Campus Technology Insider Podcast February 2025
Jenay Robert 16:38
Yes. So indirectly, we, I wouldn't, I don't know that I would say that they are less concerned about plagiarism, but that they, they're, this kind of arose when we asked about people's impressions of the future, and what are their predictions of the future. And so in that, in that way, you know, we can say that I think our respondents think that there is less of an impact on plagiarism, and, in the future. That there will be, there won't be this big, terrifying sort of fallout from AI. But I will say with regard to all those other risks, those we didn't quantify in last year's survey. So in last year's survey, what we did was we had open-ended comments and asked the community, what are all the things that you're concerned about? And we used those data actually to build out these quantitative, closed-ended questions on the 2025 survey. So I have to say, though, if you go back and look through those percentages, folks are quite concerned about all the risks. You know, you're gonna see like 90% people saying they're concerned, 80%, so I imagine that if we had quantified last year, it would be hovering around this, the same numbers. Yeah.
Rhea Kelly 17:59
So are there any other findings that stood out for you?
Jenay Robert 18:03
I mean, that was definitely one of them. Just kind of all of us drinking out of the fire hose. It felt good to me, at least to feel like, that, I was validated. Like, yeah, oh yeah, okay. We all feel the same way. We're all very concerned and very excited. I think something else that I want to point out, because it isn't as big of a finding in the report, but in that risk section, we asked an open-ended to elicit more risks than what we have listed. And one of them that came out from there, just a few comments, but I think very important to pay attention to, is that there's this emerging friction or tension between some faculty and some staff with regard to how they feel about AI. And specifically, one of the respondents described this as a lack of collegiality, which I, you know, and I, when I wrote this section of the report, I pointed out that, based on our Horizon Report research, we know that we're living in a time that is — and it's common sense too, we don't need to point to research to this — we're living in a time where people are increasingly divided. And so having another thing on our campuses that could act as sort of a divisive point of concern, we want to pay attention to that and try to catch that early and bring people together as early as possible. And as much as I said that the majority of our respondents are living in kind of an in between space and don't feel strongly 100% for or against using AI at our institutions, every institution is different, every department is different, every individual is different. And so we do see those big differences on our campuses in varying degrees. So that's something I want to kind of point out to our community, to try to get a handle on how much of that is happening at your institution, and perhaps get ahead of any lack of progress due to that. And then my colleague and co-author on this report, Mark McCormack, wrote a phenomenal section. It's one of the last sections of the report about differences between smaller and larger institutions and this emerging sort of digital divide at the institutional level, with regard to AI. So Mark pointed out in the report that smaller and larger institutions are quite similar in things like their motivations for using AI or their optimism, optimism about AI, but that larger institutions — and again, this is kind of something that is logical in many ways, but having this data is really important for raising awareness about it — that larger institutions seem to have more resources and more capabilities to implement AI at their institutions. And so I want to highlight this finding, not only because it is interesting and validates some of the things that we've all suspected are happening, but this type of a divide between institutions can trickle down to students, of course, and at the end of the day, if we're really trying to look ahead, this is the type of thing that can eventually widen digital divides between students. I don't know that we're at that point just now, but I think as we see more implementation of AI tools and teaching students about AI, if not how to use it, at least what it is, and how to be aware of the implications, that, that could drive differences in or drive an increase in the digital divide among students.