Empowering Students and Faculty in the AI Loop

Sophie White: Hello everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. First of all, thank you to our live audience for being here at today's recording. Just a note, we are recording audio and video versions of the podcast today. This will be shared afterwards on the EDUCAUSE Review website and available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. Note that we will be opening the floor up to audience questions at the end of the session, so keep that in mind. If you want to ask a question, if you do ask a question, you will be recorded on audio and video. So just a disclaimer there. So thank you all for being here and welcome to EDUCAUSE Shop Talk. I'm Sophie White. I'm a content marketing and program manager here at EDUCAUSE, and I am one of the hosts for today's discussion.

Jenay Robert: I'm Jenay Robert. I'm a senior researcher at EDUCAUSE, and I'll be your co-host today.

Sophie White: Great, and we are so excited today to be talking about students in AI. We have some fantastic guests with us today who I'm going to introduce in just a minute. So first off, we have Jo Trotechaud. Jo is a California State University, San Bernardino information systems and technology major with a concentration in cybersecurity. He has a lot going on, so I have to read my notes here. He's twenty-three years old and has an associate's degree in computer science. Jo has worked at his school's information security and compliance office for close to a year as a student assistant, and on the weekends he works a food service job for some extra supporting income. Jo loves helping people in resolving issues and as a student, he's experimenting in different fields of IST to see what he truly wishes to turn into his career related to this conversation, he's currently enrolled in two AI-related classes. One is an ethical hacking class and one is an AI seminar course. Thanks Jo for being with us today.

Jo Trotechaud: Yeah, thank you for having me.

Sophie White: Absolutely. And I'm so excited you're here. When we're talking about students in AI, I'm just thrilled to have your student perspective, so thank you for being open to this. Next up we have John Crow. John is an instructional development faculty member at Florida State University's Office of Digital Learning and Academic Technology. He earned his PhD from the Department of Religion at Florida State University. And as both a technologist and historian, his research interests are wide ranging, dealing with the interactions between religion and science, body and embodiment, materiality and emplacement, technology related to engaged learning online and in-person classes, digital humanities, and the development of eastern religions within the west, particularly Buddhism in the west. Thank you, Jo. That is such an impressive list of interests there. So I can't wait to talk about how these all connect. Great. So let's kick it off. I'd love to hear, just let's start with Jo. Can you talk a little bit about your experience lately as a student working with AI and some of the AI classes that you're enrolled in?

Jo Trotechaud: Yeah, absolutely. So my journey with AI, and I feel like a lot of students can kind of echo this sentiment, it's a bit, I mean, I'd say currently it's very polarizing. It's undeniably an incredibly powerful tool, but I feel like a lot of people need to be sort of warmed up to it and taught how to use it in certain ways. I was personally class of 2020, so my entire higher education experience has been online and kind of integrated with technology, so to speak. And so I feel like a lot of fellow students sort of feel like, oh, ChatGPT, that's that thing that could write my essay back in 2020 or 2022, and they don't really fully grasp how it could help them, and it's sort of gotten an air of being a cheating tool. So I'd say my recent experience with it has been really great where it's helped me structure study plans, it's helped quiz me, it's prepared me for interviews. And I even had a little back and forth with it before this podcast to be like, oh, hey, can I live answer questions? It's an incredibly helpful tool, but especially on campus, you almost want to hide your monitor when you have the chat tab open because there's definitely a lot of mixed opinions about it.

Jenay Robert: Oh my gosh, I'm going to start using ChatGPT like that to prepare for these. I never thought of that. I speak all the time, so thank you for the new tip.

Jo Trotechaud: Oh yeah, of course.

Sophie White: Definitely. I should have said too, I didn't give you an intro Jenay because you're a co-host, but Jenay is our leading EDUCAUSE researcher on AI too. So you have lots of thoughts on AI that we can chat about today.

Jenay Robert: I have some thoughts, yes.

Sophie White: Awesome. John, can you talk a little bit about what you are seeing based on your work as an instructional design faculty?

John Crow: Yeah, so I think there's two ends, right? The faculty responses and the student responses, and my experience with the student responses is exactly what Jo was saying. They're very concerned about any use of it will result in them getting academic violations. They are confused about how to use it, even how to communicate with it effectively. And so in my digital literacy course, these are the kind of basic skills we actually go over. So they can develop how to do effective prompts, what's an appropriate and inappropriate way to write an essay. I mean, I require them to actually use Copilot or Gemini to brainstorm for an essay, write an introduction, structure an essay, and then they have to write it themselves and then reflect on it. So the student experience is very concerning. Now, my students are humanities students. They're not STEM, they're, the STEM ones are a lot more plugged in of course, but even some of the STEM students are very concerned about academic honesty.

The faculty, they're split. They either totally embrace it or they totally hate it. And at Florida State, it is a faculty administration co-run. So the faculty have a lot of say in the operation and setting policies. So FSU doesn't have a set policy about AI because every faculty is different and their approach is different on their class. We advise the faculty to use AI or to inform students about your AI use. But then I also work with faculty to use AI to create content. In particular, I work with accessibility and universal design. And so there's a lot of things you can do with AI to prepare materials for that learning environment.

Jenay Robert: I'd really like to touch back on, I think both of you touched on this, the polarizing response at both the faculty level, but also the staff level I think can be included there. And then at the student level, we talk about this in the 2025 AI landscape study where we asked about risks being introduced. That's always part of the conversation with AI, of course. And something that we didn't ask about in closed-ended items because we didn't anticipate it, but came out in open-ended responses was this polarization particularly amongst faculty. And the reason we really want to highlight that is because we're living in polarizing times at a much bigger scale. And so to have another element on our campuses that's dividing us as a community is really concerning. So it's something that we don't have all the answers for. We can talk about change management and all those things, but we really want to maintain awareness of that as another element that could be dividing our community.

John Crow: I've actually done, contacted departments and said, Hey, I would love to meet with the faculty and just talk about the use of this. And even just on the departmental level, they're not interested. The faculty just don't want to go there.

Jenay Robert: Yeah. What are you seeing, Jo, in terms of some students loving using AI, some students refusing to use AI? Is there a similar sort of dynamic you can talk about?

Jo Trotechaud: Yeah, I mean, I feel like with all things, there's a lot of nuance to it. I personally am friends with a lot of artists and more, I forget what category this is, but pretty much just creatives. Yeah, yeah. A lot of people that write, a lot of people that have a lot of artistic ambition. And so while in my field in technology, I've basically described it as Pandora's Box where it's like it or not, it's here and it's shaping our landscape. So it's better to learn how to use it ethically and to embrace it. But especially in a lot of artistic circles, there's a threat of replacement. And I mean, my personal belief and a lot of people's belief is art is entirely a human thing, like interpretation and everything about it is always going to be in human hands. So while AI can replicate it, it's not going to replace it.

But I definitely do see where there's sort of a fear of existence where it's like, oh, this is going to replace us. And I feel like that's where a lot of this divisiveness is. I mean, there's a general student consensus where whenever we see AI art or we see something is generated with AI, your knee-jerk reaction is like, oh, gross, I don't want to deal with that. I don't want to touch that. But to kind of switch to the positive side of it a bit, there definitely is a growing acceptance and understanding of it, I think. And it's all about framing and packaging, I guess, so to speak, where if you're using it to help you organize a study plan or if you're using it to sort of create a personalized situation, it's extremely helpful. But getting past its sort of perceived threat is definitely the biggest challenge that's currently facing a lot of students, I'd say.

Sophie White: And do you see different opinions of it from the faculty members that you're working with? Or what does it look like when you go to one class and what does a professor today about AI versus what does another class look like? What's your experience as a student?

Jo Trotechaud: Honestly, the faculty has kind of been the fun part. I wish I could bring him here. Vincent Nestler, my professor for both of my AI centric courses is the perfect example of extremely pro AI. It has actually taken over our curriculum where a lot of our ethical hacking class has been, Hey, check out this new tool that just came out. And then we spend the whole class kind of trying to get our free account set up. And so I feel like faculty has actually been, at least at my institution, Cal State San Bernardino has been a lot more open to it because we recently, I dunno the exact terminology here, but we signed a deal with ChatGPT, and now all of our students get access to the Education edition for free. And so I feel like a lot of our staff is pushing for integration and understanding of it, and we're all kind of acknowledging like, Hey, we're a learning institution. This is quite possibly the most important thing to learn right now, especially for technology or for technology focused students where we need to understand it so that we can help other people understand it and use it effectively.

Sophie White: Yeah, that's it. I feel like that's a more positive a response than I expected to that question, so that's helpful. John, I'm curious how you're using AI in your classes. You mentioned that you do use it with your humanities students. What does that look like?

John Crow: I do want to touch on something that,

Sophie White: Yeah, go for it.

John Crow: There is a faculty innovators group at Florida State that's meeting monthly to present. In fact, one of my colleagues was doing a poster about it this morning. And I think these are the kind of efforts that actually pull faculty in and invite them. So again, isn't a positive sense. We have a large number of faculty who are interested in AI and FSU has created this to be able to give them a community to work with, to ask questions and things like that. So if I think universities would be really well-served to create those kinds of environments, welcoming faculty because it makes it safe. And that's a lot of times they also don't want to look dumb. And university is a prestige base, but how do I use it in my classes? It depends. So in my religion classes, I use it to generate content. I use it to write feedback, and I use it to draft or to revise assignment instructions, walkthroughs, things like that.

So it's more of the content creation. But I'll also, because of UDL's notion of multiple means of representation. So I'll have a video that has captions. I'll make sure, run the captions through the AI, make sure they're all correct, punctuated, capitalized, then take that, make it into a transcript, then make that transcripts as a PDF, a Word document, and a Canvas page. And AI could do all of that. And then now, it doesn't matter if I have a student who has seeing impairment or a vision impairment or learning disability, all of these different formats. The format thing too is funny because if they're on a Mac, they may not be able to pull up a Word documents. And so it's not even about disability all the time. Sometimes it's technology. In my digital literacy class though, it's a lot more engaged. It is starting with unit five, we look at the interaction of digital and culture.

So for the first unit is AI, and so they get some practice with it, but it also covers AI bias in generation of images. They read an article about healthcare and bias in there. So it gives them vocabulary and something to connect it to. I show them how if you go to the doctor, you're going to get a white man. If you are a nurse, you're going to get a white woman. Things like that where these defaults start to show within the training data and talk about where that's coming from. In later units, like in gender talk about deep fakes and how that's impacting content creators, especially women who now have to respond. There's a great essay and for, I forget the author, but they talk about the trauma that is inflicted every single time it's brought up, and that it forces them to respond because it's such a serious matter that if they don't, then the person who's asking or mentioning will think it's real. So it's this kind of negative impact, but also disparity in healthcare data and race, talking about, again, the facial bias. And so trying to look at how AI and the digital world impact with our culture for that second hack.

Jenay Robert: There's so much to unpack there. I feel like it connects back to Dr. Joy's opening session yesterday.

John Crow: Yes. I was actually, when I first started teaching the class in 2018, I was using excerpt from her book.

Jenay Robert: Yeah, that's so full circle. Yeah. Do you want to talk a little bit, I want to circle back to UDL. I think not everybody listening, watching maybe will know what that is. It's Universal Design for Learning. And so something I'm often asked about as a researcher is how are people using generative AI tools to improve accessibility? And I think this is an area of great opportunity in classes. So maybe if you could just unpack it a little bit for people who aren't familiar.

John Crow: So there's three primary principles in Universal Design for Learning. One that looks at the motivation of why the student is engaging in the learning process, the materials and how it's represented to the students, and then how the students engage the learning environment and demonstrate learning. And each step, it's multiple means of a multiple means of engagement, multiple means of representation, because no one student is alike, and people have different ways of learning and have preferences to learning. So the more that the instructor provides the student choices, they'll be able to make the best choice for their situation. And it came out of universal design in architecture, but that was kind of reworked also takes great care to look at for people with disabilities, but it's again, not only just disabilities. Once you have an effective learning environment, once you have those means of different ways of engaging the material, the students will use them.

They might just watch the video normal, but then when they go to answer an essay or write an essay about it, they can go into the transcript and search. So the different ways that they engage the material, the different reasons why. So sure they're there to get a degree, but what can you do to invest them in that assignment? What can you do to invest them in the whole arc? What would interest them? And then if I let them in discussions, they can do it in video, they can do it in audio, they can do it in text. I'm just interested in the content. And then I make a rubric that grades on the content not so I don't do word counts and things like that. It's like, do you demonstrate the engagement with the material in your response? And that could be done verbally, that could be done in video. So what I'm trying to do is go to the objectives. I know it sounds crazy, but my objectives focus on certain things, and I try to build assignments that meet those objectives, but then are flexible on the ways that students can demonstrate it. So that's kind of how UDL comes together in different,

Jenay Robert: Oh, and this is a phenomenal use of generative AI because we talk about we don't want these tools to replace us as experts in the classroom, but we're coming up with perhaps one format of content that we feel most comfortable with, and that comes from our expertise and our experience. But then these generative AI tools can help transform those into other means of representation. I think that's really brilliant.

John Crow: And you can take, I love the audio overview function of NotebookLM, because you can put all that material in, create a ten-, fifteen-, twenty-minute audio review of all of it and a spoken kind of story way. And that's one way that people engage and learn. We like stories, we like hearing conversations. I mean, that's why we're talking now. So presenting the same material in that format is another way to pull students in and help with that motivation.

Jenay Robert: So, what are your thoughts as the student on the panel as you hear this multiple means of representation and thinking about your course experiences?

Jo Trotechaud: Yeah, I mean, I can definitely say that AI is transforming, it's given, it's transforming a lot of how education even just commences how students engage with it. I mean, I don't know. There's a lot of different fields that we could go into. I definitely love and agree with the NotebookLM usage, where as my professor said, with AI, you can do whatever you want with it because to make a case for it as a tutor for you, you can be as dumb as you want. And obviously, educators in the space, they don't want students to feel dumb when they ask questions. But sometimes that can be an anxiety, especially for me in a technical field, there's a lot of jargon and I just don't understand a lot of it. And sometimes it's like, oh, did I say this process? But for this thing, you can just throw that in an AI, and it's like, no. And then you just close the chat and then you don't have to feel guilty about it. I definitely feel like when it comes to accessibility, it's actually something that I haven't thought a lot about, but it is great to see how it really does enable a lot more participation and a lot more, I guess, utilization, so to speak.

Sophie White: Yeah. That's great. I was able to meet Dr. Joy after her talk yesterday and was talking to her. One of my favorite quotes from her book was something along the lines of AI shouldn't be used to resolve systemic issues that we should be dealing as humans. But she talks, I think she does a great job talking about the nuances of these are some really powerful ways that it can be used, and these are also some pitfalls to keep in mind. So I'm really glad that you brought that up, John. And I think when you were talking about your classes, Jo, I was like, oh, that's a positive view, but I don't want to evangelize AI being used for everything too. And I think that's the important part of this discussion is there's so much nuance that we're still figuring out that I'm encouraged by these AI literacy type of conversations of it can be great for accessibility, which we've identified as a need as UDL, as a need for helping everyone learn better in different formats, but also making sure that students understand these are the pitfalls, these are the cybersecurity risks.

Jo Trotechaud: Yeah. I definitely feel like one really important concept that I hear, and it touches on almost all aspects of AI is a human in the loop where it's not like, oh, this is this magical solution that's going to solve all my problems. It's an assistant. It's going to help you become the best version of yourself, so to speak. Sorry, I was going somewhere with that.

Jenay Robert: That's okay. Jo, I have another question for you, actually. One of the things that we've seen in our research is that universities and colleges are motivated by, when we talk about why they're embarking on an AI journey, they're really motivated by the need to prepare students for the workforce. So I'm wondering if you're seeing that as well as you start thinking about your future career, which is a little, you're in technology, so I know it's a bit biased toward perhaps the technology, but what are your thoughts on that?

Jo Trotechaud: Yeah, I mean, it's definitely brought up a lot of questions. Honestly, I feel like one perspective that I actually gained while I was here at EDUCAUSE and I was talking with a lot of higher education professionals, is sort of how it's reshaping education and how universities, the way I described it is I feel like there's almost a gap, and maybe it's not a literal gap, and maybe the gap doesn't exist. But AI has kind of brought up a problem that I'm at least seeing a lot in my institution where a lot of students have been told pretty much through their whole life, oh, go to school, get a degree, you'll get a job. But that's not the environment we live in anymore. And so me personally entering into higher education in COVID, all the professors sort of like, oh, this is online. I guess you submitted at midnight.

Sure. And then here's your grade points, here's your quiz. You kind of fill in the right answers and you're done. And so I feel like there was this very long period of time for myself where I was able to sort of ignore my field because it was like, oh, well, I'm doing great in my classes. I have a hundred percent in Canvas, so there's nothing to worry about. I feel like, and the big point I'm trying to get at is I had to sort of come to my own conclusion later on in my higher education journey of, oh, okay, getting this degree and learning isn't about passing my classes. It isn't about just getting a piece of paper. It's about really engaging myself with the material, retaining it, understanding it, applying it, and I feel like applying it's one of the biggest things that's difficult with this hybrid landscape that we're in.

So when I speak of the gap, what I feel like is a lot of students feel like, oh, I'm passing my classes. I'm doing great. And then that's where if we want to talk about AI, oh, AI is making me pass these classes with even less effort than before, this is awesome. And then with faculty, it's so hard to keep up. It is so incredibly hard to keep up. I've never had the pleasure of creating a curriculum for a class and trying to convey something to people that want to learn, but it's hard to keep up. It's hard to truly understand if you're teaching people the right thing, if you're preparing them for what is the future, when the tool you're teaching them might get replaced tomorrow. So I feel like when it comes to preparation for the future, I feel like there's definitely a lot of questions to ask and not a lot of answers right now where it's like, Hey, are we actually preparing kids for the future? Are we giving them the right tools? Are we teaching them the right things? And there's also, admittedly, and this is not something that we can always control. We need the students to also have a perspective shift in a lot of cases where a lot of my colleagues are like, oh, yeah, no, I'm going to get a job right after this. This is great. I'm like, they don't understand the fundamentals that they don't really apply it. They just do good in their classes, basically.

Sophie White: I feel like I don't want to put this only on individuals because as higher ed, we can, I think, do better to think about how to motivate students and how to teach them to think about the larger picture. But was there a moment for you that went from, oh, I just need to get good grades in order to succeed, or, oh, I care about making sure that I learned the subject material. What did that journey look like?

Jo Trotechaud: I mean, I do owe a lot to professors and higher ed individuals. And then if we want to go back to human in the loop, I wish I had a name for you, but it was definitely people that kind of got me to be like, wait, no. Okay, let's actually learn this. Let's actually engage with what I might be doing in the future. I think the moment for me, if there was one though, the thing that at least got me to kind of look past the number in the grade book was encouragement to, I don't want to say overextend because it makes it sound like it's a laborious thing. But yeah, check out that club, install that software, do a home lab, create your own, this is more tech focused, but create your own projects and really engage with what you're studying outside of a classroom setting.

Because I feel like what was necessary for me was a perspective shift where school was from 11 a.m. to 12, 12:45 p.m. or whatever, and then that's it. I do whatever I want afterwards. But kind of acknowledging that learning is a journey was sort of, it was difficult. It was difficult. It was very much like, I do need to do more. And then as I do more, it takes nothing away from the classroom. It more supplements it where it's like, oh yeah, this is a use case for this. This is how you can actually use it in real life, so to speak. 

Sophie White: Yeah. John, do you want to respond to that at all based on . . .

John Crow: Could you repeat the question?

Sophie White: Yeah. I'm curious kind of about how you're considering working with students to look at the bigger picture beyond the grades and the specific syllabus that they're working on to tie this to the larger world applications.

John Crow: So there's kind of the macro school issue. How do you prepare all the students for AI or get some AI literacy? And that is something that FSU is addressing. They've recently signed a contract with the Digital Education Council, and they have a course for students and for instructors that give basic frameworks and ways to understand, and that's going to be rolling out in the near future. But in my particular classes, there are humanities classes. So we're talking about critical thinking, stuff like that. I always include a section in my assignments that tell them why they're doing what they're doing, what skills they're going to learn. So in my digital literacy, it literally says, these are the computational skills that you're going to be practicing. These are the critical thinking skills. It gives them the vocabulary, it tells them how it connects to this assignment, and so they can see, oh, I'm not just doing this, but I'm actually practicing these skills.

And I'm thinking, and I tell 'em how to fit it into the big picture in my introduction to Buddhism course when they're looking at the narrative of the Buddha. Sure, there's a question just about that. But then underneath, I note, every religion has a religious founder, and that religious founder's story becomes a lesson into the central teachings of the religion itself. And so, sure, you're talking about the Buddha, but you can look at Jesus, you can look at Muhammad and all these other religions, and the same dynamic is happening. So I try to get them to think broader and look at in those critical thinking skills and just to see how it fits in the bigger picture. So that's how I do it, and different instructors do it in other ways.

Jenay Robert: Yeah, that's great. I think it's time for audience questions. Great.

Sophie White: Yeah, I love that last point too about, I'm just thinking about these multi-thousand year old religions and then bringing AI, this new technology into it, and what a cool place we're in to think about.

John Crow: So last year there was, on Twitter, there was a digital or Twitter Jesus. I don't know if people saw that, but then other people, other founders and stuff had popped up. But what's really interesting for someone like me is when I listen to the things that it's saying, it's kind of revealing the person more about the person who designed it, because the way they're talking about it, it's like, ah, the person who did that's Protestant because of the different ways that they're addressing certain parts of the Bible. And so what ends up happening is the people who make that software actually encode themselves and preferences. I think everybody's noticed the use of the em dash in ChatGPT, but it's not in Gemini. And so I asked it, why did you do use? And it said, and in it's training. It got better responses and more positives when it used an em dash.

Sophie White: Fair enough.

John Crow: It's that simple. So the people who scored it liked it, and that's why it does it.

Jenay Robert: And now those of us who are human who using em dashes are feeling a little insecure about it.

Sophie White: Yes.

Jo Trotechaud: Yeah. I've completely removed using emojis entirely from my inner any post or anything demo days. Yep.

Sophie White: All right, thanks for asking a question. Go for it.

Audience Question 1: Yeah. So I have a question for both of you regarding grading. So I'm curious how, as a faculty member, you're using potentially AI for helping you with grading, and I can assume it can be very helpful, but I'm curious if that inhibits your ability to really assess and know how your students are doing, if you're using that potentially instead of grading yourself, how do you check it? And then from the student perspective, I'm curious how students feel about their work going into an AI tool that potentially is being trained on it, assuming that it's FERPA compliant. But I also wonder as a student, how you feel about your instructor not reading your work potentially that you've been working on. So if you both could address that, that would be great.

Jenay Robert: It's a great question.

Sophie White: Great question.

Jo Trotechaud: Yeah. Yeah. I can go first. So I will say before I do answer that as a IST major, I feel like, I mean, writing is incredibly important. I don't mean to devalue it in any sense of the word, but a lot of it is sort of just business for me. So I feel like depending on your major, there's a very important communication that needs to happen between the student and the professor, where if I'm writing a forensic report or a policy report, if he sees it and he gives me genuine advice, that's awesome because then that helps me in the future. But that also doesn't feel like we're connected to me. And I think if we go back to the human point, I mean if I put my heart and soul into a project and then it was like, oh yeah, the AI said it was decent.

It was just like, I would definitely feel discouraged, definitely discouraged there. I think especially as we use these tools to help save us time, we need to really cherry pick the important moments to know that, hey, I'm working hard on this and it's being seen and it's being responded to. When it comes to the training point, we need some form of opt-out. I feel like that has to be the important thing there where control, it cannot be lost in that situation because especially as young academics, maybe we did actually create the best paper of our lives, and if it just goes straight into a black box model, that's really disappointing.

John Crow: So I think there's an incorrect assumption using generative AI for grading isn't necessarily having the AI did grading, but I use it for feedback. So I read it, I assign the grade, but I'm a terrible typist and I'm really slow. So in the past, what I've been using is in Canvas, you can do the pre-selected things, so they just kind of get these generic statements. But now with generative AI, let's just say a discussion, so I have a format where it's like this is the grade of the, this is the text, this is the grade of the comments, and these are the comments. And I've made a custom gem in Gemini where I've given it my rubric. I've explained what each part is and why it's that. I've explained to it, these are the ways that the student can improve themselves. Then. So it has all my grading information, all my instructions, but it can put it all together so much faster than I can, and it's much more clear.

It also can engage. So at the beginning of grading the feedback of an assignment, I give the AI the assignment, I give the AI the readings, and so it can look at a person's essay and say, well, when you talked about this, you could have engaged this part of this lecture or this writing. So it allows them to get much more substantive feedback based on my rubric, based on my desires on what I want to see. And I have found that when I do that, say on discussions within a unit or two, they are getting much better because they see it and it's not some generic thing. It's clearly connected to their experiences, their essay. And so I think the feedback is excellent, but I think it's unethical to turn the grading over to the AI.

Sophie White: Great question. That's a great example of the human in the loop too. So thanks for sharing that. Other questions from the audience? Looks like one in the back.

Audience Question 2: Yeah. Hi. So generative AI, we are using it more as personal productivity tool and various ways, and we have many examples of that. I was wondering if you have come across situations where it could be more as a collaborator in a group kind of environment. So as a student, for example, for your student project, could you use it as a, I don't know, something that helps everyone to think together, come to a conclusion. We know of many faculty meetings which are say very contentious or diverse, and discussions go on and on. Could you use that as a mediator? Do you have any examples of such use cases?

John Crow: I don't. The courses that I create are online asynchronous. So my courses don't have that kind of collaborative engagement. I do have them engage collaboratively with the AI, and in fact, I make them do it even when they don't want to, and they're scared of it. So to get them to learn those skills, I have to make them do it. And I tell it, have the AI generate the introduction to this essay, now go edit it. And then you write the rest of the essay. And so it gets in that kind of collaborative way where they can see, oh, well, this is an appropriate use for it, or it can write the first draft of something, and then what they turn in, they have to put the original that the AI did, and they have to put their changes and then explain it. So each step of the way, I'm building that structure for them to know how to do it. Correct. But the fact is almost anything that is language based, the AI can engage it in some shape or form.

Jo Trotechaud: Yeah. Yeah. I think I don't have any exact examples of using AI as sort of like a collaborator, although I do like the idea. And honestly, I have a pretty big presentation coming up with four classmates, and we definitely have some difficulty communicating. So I'll get back to you on that. But I feel like what you brought up is really important when it comes to how we need to shape our talks about AI. Where I think, especially as a student, a lot of the loop of education is like you're given a problem, solve it. Basically like, oh, you're given, this is a project. How are we going to get to submitting that project and turning it in and having it out of our minds. So when we're looking for solutions, we can come to AI as like, oh, you will help me do this project as a personal assistant. But then when it comes to a collaborative, multi-person setting, you don't have a catered agent that's like, oh, this is my GPT that knows what I like to hear, and it's going to butter me up. It's different. I do really enjoy the idea of having a sort of collaborator involved. And I think that'd be an interesting way to kind of push it to students where it's not replacing any of you, it's just giving you, it's like a quick fact check almost or a quick input and can blend your ideas, so to speak.

Jenay Robert: I love that you brought this use case because it gives me a chance to talk about thinking about future development of these tools. So many of the conversations we have really rest on the assumptions that these current tools are about as good as they're going to get, even though we know they're going to get much better, we tend to really embed those in our conversations. And so thinking about use cases like that are so interesting and important because in that case in particular, I think that the tools themselves don't necessarily lend themselves to that type of facilitation, even though we know learning is a social activity and all the social elements we know about learning. And so this is an opportunity for those of us at institutions who are actively working with these tools to give feedback to the companies that are creating the tools or the teams that are doing homegrown tools at our campuses to say, here's some really cool use cases.

Have you thought of this? And this event is a great place to do that. One thing we really emphasize at EDUCAUSE is that we want to build bridges between communities. So go to the EDUCAUSE Commons, go to Startup Alley, find the nearest corporate partner who's working on some tool that you like and say, have you thought about building in this more collaborative structure? What would it look like for four team members to talk to a chatbot at the same time? I don't know about if any of you have tried it before, but if you use the voice feature with ChatGPT and you have multiple speakers, it gets confused very quickly. So I think the tools just haven't yet reached that point. But zooming out a little bit, this idea that we have the power to impact the future, but it requires us to step on that bridge and talk to the people who are developing these tools.

Sophie White: That's a great question. We can keep an eye on it too. I know we have EDUCAUSE research on AI planned for 2026. We have a teaching and learning horizon report, which looks at forecasting what AI and other technologies could look like as it relates to teaching and learning. So stay tuned in case that one comes up.