Molly Mohr Bruni

Potential Applications for Artificial Intelligence Across Campus

mmohr — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 19:36:14 +0000

Potential Applications for Artificial Intelligence Across Campus mmohr Monday, April 22, 2024

Potential Applications for Artificial Intelligence Across Campus

Offices across �԰��’s campus weigh the pros and cons of the latest technology disruptor

Monday, April 22, 2024

The higher education landscape is being upended with debates around artificial intelligence (AI), especially how it affects learning in the classroom. Looking beyond the academics, though, AI offers significant disruption—and potential—for other areas of campus that support the student experience. We talked to some of these offices to hear what they had to say about AI.

Admissions

Justin Doty, Dean of Admissions

People are curious about how college admissions offices are handling AI in the context of reviewing essays. Admittedly, at first, I was very concerned and felt like every high schooler would be using AI to write their essays, but now I feel differently after doing more research. There are certain 'pros' I hadn't considered previously, like students using AI to help them brainstorm essay topics, structure their content, or enhance certain ideas. Another pro is that AI may be able to assist students who don't have the financial means to hire a college coach or may not have family support to assist them with their essays. Of course, we want the human being (student) to be the one writing the actual essay so it's their authentic voice/tone. We want parents, teachers, advisors—and now AI—to help assist them in the process, not do it for them.

I've also heard of colleges using AI to assist with transcript processing and review, although we haven't fully explored this ourselves yet. I attended a recent conference session highlighting the application of AI in education and heard about teachers and high school counselors using AI to assist them in writing their letters of recommendation. While they were infusing their own voice, they said AI was helpful in structuring the content to make the letter more meaningful. Personally, I think AI is only going to become more prevalent, so better to lean into it and figure out new world applications vs. resisting it!

Center for Experiential Learning and Career Success

Katie Ramirez, CELCS Director

AI has a lot of potential applications with career development. We encourage students to use AI as a resource to get to the answer, not as the answer itself. AI can help summarize job descriptions for students, brainstorm career paths with students, and help students learn how to talk about their research. It’s important, though, that there is a human component working alongside the AI, especially when using AI as a resource to help edit—not write—application documents. Good prompts entered in will translate to good output from AI.

We’re excited that our recruiting platform, Handshake, will soon have Coco, an AI-powered chatbot. Coco will help users with career guidance, goal-setting, planning, career research, industry information, and interview prep. Most importantly, Coco will help democratize access to Handshake across all users, leveling the playing field.

In fact, AI in general helps level the playing field even outside of career help. Students can use it for instant access to quick information, and it’s not going to judge you. There are no dumb questions! It’s a neutral space to learn, recognizing the data is imperfect and sometimes outdated. That's where the human component is critical to taking that next step..

Emergency Management

Lorenzo D. Sanchez, Ph.D., Director of Emergency Management

AI has the capabilities to support emergency management before, during, and after a critical incident, and there are many applications that I’m looking to explore and possibly implement in the future, which include:

Chat Assistant: Seeking to leverage AI in a “chat assistant” like Pawla, to provide emergency information quickly to students, faculty, staff, and parents if they visit the website. They can ask Pawla for shelter locations, emergency procedures, possibly weather alerts, and other info.
Situational Awareness: Leveraging AI for situational awareness is an emerging trend in emergency management to rapidly triage large volumes of information from multiple sources, agencies, and social media. This application of AI can provide first responders, emergency managers, and other safety professionals with real-time data when seconds count.

Other uses of AI in emergency management include advanced search for local resources during critical incidents and regional disasters, predictive weather modeling and forecasts, generative AI emergency scenarios for responder training, business continuity and organizational resiliency, and administrative policy and plan development among other uses.

Library

Dennis Donathan, Assistant Professor and STEM Librarian, and Audrey Stewart, Staff Librarian - Digital Technologies and First-Year Programs

Current AI tools can be very impactful in the process of researching and literature-searching. For example, Research Rabbit can help with literature searching and finding related papers, and even help find connections between ideas and topics. Peplexity.ai is helpful in finding resources and information to get you started, particularly early on in the research process. Scopus AI and The Literature (PubMed) are generative tools where the user provides a question, and the tool then generates a summary with references to articles that are indexed within the Scopus and PubMed databases, respectively. These two programs present unique opportunities to lower the barrier of entry to literature searching with academic databases, particularly for students.

Student Accessibility Services

Laura Márquez Ramsey, Director for SAS

Several of our technologies have various AI features built in. The most widely used features include captioning and transcription services. For example, Read&Write offers text-to-speech for reading assistance and speech-to-text that students can use to talk out their papers. SAS purchased an institutional license so all students, faculty, and staff can access this technology.

Another popular tool is GLEAN, a note-taking technology incorporating multiple features to promote active note-taking skills. This tool allows students to type notes while incorporating an audio recording feature that not only transcribes but also lets students tag specific portions of the lecture they want to revisit. The study features within this platform help students organize, revise, and clarify their notes.

Our goal in using AI technology is to promote independent learning and self-advocacy skills that students will use in the �԰�� classroom and beyond.

University Archives

Abra Schnur, University Archivist

We are using a form of Whisper AI, created by Baylor University Libraries and Institute for Oral History, to get quick text output for transcription of oral history interviews. It's not 100%, but it cuts down transcription time by a lot and allows students to focus more on formatting the transcript document for readability and actively listening to discover insights from the interview.

University Police (TUPD)

Paul Chapa, Assistant Vice President of Enterprise Risk Management and Chief of Police

The one area at TUPD where we would probably use AI is with our surveillance cameras on campus. AI can be used to monitor areas like bike racks, looking for particular body movements that could mimic someone stealing a bike, or identifying a suspicious person and having the camera system search and follow the subject across campus. Other systems can also look for objects that look like guns or look for specific body movements that could be aggressive.

Writing Center

Jennifer Rowe, Director of Tutoring Programs and Lecturer

Tutors pretty quickly learned to spot AI in papers—they would make jokes about the predictability of the form, particularly the type of "flourish" the last paragraphs tend to have. The trickiest part for us is not that AI exists or that students use it, but that there is such variability amongst professors in class policy regarding its use. We now regularly ask questions like, "Does your professor allow the use of AI for writing or brainstorming? Does your professor prohibit the use of ChatGPT?" etc.

When tutors suspect a paper has been done by AI, they try to encourage students to talk through ideas so they come up with their own unique phrasing. At the same time, we don't suspect too many of our clients/students are using AI right now. Students who come to the Writing Center are typically hard-working students interested in learning / doing on their own, who are willing to work past issues in writing with the help of a human tutor, etc.

Staff

�԰�� Magazine: Spring 2024

Thank you to Emma Utzinger ’24, Strategic Communications and Marketing writing intern, for her contributions to this story!

Molly Mohr Bruni

Potential Applications for Artificial Intelligence Across Campus

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