The area of interest around this grant is to study how artificial intelligence can be integrated into instructional activities and possibly improve learning outcomes. This aims to enhance teaching and learning through the adoption of AI technologies embedded in higher education curriculum.
Among these awardees are two NAU professors who offer their own innovative proposals for this specific topic but share the same goal of helping students and educators better understand AI.
Janice Sweeter is an associate professor of practice in the School of Communication who teaches strategic communication. Sweeter said she was thrilled to receive the grant because nothing is a more profound disruptor than AI in every facet of everything, especially strategic communication.
“College is a terrific opportunity to practice in a low-stakes environment how to work with a tool that is going to be so ubiquitous everywhere,” Sweeter said.
Sweeter’s research is called Harnessing AI in the Strategic Communications Classroom and Workplace. This project focuses on helping strategic communication students capture the powerful tool that is AI to use it thoughtfully and prepare them for its integration in future careers.
This was an opportunity to provide students an intervention in the classroom on how to appropriately use AI, Sweeter said, and hopefully steer them away from the fear she has seen some students struggle with when it comes to using it.
Alongside a few of her colleagues, Sweeter conducted her research by putting together focus groups and asking students how the in-class intervention with AI affected the way they perceive it. The students using AI to complete their assignments were not only required to explain where they used it in their work, but how they used it, whether it was for brainstorming ideas or summarizing long essays. Results from this experiment found that awareness, usage and understanding all increased among the students required to use AI compared to a controlled group of students that had no AI perspective in the course.
Before receiving her TRAIL grant, Sweeter co-developed a class called Social Media Analytics and Management. She and her team interviewed industry practitioners and asked them what qualities they were looking for in graduate students entering the workforce. Most companies said they are looking for an online listening tool — someone or something that can track how a brand is doing based on if its feedback is positive, negative or neutral.
This data can be received from humans or AI-enabled tools.
Given this feedback, Sweeter gave her students the chance to play around with AI and see what insights they received from an AI perspective in comparison to humans. This work inspired her to apply for the TRAIL grant to further her research on exposing students to AI use and better prepare them for their careers after graduation.
Sweeter said AI cannot be ignored, especially in strategic communication, because it is a dynamic industry that is always changing, and it is the responsibility of educators to provide students the space to help them feel comfortable using it.
“Being comfortable with it and building your familiarity in an appropriate, ethical way we hope will help students on their way,” Sweeter said. “We would recommend every course have some sort of micromodule, usually at the beginning of the class, regarding AI so that it’s an open conversation. That way you understand what’s appropriate within that context and then you can extrapolate that when you start looking at corporate culture.”
TRIAL AND ERROR
Blue Brazelton, an associate professor of educational leadership at NAU, offers another angle to look at AI in the university setting in his research project called Generative AI and Organizational Leader Development.
Brazelton’s research looks at school leaders and their AI adoption and usage through his students. The framing for this project observes technological anxiety, specifically around AI, and what might be preventing individuals from exploring the potential of AI in schooling.
Generative AI is defined as anything that is built off of a large language model (LLM) and explores the different ways people can communicate with AI to get the results they want. LLMs are trained on an immense amount of data, making them capable of understanding and generating natural language and resolving a multitude of tasks.
This language-based interaction with the platform allows people to have a conversation with it, whether it is through text or through point-and-click interfaces.
The professor’s goal when embarking on this project was to connect with the emotions of educators and administrators to bring them some cognizance to the integration of AI.
“I was inspired by the potential of exposure and simplifying AI to individuals who are really capable of understanding it but may not have the time, resources or training to get their hands messy,” Brazelton said.
Before starting this project, Brazelton said, he encountered a significant number of individuals who are afraid of AI and the disruption it presents to schooling, so he wanted to spend time teaching faculty about it by having them implement it in classroom assignments to give them exposure.
Technology always presents itself to be unknown, Brazelton said.
Educators and students might know what it is, but they don’t know what it’s going to be, and the growth of AI is limitless.
Brazelton said when it comes to the type of communication educational leaders should be having with their students about AI, it should be individualized to their curriculum and have a structured, organized approach to understanding that AI literacy is something graduate students need for their future in lifelong learning with technology.
“We are kind of in the same spot we’ve been for 20 years,” Brazelton said. “We know our graduates will need these technological skills to enter the workforce or possibly excel there, but whose responsibility is it for them to mind this?”
As Brazelton has conducted his research, he has had some strong reactions from students and how they are receiving AI. There were students who were alarmed about taking a class with Brazelton in which they’d have to use AI because of conflict of morals, and there were students optimistic about AI's potential.
Brazelton said the use of AI can be enriching to the learning process rather than subversive if educators take the time to understand the usage of these tools to design learning assessments and activities that allow students to advance their technological identity and usage practices.
Some usage rates Brazelton found from his research showed 61 percent of faculty have already integrated AI into their teaching materials and 86 percent plan on using it.
“We don’t want to define the way it goes,” Brazelton said. “We just want to support individuals with how they think they will use AI next. We don’t want to be restrictive of the concepts of innovation and trial and error.”
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