Campus Technology Insider Podcast February 2025
Listen: More Optimism, Less Distrust: Educause's 2025 AI Landscape Study
Rhea Kelly 00:07
Hello and welcome to the Campus Technology Insider podcast. I'm Rhea Kelly, editor in chief of campus technology and your host. And I'm here with Jenay Robert, senior researcher at Educause, to talk about the latest Educause AI Landscape Study. Jenay, welcome to the podcast!
Jenay Robert 00:24
Thanks so much. It's a pleasure to be back. Always a joy to chat with you.
Rhea Kelly 00:28
The Educause 2025 AI landscape study just came out a couple of weeks ago. Could you give kind of a brief overview of the study, kind of its history, your methodology, that kind of stuff.
Jenay Robert 00:40
Yeah. I mean, in regards to the history, this really started late 2023, which is when we started to feel like it was time to do our first landscape study. So you know, if you try to do research like this too early, when something shows up on the stage of higher ed, people are still kind of trying to get their feet under them. But by late 2023 we felt like, okay, this is a good time to kind of get started on this line of research. And I have to say it's one of my proudest moments for me and my team, because we went from a meeting with Susan Grayjek, who was the VP of Research at that point, and that was October 2023 when she said, "I'd like to see this happen." And we got that published by February 2024. So it was this huge team effort, and really fun. And we had so much fun that we decided to do it again for 2025. So yeah, we followed a similar sort of research plan, really, like all of our research, this starts with listening to the community. So figuring out what's keeping all of you up at night, what are the things you really need to know. As an aside, sometimes you'll see me pop up at a random like AI summit or something like that, which might be a very practitioner-focused event, and usually what I'm doing is just trying to kind of see what's happening on the ground and connect with community and get research ideas. And so that's, that's really the story behind the research.
Rhea Kelly 02:07
Yeah, so this being the second year of the study, that makes it super exciting to be able to make some comparisons between this year and last. Were there any standout differences?
Jenay Robert 02:17
Yeah, there were a few interesting things. Some a little more subtle, some not so subtle. So I think on the subtle side of things, we're seeing perhaps a slight shift towards enthusiasm for AI tools. So fewer respondents saying that they're mostly cautious or that they're indifferent or that they don't know how they feel, and then a little bit more respondents saying that they're optimistic or they have a mix of caution and enthusiasm. So in general, even though this is a subtle finding, I like to really point this out, because I think we tend to hear that there's people who are either 100% for or 100% against AI tools at our institutions. And while those extremes do exist, I think our data don't support that most people fall on one side or another. I think most people are really somewhere in between, and perhaps leaning a little bit towards optimism. Another piece would be that, we're, we asked our respondents about what they think about the future of AI in higher education, and so this year, 55% of respondents predicted that academic dishonesty would increase in the future, which is a decrease of nine percentage points from 2024. So I do think, and this is also based on kind of the conversations I'm having with colleagues, I do think that some of that initial panic, while, while we're still quite concerned about academic integrity issues, I think some of the initial panic is starting to subside, and people are really thinking about, how can we, how can we leverage this point in history to push back on assessment practices?