collaborative space to think critically about the tools and their implications. The main value of InnovAIte Academy is an environment where colleagues from across the institution explore and grow together. “We spend a lot of time focusing on challenges and barriers and budgets,” she said. “It’s exciting to engage in something forward-facing.”

Creating the initial course content was a challenge, and it has needed to be redeveloped for each new cohort, said Bass. “We will have content prepared, and then some new [tool] gets dropped the day of the workshop. Or somebody raises their hand in class and says, ‘Hey, we heard this new thing happened today.’”

Along with changing technology, understanding among users is also shifting. Despite expecting to need to redesign the program between cohorts, Giovannozzi was still caught off guard by the rate of change. “The level of baseline understanding and use in the second cohort was much more advanced than the first cohort, even in that six-month period,” she said. Bass added that it’s important to have a learner’s mindset of your own because the AI space is changing rapidly. “There’s so much happening all at once, and we’re all learning together.”

Notes

1. See the Syllabus Template and instructions for its use. Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.↩
2. “Guidelines for the Ethical Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence,” Portland State University’s Generative AI Working Group, September 2024. Jump back to footnote 2 in the text.↩
3. Kerry Wu, “Minds Meet Machines: Inside the InnovAIte Academy at Portland State University,”Technical Services Quarterly 43, no. 2 (2026). Jump back to footnote 3 in the text.↩

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Jessie Kwak is a writer with McGuire Editorial & Consulting.