He instantly saw the academic integrity challenges that would arise, and ultimately the work that teachers like him would have to do to redesign curriculum in response. In the time since, Watson has studied and written about the ways AI is changing our relationship to information, work and problem-solving. At the ASU+GSV AI Show April 6, he presented strategies to embrace those changes and accept AI as an essential component of teaching and learning today.
Most notably, Watson said AI is leading “not necessarily huge job loss, but huge job change.”
For example, in health care, AI is assisting human doctors in reading scans by highlighting areas to pay extra attention to. Other tools record conversations with patients with the goal of allowing physicians to focus on interacting with patients face-to-face rather than typing their responses into charts. Watson said his own physician piloted an AI scribe like this in a recent appointment.
AI is also assisting lawyers in reviewing contracts, proving to be better than humans at noticing not just when something is wrong, but also when something is missing. Some customer service positions are using AI to guide human agents’ responses and direct them to relevant information.
Employers broadly say they value AI skills. According to a spring 2024 survey from Microsoft, 66 percent of leaders wouldn’t hire someone without them, and a November 2024 report from the University of Pennsylvania found that companies’ weekly use of generative AI among business leaders increased from 37 percent in 2023 to 72 percent in 2024.
Watson said signs show all jobs are going to change somehow due to AI, and educators have a responsibility to prepare students for this. However, AAC&U found that as of early December 2024, only 14 percent of higher education institutions had set AI literacy as a general education learning outcome.
Responding to these changes is an unfunded mandate for all colleges and universities right now, Watson said. He offered several strategies to help leaders and faculty navigate it.
While banning AI use is one strategy some educators have used, Watson cautioned against relying on bans. For one, they usually depend upon detection tools that can have false positives.
“This is a direct quote from a student: ‘We’re not worried about being caught cheating with AI. We’re worried that we’re going to be falsely accused of cheating with AI. Everyone knows someone that has happened to,’” Watson said.
He said false cheating accusations and the stress around them could add to existing mental health struggles among students. If instructors are not willing to discuss the possibility of false positives in AI detection systems openly on a course syllabus, they shouldn’t use them, he said.
Additionally, students say they will continue to use AI even if it is banned.
“That doesn’t mean they’re using it to cheat,” he said. “It means that they see so many different ways that it’s valuable to their lives and to their own learning, and therefore they’re not going to move away from using it.”
Instead, Watson suggested developing clear policies and communicating them to students, including why that policy was chosen. Assignments can allow AI, ask students to share how they’ve used it, or disallow it. Proctoring exams, using oral assessments and returning to in-person handwritten essays can all limit AI use without relying on AI detection, he said.
He also said educators should understand that what they see as cheating, the business world might see as progress or a skill. To prepare for that reality, educators should design assignments that ask for higher-order thinking while using AI as a tool.
“For assignments where we would indeed invite students to use AI, maybe we focus on more complex tasks, moving them up Bloom’s Taxonomy to higher-order learning outcomes, even at the introductory level,” he said.
Low-level interventions to promote academic integrity and consider AI ethics can help promote AI literacy in a lower-pressure environment, Watson said. He added that simply discussing academic integrity, especially in recurring conversations before opportunities to put it in practice, can have a big impact.
“If you talk to your students about academic integrity, it’s more likely to influence their decisions regarding cheating,” he said. “If you have that talk on day one and then you give a quiz on Friday, it’ll influence them. If you have a talk on day one, and you never bring it up again, and you get to the midterm, it’s as if you never had the conversation.”
Instructors should also be flexible, understanding that modern students have responsibilities and stressors, and it is easier than ever to turn to cheating when they feel overwhelmed. The goal is to allow students to learn, and flexibility on deadlines can help facilitate that.
Flexibility, discussions of integrity and incorporating AI into classwork with clear policies can help students develop AI literacy skills and better prepare for a workforce that expects them to leverage AI tools.
“It’s becoming an imperative that higher education make a curricular pivot this coming academic year to ensure that our graduates in May of 2026 indeed are ready for the world that awaits them post-graduation,” Watson said.
