3 AI Fears in Higher Education

Gerry Bayne: Welcome to EDUCAUSE Exchange, where we hear insights, perspectives, best practices, and more. Across campuses, conversations about artificial intelligence are sometimes being framed by unease rather than enthusiasm. Leaders, faculty and students are questioning how fast to move, what might break and who bears the risk. This episode of EDUCAUSE Exchange explores three of those fears around higher education AI. The first item on our list is career anxiety.

Sarah Buszka: As a mentor of many undergraduate students across the country right now, many of those students are computer science or related majors. They are also worried about AI making their future job prospects irrelevant and having those opportunities evaporating. I have many cases right now where I have some of my students coming to me saying, I have no opportunities. There is nothing open.

Stan Waddell: I hear a lot of differing opinions and they range from, I fear that this will eliminate jobs to I fear or I believe, and I'm optimistic that this will create many jobs, and so I tend to be somewhat in the middle, and so I do listen to all of these viewpoints and I do think that the technologies will have an impact on the way we live our lives, sort of full stop, writ large, but I think that we are in the driver's seat.

We get to choose, in many cases, how we deploy the technologies and how we let them impact our organizations, and we can't stick our heads in the sand and say, "It's not going to, therefore we're not going to play." That's the bottom line for me. Leverage the technologies to advance our missions, and then we'll figure out how to adapt to the impacts as they come or as they get nearer to us so that we have better vision and better clarity as to how they will impact us. Right now, we're just sort of guessing.

Amarda Shehu: Primarily I would say the concern for our staff is being replaced, which is the fear that I would say all of us have. Even, I mean, I have that question. Every industry, especially I would say if are you're a knowledge worker, which a lot of us are, that is the question. And I don't think that necessarily that the folks are writing the answers to this question are folks that deeply appreciate the value that a human being brings and how integral work is to the value that we give ourselves and to the purpose that we say we have in this life.

I am not scared of the technology. I am more scared of wrong-handed decisions by people in certain industries. We've seen these examples. This company laid off all their workers and said, "We're going to do all the AI," and then one year later they were like, "Well, this is not working. It turns out we need the humans," which you look at that and you said, well, I could have saved you all that time if you had talked to the right people.

Gerry Bayne: The second theme is the disruption of teaching and learning.

Brandon Rich: Students are really demanding for things to change. There's also just all the risks and fears around academic integrity. It's unfortunate but true that it's trivially easy to circumvent some of the traditional ways that we have delivered content and assessment. My sense is, and again, I'm not a pedagogy expert, but the sense that I have is that the real challenge here is the pedagogy for this era has just not been invented yet, and we have to figure it out.

And we're in this really messy middle right now where everything has shifted much faster than we're able to react, and there's a lot of anxiety around that. I think in, I don't know how many years, five years, 10 years, there will eventually be some sort of equilibrium. We'll figure out how to kind of coexist with this technology and hopefully use it to our advantage in the classroom.

Chris Cantoni: I think we as a faculty just don't want to change, and that's why they don't really want to go down, and that's fine. But then there's the whole aspect that students are going to be way ahead and the types of assignments that they were doing just aren't really useful anymore. And so we're at a point where I don't think we're behind a society of using AI. I think we're not ready for the change to education it's going to make. I'm glad I'm not the only one that thinks that, but it's getting more faculty on board to think that way, and that's going to be a challenge.

Gerry Bayne: And rounding on our list is governance paralysis and cultural tensions around AI.

Jay James: So many different colleges within the university that have a lot of different wants and needs where engineering and their investment into research, in relations to AI, to other units were more focused in on how we can leverage AI operationally to improve our processes. Where you have the student experience and how it's being impacted by AI. You have all of these different competing factors and thoughts and vendors reaching out to so many different individuals about so many different things, just the governance around all of it.

I think that there is a lot of hesitation and sometimes anxiety when there's not good governance around AI because everyone's worried about, "Who's accountable? Who's responsible for what?" Everyone wants to use it though, right? So where you have everyone purchasing the new tools and implementing it, and now you're looking at it, taking a step back and realizing, "Oh wow, this is a lot, and how are we going to properly govern all of it?"

Brandon Rich: How does this software or application treat our data? What are its retention policies? How does it handle FERPA data? Are we happy with what happens at the end of the contract? How are they handling it? Are they connecting to third parties? What is the info sec around that? How much do we trust their security and their practices of data handling? And what does the legal perspective say is the contract where we need it to be to move forward?

Sarah Buszka: We have to figure out where we can agree as an institution on where to use AI or not to use AI. And we can't boil the ocean either. We have to start somewhere and typically start small. ROI, you can't hit ROI if you can't agree as an institution on how we're going to deal with this or not. So I think that's kind of the key, and those are tough conversations.