Forum brings together Ohio State faculty, staff to share AI best practices

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Forum brings together Ohio State faculty, staff to share AI best practices

Participants discuss using AI in classroom, across disciplines

The Ohio State University faculty and staff came together last week to discuss how artificial intelligence (AI) is being implemented across disciplines. The Office of Academic Affairs convened the AI Fluency Forum at the Ohio Union, with about 200 people from throughout the university in attendance.

Last year, the university launched its AI Fluency initiative. The initiative is ensuring that every undergraduate Ohio State student, beginning with the class of 2029, will graduate AI fluent - fluent in their field of study and fluent in applying AI in that field.

"We received roadmaps from all of the colleges that offer undergraduate programs," outlining how the AI Fluency initiative will be implemented, said Shereen Agrawal, associate vice president for Student Innovation and Entrepreneurship and executive director of the Center for Software Innovation. "These represented well over 50 new courses in development as well as hundreds of courses being in some way adapted or edited to think through how AI is impacting some of the existing learning outcomes or some of the existing objectives."

During the forum, faculty shared strategies on how they're incorporating AI into their disciplines and courses.

"As educators, we are at a critical moment in time where we can support students as they learn within this age of AI and we can design our assessments, our learning environments and our learning experiences that foster our students' development of AI fluency," said Anika Anthony, associate vice provost and director of the Drake Institute for Teaching and Learning.

"I am stressing here the importance of human intelligence. And by that, I mean human knowledge, human experience and our wisdom in framing AI fluency within our disciplines, within our curricula, and within our courses and our co-curricular experiences."

Professor Rebecca Andridge said the College of Public Health's new course, Technology, Innovation and Public Health, is designed to prepare students to become proficient in AI and other technologies they will encounter in the workplace. The college has also determined that engaging with the business community is key to ensuring that the curriculum aligns with workforce needs, she said.

"We should always be doing this to learn what are the skills that our employers want," Andridge said. "In the age of AI, it's especially important to find out from those employers what they want the students to be able to do when they graduate."

The College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences (CFAES) is teaching students how modern farming uses AI to save money, time and resources, said Professor John Fulton.

"We're taking cameras -- it could be your smartphone or a camera on a drone taking pictures -- and interpreting things like [crop] disease, insects, things of that nature from a stressor," he said. By including this technology in courses, CFAES is introducing students "to what they might be a part of out in the professional world as far as implementation."

Assistant Professor Molly Downing shared how the College of Pharmacy is integrating AI into its general education cosmetics science course.

Downing said she used a framework designed by colleague Steven Nagel, lead of Emerging Technology Programs in the Center for Software Innovation. The framework offers guidelines for instructors on designing assignments that account for students' use of AI. Downing cited an example of an assignment in which students used AI to assist them in evaluating the environmental tradeoffs of a personal cosmetic product.

Using the framework, Downing designed AI prompts for students, encouraging them to demonstrate critical thinking through synthesis of their decision-making process via a submitted video presentation.

"It's really about helping them make that thinking visible and guiding them along this decision-making process, filled with reasoning, judgment, supporting their responses with evidence and ultimately coming to a decision about their cosmetic product," she said.

In surveys completed after the assignment, Downing said most students agreed that AI should be used as a partner, rather than a substitute for their own problem-solving skills.

"They said, 'Instead of asking AI to simply complete an assignment, I can use it to challenge my ideas, ask follow-up questions, identify gaps in my understanding and explore a topic more deeply,'" she said. "They go on to say, 'This helped me understand that AI can support my learning and really help me think more critically,' versus AI just doing the assessments for them."

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