Campus Technology Insider Podcast February 2025
Rhea Kelly 12:50
It also makes me wonder kind of what kind of costs are we talking about. Because hiring new leaders that are focused on AI, that would be, you know, a different type of thing than investing in, you know, a ChatGPT rollout across your whole institution.
Jenay Robert 13:06
Yeah, and that would be a really interesting avenue for this future work that I've discussed, where we really want to dig deeper into what's happening on the ground. That's one of those frustrating limitations of these big surveys, is that I want to know all the things, and I can't ask all the things. And so I do think that kind of getting a little deeper into the financial impacts would be very interesting for the future.
Rhea Kelly 13:31
Yeah, for sure, yeah, because there have been so many examples, like CSU recently, huge AI, you know, initiative. And I can imagine being a small college, just thinking, how are they coming up with the money to do that?
Jenay Robert 13:45
Yeah.
Rhea Kelly 13:45
Interesting stuff. So could you talk about institutions' perceptions of AI risks versus benefits? Like, what are people still worried about, and what are they most optimistic about?
Jenay Robert 13:57
Yeah, I, this is maybe one of my favorite things in this report, because, well, I'll just go into it, that everybody seems kind of concerned about all the risks, and everyone seems kind of optimistic about all the potential. And so this is always a risk when you ask people to kind of rate a list of things, they can kind of say, Yes, I'm very concerned about everything, and I'm very optimistic about everything. And in some ways, that seems like it's not an interesting finding, because, oh yeah, we're all worried about everything. But I think that in the case of AI, this really is a very important finding, because it validates the feeling that we have in the community right now where people feel that they are drinking from the fire hose. They don't know where to focus their attention. Everything seems important and urgent and interesting, and there's potential and there's risk. So there's a long list of risks and a long list of potential uses that you can find in the report. Um. And the punchline there is that, you know, everyone's worried about everything and everyone's excited about everything. So, yeah, I mean, I think, I think this is really a case where you've got to drill down into what's happening in your local context. What are your faculty excited about? What are your students excited about? Every institution has a different focus and a different approach to education. Are you a liberal arts school? Are you a research-intensive environment? And so with all of that context in mind, that's where kind of building off of the work that we've done, investigating locally would be really helpful.
Rhea Kelly 15:39
Yeah, it makes sense that the risks and benefits would be very individual to, to the institution's unique sort of circumstance.
Jenay Robert 15:47
Well, there are risks where all, we all agree on, of course, still, right? Like so we still all agree that data privacy is a huge risk, cybersecurity is a big risk, ethical use of these tools, understanding where human creativity begins and ends, and are we encroaching on that? Are we impacting the way students are able to learn to think critically? So these are all things that I think the community very much agrees on, but there's just so many of them, and so trying to decide where to focus and how to shore up your own policies and guidelines and practice can be quite challenging. Legitimately.
Rhea Kelly 16:29
Were there any risks that people were less concerned about than last year? So I think you mentioned plagiarism concerns were less. Am I getting that right?