The state-of-art of Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) is changing at lightning speed. Advances come by the hour, not just by the day. How might this play out in higher ed?

As Senior Fellow at UPCEA, the online and professional education association, and Professor Emeritus from the University of Illinois Springfield, I am fortunate to devote recent efforts to track, analyze and project the impact of technologies in higher education. Beginning with my first instructor appointment in 1972 and continuing throughout the ensuing 52 years, I have closely followed, administered, researched, published, and taught about the application of technologies in enhancing learning and teaching in higher education.  It has been an exciting ride from analog technologies such as film and audio tape of the early years to digital transformations that brought the Web and online learning to students and faculty worldwide supported by a host of platforms and supportive technologies. Now, in a convergence of Gen AI technologies bringing the agency, autonomy, and even robotic embodiment, we face a moment that promises to dwarf that half century of advancements and higher education changes in the space of the coming months and grow through the years ahead.

To effectively envision the near future of Gen AI in higher ed, we need to at least briefly consider the context of the broader economy, the general fiscal condition of higher education, the state of development/deployment of new and emerging AI technologies, and the emerging demand for graduates, upskilled and reskilled workers with certificates from colleges and universities.

In general, we see evidence in the broader business and industrial world that there is an enthusiasm for AI as a way to attain efficiency and effectiveness, even in roles traditionally held by humans. The shift is already taking place in the tech field.  In this column, we have previously documented instances of corporate leaders of IBM, Cisco, Microsoft and TurboTax have justified massive layoffs to launch AI initiatives in which AI has taken over duties that were previously held by people. In an article, “Generative AI Update for 2024,” in the European Business Review earlier this year, my colleague Katherine Kerpan of the University of Illinois Chicago and I documented the beginnings of this movement, including strategies for ethically supporting workers with out-of-date, less-efficient, skills and approaches to their work. Suffice it to say that the competing forces of efficiency and innovation are driving the adoption of these technologies beyond the academy.

Meanwhile, a significant number of institutions of higher education are suffering from lower revenues and operating margins.  Last month, Forbes released its “Forbes College Financial Grades” List, noting, “About 55% of schools, or more than 480, earned a C or worse, compared to only 20% in fiscal 2021. One hundred and eighty-two schools earned a D, the lowest possible grade, up from 20 in fiscal 2021.” Earlier this year, John Marcus wrote in the Hechinger Report that “Colleges are now closing at a pace of one a week.” Marcus documents that in far too many of the cases, surprised students are left in the lurch with a difficult road forward to completing degrees and certificates. Accrued student debt remains staggering, currently at one and three-quarters trillion dollars! A looming student “demographic or enrollment cliff” is scheduled to reach higher education in the next year. As a result of these factors, there is awareness and some anxiety in our field that we must become more efficient and effective in order to meet prospective student expectations and the intensity of competition that grows in our field as the number of institutions shrink.

Research and development across the wide field of Artificial Intelligence is taking place at thousands of institutions and start-ups around the world. The recent release of OpenAI o1, is just the most recent, as I write this, of a long litany of incremental developments across platforms from some of the largest tech companies in the world to unleash the potential of AI in a wide variety of forms and ways. Taking just this one new development, we see the advent of “level 2” reasoning. In a report accompanying the release OpenAI writes “OpenAI o1 ranks in the 89th percentile on competitive programming questions (Codeforces), places among the top 500 students in the US in a qualifier for the USA Math Olympiad (AIME), and exceeds human PhD-level accuracy on a benchmark of physics, biology, and chemistry problems (GPQA).” The report goes on to say: “We also evaluated o1 on GPQA diamond, a difficult intelligence benchmark which tests for expertise in chemistry, physics and biology. In order to compare models to humans, we recruited experts with PhDs to answer GPQA-diamond questions. We found that o1 surpassed the performance of those human experts, becoming the first model to do so on this benchmark. These results do not imply that o1 is more capable than a PhD in all respects — only that the model is more proficient in solving some problems that a PhD would be expected to solve.”

While the reasoning of o1 soars, we are witnessing the rise of autonomous artificial intelligent agents that are no longer simple chatbots. Instead, the agents that will be flooding the market this fall and beyond are able to accomplish complex, multi-step, changing tasks. As Amazon Web Services explains it:

“An artificial intelligence (AI) agent is a software program that can interact with its environment, collect data, and use the data to perform self-determined tasks to meet predetermined goals. Humans set goals, but an AI agent independently chooses the best actions it needs to perform to achieve those goals. For example, consider a contact center AI agent that wants to resolves customer queries. The agent will automatically ask the customer different questions, look up information in internal documents, and respond with a solution. Based on the customer responses, it determines if it can resolve the query itself or pass it on to a human.”

Far more complex tasks also can be accomplished. We have seen multiple experiments using such agents in Minecraft as described in Toms Guide. Multiple societies have been formed and fascinating communities have been built by intelligent agents which have been given purposes and goals by humans. They organize and even, in some cases, implement democracies.

That leads us to a glimpse into higher education in the coming year. Given this background, join me in envisioning how we might begin using these technologies. I see us replacing mid-level administrators with intelligent agents which can efficiently and effectively make decisions that are thoroughly documented and adaptive to changing goals and outcomes. Such areas as admissions, financial aid, the division of financial affairs, facilities scheduling, human resources, and many more are offices where some staff may first become artificial staff. 

Startling as it may seem to some, I can see these advanced models, such as those with PhD reasoning, filling adjunct faculty posts while overseen by human professors. The long-running OpenAI funded Khanmigo project demonstrates that key teaching, tutoring and personalization skills can be delivered by Gen AI.

On some enterprising campuses, I can see robotic embodied intelligent agents by the end of 2025. I envision autonomous intelligent robots working shoulder-to-shoulder with students, faculty and administrators in the library, the dining halls, health services, international student services, physical plant, campus grounds, and many other units. 

I hope you will follow the hyperlink citations to learn more about the topics in this column. Then, perhaps, you will begin forming your own vision of how and when these technologies will roll out in your university. This vision will help you to inform your university’s future and your own personal career plans.

This article was originally published in Inside Higher Ed’s Transforming Teaching & Learning blog.

The potential for Generative AI (GenAI) to further advance, enhance, and expand higher education in the future is enormous. Meanwhile, few realize how AI already is improving what we do today in a myriad of ways.

Let me begin by noting that I have used GenAI tools to assist in ideation and the search for the best examples in writing this edition of “Online: Trending Now.” As always, I strive to embed sources in all cases where readers may want to dig deeper into my assertions. GenAI has assisted me in identifying such resources.

In nearly all aspects of the operation of colleges and universities GenAI is playing an increasing role. From student learning to faculty efficiency to administrative insights, we see that role has become part of the standard operating practices. We are using the tools to advance our work in the most enlightened and efficient way. Here are some examples.

Faculty, staff and students are utilizing AI-powered Grammarly around the world. This popular, now AI-supported tool, is encouraged by many faculty and used by students worldwide. The company notes that among the AI supported features are compose, rewrite, personalize, reply, and ideate. Lindsay Babcock writes in a report earlier this year “Is Grammarly Worth It for College Students? (2024 Review)”:

Grammarly is worth it for college students because it helps them get better grades and enhances their writing skills. The free version improves one’s grammar and spelling and eliminates wordiness. The premium version makes writing clear, concise, consistent, and compelling. If you’re a student who’s on a shoestring budget, don’t worry! I’ll show you how much you can benefit from using the free version.

Babcock goes on to report that Grammarly says more than 250 universities, including, for example, Iowa State University, Chapman University and Indiana Wesleyan University, are providing the premium Grammarly version to all students and staff.

Many readers are familiar with Khanmigo, the AI tutoring tool that was developed by the Khan Academy with funding from OpenAI and is available to students for $4/month. While the tool is most often associated with elementary and secondary school use, the tutor supports learning in advanced math, computer science, the humanities and many other disciplines. This GenAI app is an ever-patient, personalized tutor that guides students through solving problems and achieving learning objectives. This approach to personalized learning goes beyond what a faculty member might be able to provide to personally support each and every student in a large class. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics reports that GenAI apps from a range of providers offer individualized assistance with explanations and tutoring that can personalize and promote effective learning under the appropriate guidance of faculty members.

A number of popular GenAI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Llama, Claude, and a host of others provide GenAI functions for project conception, graphics, general research, identification of source materials, citations and associated information for both faculty and students. These tools are used at all levels of the research and report-writing processes. Faculty and students can utilize these tools to coordinate their research activities, review literature, identify research gaps, uncover previously unidentified linkages and generate better research hypotheses.

The nature of searching the Web itself is changing. For decades, Google Search dominated the field with a number of other search engines such as Bing and DuckDuckGo. Sites customized their layout and design to optimize the positioning of their results in Google Search using Search Engine Optimization (SEO). With the advent of GenAI tools that search the Web, more users in higher education have begun using such tools as Perplexity iAsk.ai and CleeAI that tend to provide links first to more useful informational rather than product sales sites that have traditionally been given a paid priority in search engine rankings. As a result, university Web development offices, university relations offices and related units are increasingly utilizing Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) principles and practices to elevate their sites for those searching using GenAI tools. In addition, they can utilize graphics, short video and image generators from text prompts.

As reported last month in this column, “AI in a Lingering Age of Loneliness Among Students,” many colleges and universities are offering GenAI apps for students to utilize as a front-line response to students who are unable or unwilling to seek in-person help. These can provide support most particularly to distant online students who cannot easily access campus-based resources.

AI is playing an important role in student recruitment and admissions decisions at many universities. Brennan Bernard writes in Forbes that admissions and records offices have been using AI tools to perform their jobs more efficiently and accurately for several years:

This year, that mystery is more nuanced than ever—some are wondering if humans or machines are deciding their fate. Ultimately, it is not a question of if artificial intelligence will be used by admission offices. The truth is that enrollment managers were employing AI in their work long before the ChatGPT boom last fall. The question is rather one of how much and in what ways this technology will be used.

Of increasing importance are the predictive analytic tools that enable faculty and staff to identify students who may be struggling or are at high risk of dropping out of classes based on data generated by prior students. For example, “poison pair” designations of classes, when taken the same semester result in lower grades for students than when taken in different terms. These analytics can inform academic advising and alert faculty members to potential difficulties prior to their surfacing on grade sheets.

GenAI is facilitating, creating synergies, providing insights, and enhancing the quality of higher education across the curriculum, within the administration, and among faculty and students. Deeptanshu Tiwari, COO of MRCCedtech, describes ways in which AI is used to enhance the university experience:

…. administrators are increasingly turning to innovative solutions, and one such powerful tool is predictive analytics powered by artificial intelligence (AI). With machine learning algorithms, predictive analytics can identify early warning signs of academic struggles or disengagement by analyzing student data, behavior patterns, and historical trends, thus enabling educators to proactively intervene by providing students with targeted support that ultimately improves their outcomes.

How is your university planning and preparing for the advancement of these powerful tools? Are you prepared to take a leadership role in identifying and testing additional tools that may be beneficial as they emerge? How are you ensuring that timely, coordinated decisions are made based on sound knowledge and experience so that you can best serve the mission of your institution and remain competitive with your competition?

This article was originally published in Inside Higher Ed’s Transforming Teaching & Learning blog.