As AI testing grounds, Rochester’s higher ed institutions find benefits in the new tech

Generative AI continues to come of age on college campuses. A 2024 survey from the Digital Education Council showed 86% of college students are using Gen AI tools in their studies – up from 23% in the spring of 2023 – and usage by faculty continues to grow too.

We checked in with three Rochester universities to find out how AI is being used on their campuses for personalized learning and academic research today.

“The perceptions around AI in higher ed have changed,” said Katie Sabourin, assistant vice president for digital learning at St. John Fisher University, speaking about the time between Gen AI’s widespread release to the public in November 2022 via OpenAI’s ChatGPT to now.

Sabourin has seen a change from fear on college campuses that Gen AI could be negative to the learning process, to something much different.

“We’re on the shift to a much more positive outlook on how these tools can enhance the learning experience,” Sabourin said. “I think we’ve reached a stage where we acknowledge that these tools are not going away and that these tools are affecting people’s personal lives, work lives and entire professions.”

Therefore, Sabourin says it’s incumbent on the university to prepare students on how to use AI tools responsibly, safely and ethically.

In the fall of 2024, St. John Fisher released a university-wide policy that says, “Students are permitted to use AI tools on their own to study, to further explore course topics, to brainstorm ideas, and to seek assistance from campus services who may use generative AI tools as part of their support.”

St. John Fisher offers an AI Toolkit, which is an online resource for faculty, staff and students, to help support the process. It helps answer questions like, What AI tools should I use? How can I use them safely? Where is my data going when I use these tools? How do I cite these tools properly?

The toolkit was first built in the summer of 2023 by a group of about sixty faculty and staff. It has morphed into an AI advisory board and the toolkit is continually evaluated and adapted to keep pace with the fast-growing Gen AI space.

“We’ve seen a transition from many of our faculty and in courses across campus,” Sabourin said. “They are finding ways to really bring AI into the course in a meaningful way and in a helpful way while also showing students where the weaknesses are or where the misinformation can come from. Because AI is not perfect, but it’s much more accurate than it was two years ago.”

At SUNY Brockport  two active faculty learning groups are having conversations around how Gen AI is changing higher education and how faculty should be or can be adapting to those stages as they evolve, according to Martin Abraham, Ph.D., provost and vice president for academic affairs.

“We encourage our faculty to make very clear at the outset of their course,  what it is that they believe or what it is that students are allowed to do with regards to AI in their classroom,” Abraham said. “In some cases, students are given complete flexibility and in some cases, students are given no opportunity to use it. It is up to the faculty to decide how best the students can incorporate those AI tools to help them in their learning process.”

While Gen AI is still in its infancy, Abraham is seeing its use and research about it growing very quickly by students and faculty alike – and sometimes even in collaboration. He points to an AI-powered tool, EduAlly, being developed by SUNY Brockport’s Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence (ACM SIGAI) Student Chapter.

The tool will be able to assist teachers by offering personalized feedback for their students based on specific course material. Jie Zhang, a SUNY Brockport professor of education, offered her coursework and classroom to serve as a “pilot” for EduAlly as a chance for her students to better understand AI and its potential impact on the classroom.

In the school’s psychology department, students and faculty are investigating an AI tool that will allow them to transcribe conversations for statistical analysis in a way that Abraham said would not have even been possible a year ago.

“Faculty are being creative in how they use AI tools to help them do their work,” said Abraham, noting research on AI is happening across campus and disciplines.

At the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), Christopher Collison, Ph.D., is the Jane King Harris Endowed Professor in the School of Chemistry and Materials Science, as well as the university’s AI Hub, which is a strategic entity responsible for developing AI solutions for teaching and learning and promoting AI-enabled innovations and services on campus.

“The AI Hub is a connector or an enabler on campus,” said Collison, who notes that AI is connecting different groups and disciplines on campus and breaking down silo structures in a variety of areas including research.

Among the vast research being done on or powered by AI on campus currently are projects in the arts, computer science, chemistry, medical imaging, sustainability, cognitive science, cybersecurity, criminal justice and accessibility – including a project on automatic captioning and sign language.

“We have our own fire hose of all the things we’re doing,” Collison said. “And of course, at the same time, we’re also recognizing the fire hose is turned on because the technology is accelerating in the world around us.”

Collison has integrated computational and AI approaches into experimental work in organic photovoltaic devices, nanomorphology, and photoactive materials.

He says RIT had many early adopters of Gen AI and a fantastic talent pool of faculty it looks to grow. Over the next few years, the university will be hiring several faculty positions in computing and information sciences, engineering, engineering technology, arts and sciences, humanities, business, and design that are expected to draw visionaries and collaborative thinkers tasked with shaping AI-focused research and education.

“It is the goal [at RIT] to embrace AI as a kind of foundational technology while also having a very strong presence and perspective on responsible governance and ethical use,” Collison said.

Caurie Putnam is a Rochester-area freelance writer.