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A taskforce of UMass Dartmouth faculty and staff was charged with making recommendations for integrating artificial intelligence as a teaching and learning tool

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly becoming a fundamental part of everyday life, especially in education. College campuses are faced with the challenges AI poses and the current and future impacts it has on higher education. This technology’s rapid development is leading students and educators to consider AI’s place in the classroom and reimagine how it can be used as an academic tool.

To confront these questions and challenges, UMass Dartmouth Provost Ramprasad Balasubramanian created the AI Taskforce, a group of staff and faculty charged with investigating AI’s academic capabilities and creating a set of recommendations for meaningfully integrating it across UMD’s curriculum.

Members of the Taskforce are Scott Ahrens, Brian Ayotte, Julie Bowman, Nancy Godleski, Firas Khatib, Melody O'Donnell, B.K. Rai, Michael Sheriff, Mendy Smith, Matt Sneider, Alexis Teagarden, Iren Valova, and Anoo Vyas. They will work with the Office of Faculty Development, the Senate Technology Committee, and Instructional Design.

The Taskforce is headed by Chair Amy Shapiro, who is the Dean of the Honors College, and she shared her insight into the Taskforce’s goals and how it will serve the UMass Dartmouth community.

Why is it important that the University has a dedicated AI taskforce?

AI is the most disruptive technology affecting higher education since the development of the internet. It has the potential to dramatically change student outcomes and the way we teach and learn. Most educators feel unsure about how it should be used, or if it should be used at all.

The Taskforce is important because it brings together faculty, technologists, and administrators from across campus to study the problem and make recommendations to the Provost about how UMass Dartmouth should move forward with AI use in the classroom and get students ready for a future that will involve AI in its workflow.

What are the goals of the Taskforce?

The Taskforce will study and assess how faculty are currently using AI for teaching, how other schools have adopted it, and how our campus can support our faculty in becoming comfortable and proficient with AI-integrated pedagogy. A key goal is to ensure our graduates are skilled users of AI tools and technologies in their professional practice.

What skills or competencies do you want students to gain as AI becomes more prevalent?

At a fundamental level, students should become AI literate, meaning that they should know what it is, how it works, the biases inherent in each AI, ethical and responsible use, and AI's capabilities and deficits.

AI fluency will differ between disciplines, but any fluent user should know how to use AI as a partner in the human creative process. Each college or discipline must have input about what its majors should know about using AI at a high level.

And finally, AI competency is where students will demonstrate the ability to use this powerful technology responsibly and ethically within their discipline.

How does the Taskforce align with the University’s broader academic mission?

A foundation of the campus mission is dedication to “engaged learning and innovative research resulting in personal and lifelong student success.” The disruptive potential of AI to so many industries makes it important for our graduates' success that they understand what AI is, understand its current limitations, and how to use it effectively and responsibly in their chosen fields.

It is vital to our mission as a university to prepare our students for the world in which they will live and work after graduation. The Taskforce's mission is to inform campus decisions that will position students for success in an AI-influenced world.

What challenges or opportunities are in front of this taskforce?

There's so much to learn about AI, and the technology is evolving rapidly. One challenge is understanding the landscape in a way that remains relevant in a year.

Equally important, we need to become expert enough to make recommendations that support students' intellectual growth rather than losing them to the lure of using AI as a replacement for thinking.

What excites you most about the future of AI at the University?

We know what kind of activities promote meaningful learning (like creative problem-solving) as opposed to surface learning (like rote memorization). Many of those methods require individualized experiences and time, which is difficult for professors to provide in large classes.

Shapiro is excited at the possibility of our faculty empowered to harness the ability of AI to teach our students through simulations, the Socratic method, individualized adaptive tutoring, and other strategies that may push students to achieve their potential.

AI also has the potential to support student learning throughout their academic journey by serving as an on-demand tutor, coach, and evaluator. These are powerful tools that truly accelerate student learning.