Year of AI Exploration at Oberlin

Dear Oberlin community,

If you open the ChatGPT app on your phone and type in the question “Is any technology coming close to having the same impact on society as the smartphone?” The answer? “Great question—very few technologies have reshaped human life as much as smartphones have. But some emerging ones may come close (or even surpass them): 1. Artificial Intelligence (AI).”

That an AI app would name itself as the most important emerging technology may confirm our greatest fears even as it simultaneously sparks our imagination. But we don’t have to go any further than our own consumption of the daily headlines, our disciplinary journals, and our educational conferences to know that AI will be transformational and possibly revolutionary.

As an academic institution, we work to ensure that our students are critical thinkers, culturally competent, and prepared to meet the challenges of the world they will inherit. All the while, we do so as an institution grounded in liberal arts and musical excellence. Given these groundings and our commitment to effectively preparing our students, I believe it is important that we take collective time as a community to explore the impact of AI on all aspects of our campus work over the next year. To that end, the President’s Office, along with our divisional deans, will be supporting the “Year of AI Exploration at Oberlin” initiative.

The goals of the Year of AI Exploration at Oberlin are simple: (1) to support institutional exploration of AI through speakers, workshops, and hands-on opportunities for faculty, staff, and students; (2) to grapple with the concerns that AI raises in faculty research and pedagogy, student learning, ethical and privacy matters, environmental considerations, etc.; (3) to work together to establish policy and procedures; (4) to gather faculty, staff, and student perspectives on AI; (5) to explore curricular and co-curricular pathways impacted and possibly enhanced by AI; (6) to explore the work of various administrative units through the lens of AI innovation, while being attentive to the underlying challenges and pitfalls.

Over the summer, I have been consulting with a small group of advisors from the deans’ offices, key faculty members, administrative leadership, and the Center for Information Technology to help our community define the broad strokes of this exploratory year. 

Academic and Campus Exploration

Like most exciting initiatives at Oberlin, our Year of Exploration begins with the faculty, who will drive much of this initiative. To that end, the deans have designated a faculty member in each division to be advisors on this year-long exploration. Adam Eck, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Data Science and Chair of Data Science in the College of Arts & Sciences, will serve as the college’s Director for AI Innovation and Strategy. Joe Lubben, Professor of Music Theory, will serve as the conservatory’s Director for AI Innovation and Strategy. Adam and Joe will work with faculty (at the departmental, committee, and divisional levels) and campus partners and programs (CIT, the libraries, the Gertrude B. Lemle Center for Teaching and Scholarship) to investigate the impact of AI on learning, teaching, and research. This research will inform potential policies, as well as pedagogical and curricular initiatives. Our goal is to create a space, beyond the noise, hype, and fear, where we can think critically and creatively about what AI means for our students—now and in the future—and how we can best prepare them to be engaged citizens, socially conscious community leaders, and lifelong learners. 

Activities

I hope that the entire campus will contribute new ideas to the range of activities we will engage in this year, suggest speakers and topics, and raise concerns and challenges. But to get us started, here are some of the things you can expect to see this year:  

• ChatGPT and Gemini: To support the year of exploration this fall, we will provide all faculty and staff with access to the enterprise version of ChatGPT and Google Gemini (in the spring, we will provide access to both of these tools for all students). While the free version of ChatGPT is already available to the public—and many on campus are using it and the enterprise version, for that matter—we are providing access to the enterprise version to address a range of  important considerations: (1) it allows us to create stronger safeguards to keep Oberlin’s data private and to ensure that our data is better protected from use by external AI models; (2) it offers better support for research and academic pursuits; (3) we want to create equity across campus, particularly for students; (4) effective collective exploration of AI as a campus requires a common tool. 

• Faculty and Student Survey: A faculty survey and a separate student survey will launch in the early part of September to assess perspectives on AI and its usage. The faculty survey will also help us measure and learn about faculty use, fluency, and comfort levels of applying AI in the classroom.

• Speakers and Collaboration: A series of lectures and conversations, by experts in the field, will be brought to campus. These conversations will inform policy guidance and provide our campus with the framework to discuss both the challenges and opportunities that AI provides in research, teaching, student learning and outcomes, and administrative work. I hope that we can use some of our time in General Faculty meetings for the lectures and conversations. We have some key speakers already invited, but if you have recommendations of speakers and views on needed campus conversations, please reach out to Adam Eck or Joe Lubben.

• Faculty Governance: Key faculty committees will be taking up the work of policy review and curricular development as we grapple with AI’s impact on academia. We are asking key governance committees as well as relevant divisional and general faculty committees to put AI into their work plans this year. Considerations for these bodies include issues of academic integrity, general education requirements, approaches to critical AI literacy, and discipline-specific AI competency. These AI conversations will be important for our community as well as ensuring the many rich discussions necessary to think collectively about AI’s impact on research, teaching, and learning.

• Workshops: In deep consultation with Adam and Joe and other key faculty, CIT, the Lemle Center, academic divisions and departments, Oberlin Undergraduate Research, and campus libraries, we will collaboratively offer workshops designed to meet the broad needs of our community. These collaborations will ensure the workshops are relevant, widely accessible, and supportive of faculty, staff, and student exploration with AI. Please feel free to suggest workshop topics. 

• Guided AI Exploration: These opportunities will begin in a few weeks. For those who have had little to no exposure to AI (and for those who just want to engage in this way), CIT will provide several opportunities throughout the year for participants to have guided daily interactions with AI. Likely in four-week segments, participants in these guided experiences will explore new tools, reflect on its applications, and build skills progressively. Our goal will be to provide participants multiple opportunities to be a part of a guided experience so that everyone has the space and time to do so.  

• Pilots: We will be providing opportunities to pilot various AI tools. In the spirit of exploration, I believe it is important to understand the AI tools that already exist on our campus and to have the ability to explore new ones. Several divisions and administrative units have software in which AI tools are automatically embedded in their upgraded versions. This embedded nature of AI in currently existing software packages has already become the norm. This year, we hope to have a planned and thoughtful approach to assessing these tools, their value, and their challenges. 

• Resource Hub: We have created a shared internal hub and a public site to capture our collective learning, pilots, and experiments. This knowledge base will support policy development over time and build AI communities of practice. Ultimately, this will be a network in which faculty, staff, and students share discoveries and insights, shape best practices, and ensure responsible, ethical use. 

Our Future

Over the next nine months, our community will explore AI in a comprehensive approach designed to prepare our faculty, students, and staff to be discerning users of AI, even as it reshapes education, research, and employment. 

AI is here. To ignore it would be to do so at our peril. We should understand its constraints and its challenges, absolutely; and then we must determine how to harness this technology so that it helps Oberlin produce the best critical thinkers, creative problem-solvers, and generous and skilled collaborators. Done effectively, this approach, I hope, will spark curiosity, cultivate ethical engagement, and build foundational fluency with AI across our liberal arts and musical community.

There are so many things I love about Oberlin, but one of them is that we embrace big challenges with a framework that is steeped in critical inquiry, creativity, academic innovation, and equitable access. If AI is the most significant technological innovation since the smartphone, we are obligated to explore it for the sake of our academic mission. I am hopeful that this Year of AI Exploration at Oberlin will help us grapple with the challenges and opportunities of AI with purpose, reflection, and imagination.

It is an ambitious undertaking, for sure, but thankfully we are known for our ambition.   

Regards,

Carmen Twillie Ambar