Art Munin
But I’ll start with maybe like the book definition and kind of bridge off, you know, a more book definition is, AI is the simulation in computers of human intelligence, that are programmed to reason learn and perform tasks that up until now required human intelligence. That’s a great book definition, but what does that actually mean in our lives? You know, More simply put, it’s a tool that’s available to serve higher education and students. Our campuses have gotten so complex with multitudes of data on integrated systems and increasingly higher states for recruitment, retention, student success, and so on. And quite frankly, our current systems can no longer do the job alone.

Heather Shea
Welcome to Student Affairs NOW the online learning community for Student Affairs educators. I am your host of today’s episode Heather Shea. Today on the podcast we’re discussing an important intersection between technology and student affairs. Artificial Intelligence, otherwise known as AI is everywhere in higher ed media and at conferences. The idea of creating machines to perform tasks that typically require human intelligence is not a new concept. However, recent advancements in AI research and development have brought about a proliferation of predictive analytics with big data machine learning, as well as online tools like chat GPT, a form of generative pre trained transformer. That’s what the chat that GPT stands for, and chat GPT I looked it up. But each of these forms of aI have real life implications and possibilities for our work and Student Affairs, which we’ll be discussing today with a panel of experts. So before I bring them in, let me tell you a little bit about our channel. Student Affairs NOW is the premier podcast and learning community for 1000s of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs. We hope you find these conversations make a contribution to the field and our restorative to the profession. We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays and you can find us at studentaffairsnow.com on YouTube or anywhere you listen to podcast. Today’s episode is sponsored by Symplicity. A true partner Symplicity supports all aspects of student life with technology platforms that empower institutions to make data driven decisions. You can stay tuned to the end of the podcast for more information about this episode sponsor. As I mentioned, I am your host of today’s episode episode Heather Shea, my pronouns are she her and her and I am broadcasting from the ancestral traditional and contemporary lands of the Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi peoples, otherwise known as East Lansing, Michigan, home of Michigan State University where I work. I am so excited to be joined by four industry experts and higher ed, educator leaders to delve into this topic today of innovative applications and ethical considerations that will undoubtedly shape the future of our work. So joining me are Art Munin, Art did I say your last name correctly? Nailed it. All right, awesome. Art is the AVP of Enrollment Management Solutions at liaison International. Mallory Willsea, Hi Mallory, the VP of Marketing at element 451. Ed Cabellon is the VP of enrollment at Curry College High Ed. Hello. And Paul Gordon Brown is the director of the campus experience at Roompact. Welcome back, Paul.

Paul Gordon Brown
Happy to see you, Heather.

Heather Shea
All right. So we are going to kick stuff off with just general introductions, I’d love to hear a little bit about how each of you are entering this conversation today. And then I’d love to hear an example of a task that you have recently given over to AI. Art, we’re gonna we’re gonna start with you. Sure,

Art Munin
really glad to be on this podcast. I appreciate being invited to this conversation. How I come at this is a few different ways. You know, working with liaison, we work specifically with artificial intelligence solutions to help with the recruiting and retaining of college students. But before I joined liaison to come out of Student Affairs, most of my career was that as Dean of Students, so I, you know, I’ve seen early on its impact and how we can use it to help support students. And as far as the tasks that I’ve given to AI, I think we’ve all used chat GPT for an array of things. But for those of you who are watching the video, you might see some guitars behind me. I’m a musician, and I’ve used it in songwriting. I’ve used it to, you know, when I’ve blocked creativity to give me ideas to kind of launch off from

Heather Shea
that is awesome. I love it. We could have a whole other episode about song writing, and you know, and music. That sounds great. I’m Mallory, what about you?

Mallory Willsea
Hi. So, I work for Element451. We’re an AI powered all in one student engagement platform. We use AI to help institutions create more meaningful and personalized content to engage students better. So the perspective that I’m hoping I can bring to the conversation today is just that how does AI impact student engagement and how is it going to help you to offset some of the very real challenges that we’re facing in this industry around talent shortage, and struggles with, you know, utilizing data to make smarter and better decisions. I am fortunate to work with a true expert and artists could do or CEO. And I’ve learned just tremendous amount from him over the past year. I’ve been focused on helping educate the industry around prompt engineering specifically. And so my task example will be that we just announced our registration for the Engage Summit Conference next summer. And AI is through prompting, chatting, PT and Claude helping me basically do everything from brainstorming how to create a more meaningful and memorable experience at this conference for attendees, to drafting the website copy to prepping for a team brainstorm next week around the summit, so it’s a key tool in my arsenal these days.

Heather Shea
I love it. That is awesome. giving me some ideas. Ed. Welcome. Thanks,

Ed Cabellon
Heather. Great to be back with all of you. Hi, everybody. I’m Ed Cabellon, the Vice President for Enrollment Management at Curry College. It’s a small private liberal arts college, just seven miles, right outside of Boston, Massachusetts. And I’ve been in higher ed for 27 years now and mostly in student affairs, but now mostly doing enrollment management, but also leading our retention efforts. And so the way I have leveraged AI, most recently is through AI chatbots. And not only within our admissions process, but as a way to improve our yield rates right around those who are applying and depositing into college. But also scaling our students support outreach in ways that we could never do without that chatbot and tool and the data that we get from there to really streamline outreach has been really helpful, and has contributed to our six point retention gain year over year. And so I really attribute the scalability of this to that and the ability to focus our time on helping students which is what we’re here for. So looking forward to the discussion, Heather, thanks.

Heather Shea
Yeah, thanks, Ed. And Paul. Yeah,

Paul Gordon Brown
thank you happy to be here. My name is Paul Brown. Paul Gordon Brown, if you’re Googling needs the much more Google friendly version of my name, but I use he him pronouns, I work at Roompact, which is a software for Residence Life and Housing folk, to kind of manage the day to day of their residence life program. And we were founded in Chicago on the ancestral lands much like actually where Heather is located, of the Confederacy of the three fires, and for for me, and so part of one aspect of my job is managing our blog and engaging with students staff. And so I’ve been experimenting around with what kinds of wacky crazy things can I get out of chatbots? Well, they bite like Chad GPT. So I think my favorite one was, I now have 30 recipes, for taking chicken tenders and your salad bar in the dining hall and making 30 different dishes out of it. So if you ever have a college student who’s looking to take those chicken tenders and make them into something else, I now have options for you, thanks to the power of AI to figure that out.

Heather Shea
I love it. i That is awesome. And the contribution I’ll add to the things that I have used chat GPT for is I helped it plan, an eight day trip with two teenagers with vastly different interests to Greece. And I gave them a gave chat up to the parameters and then it set up an itinerary. It told me places to stay, it was amazing. And and then I could keep asking questions, too. So vacation planning, via AI. Amazing. Okay, so let’s, let’s start with kind of a broad overview, because I don’t want to assume that everybody knows what we mean by artificial intelligence or AI. And so art, can you give us kind of a simplified explanation or a brief explanation of what this means? And a little bit about how, you know, it might be applicable in the context of Higher Education and Student Affairs?

Art Munin
Sure, absolutely. I think the best way to dive into this as to you know a little bit about what it is and also what it isn’t, because then there’s a lot of even just misinformation out there. But I’ll start with maybe like the book definition and kind of bridge off, you know, a more book definition is, AI is the simulation in computers of human intelligence, that are programmed to reason learn and perform tasks that up until now required human intelligence. That’s a great book definition, but what does that actually mean in our lives? You know, More simply put, it’s a tool that’s available to serve higher education and students. Our campuses have gotten so complex with multitudes of data on integrated systems and increasingly higher states for recruitment, retention, student success, and so on. And quite frankly, our current systems can no longer do the job alone. AI can draw together data into a unified data layer, and identify patterns to either challenge our assumptions, or bring forth new ideas. And I think that unified data layer is absolutely crucial. Because I mean, I worked in higher ed for a long time, we have a lot of systems, and how many of them actually talk to each other, how many of them actually have a leader that can draw them together to draw to make a cohesive story about who our prospective students are, or even, you know, who, how we can best retain our students. So that’s a little bit about what it is. It can serve in student affairs, conservative enrollment management serve a lot of different ways that no other of the panelists will draw out. But I also want to talk a little about what it isn’t. AI is not a replacement for the very highly talented faculty and staff on campus that can’t be replaced. But one of the ways that I love encapsulating artificial intelligence is the effective use of artificial intelligence can help a campus more effectively leverage leverage its emotional intelligence, it can help a campus give the information to faculty and staff to better serve students. And that’s what the point of all of this is. And that’s why I think this this conversation in this podcast is crucial. You know, the last thing I’ll say is this past summer, I had the opportunity to see a talk from Nancy Zimpher, who is the Executive Director of the National Association of system heads. And everybody’s worried about AI taking jobs or taking people’s jobs away. And I think she encapsulated well, by saying, AI isn’t going to take your job away. But someone who knows how to effectively use AI might is the next technology that is both transformative and disruptive in higher ed. And that’s why I think these opportunities to converse about it is absolutely crucial.

Heather Shea
I love it. That’s great. I love the disruptive component there. So Paul, I’m gonna turn it to you now. So tell me a little bit about how an integration of AI might be impacting the quality of services provided to students. And if there are any ethical implications associated with this,

Paul Gordon Brown
you’re surely our kind of touched on this. And what he said in terms of, you know, especially working at a software company, it’ll, we’ll frequently get the request from a campus that we want to export the data that we collect in room packed out into this big bucket Oh, data, right, that brings in all the data from across the institution. And we’ve had that request for years. And what we found is people will help them do that. And then they have absolutely no idea what to do once that data is in a big box. Right? Like, okay, we’ve collected it, it’s all in one place. It’s ready. Now what, and every time we’ve done it, we do it, but we’ve never seen a campus then successfully take that use that do that. And I think I think that impetus is there for campuses to say there’s obviously some things that if we can start putting these variables together, and see trends and see patterns and things like that, that would be incredibly useful. But I think I don’t think until we’ve really started talking about AI, that there’s been a solution to do that. Right. We could write out incredibly complex algorithm. And I think sometimes there’s some companies out there that say, Oh, we do AI. And what they really mean is we have a really incredibly complex algorithm. It’s not truly AI, right? That just like we experience in terms of going on social media, it predicting what ads to show us it doing all these kinds of things, which starts to get into that more AI round. Those types of things could happen with the data that we have, we just haven’t had the time or know what to do with it, or the technology hasn’t caught pace, to really, really do that. And we’re just on the cusp of where we can start to see those things. And so I feel like that is where we’re going to see those kinds of improvements, which have, obviously retention, very easy to talk about that. But also in terms of what services do we provide for students? Where are they learning? Where are they not learning? What kinds of you know, if we came out of COVID? And we’re able to kind of diagnose some of the issues that our students brought back to campus? Meaning can they connect with others, things like that, we might be able to see that in the data. I think that’s really where it kind of goes, I think the biggest ethical implication around that is well for sucking up all this data, who has access to it, what’s being done with it, who has agency over their own data, you know, all those kinds of things that we already struggle with in terms of data privacy, just by being on the internet. It also carry over into this realm. And that’s why I have what I often think of I had there was someone on a campus that was using it to analyze data that they were collecting. And they were using chat GPT. And he’s like, I’m a little nervous because I anonymize the data. But I’m also still throwing this data into a product that is not mine. What does that mean? And I said, Well, I can’t answer that for you. But I’m sure your university legal department might might want to chime in on that. But but the lure is there, right, like the potential is there?

Heather Shea
And what do you what do you think? What are some additional integrations or thoughts about ethical implications? Well,

Ed Cabellon
I, Paul said it really well, because I think that those are the those have been our standards. When we look at when we look back on social media and how it entered the the, you know, how it entered higher ed, and the data we were putting out there related to the things that students are saying to us. And we didn’t own that data. Because if we were conversing on a Facebook group, you know, who’s whose content is that really thinking about all of that, I feel like we’re coming back around to some of these historic push backs that we hear from our colleagues when new technology or emerging technology comes for. We should have expected and we are seeing that push back happen. I think when you ask the question around quality services, I don’t, I don’t haven’t seen it yet. I haven’t seen the impact yet. And I think because we’re still people are still coming out of the pandemic exhausted, they’re excited about it, I see a lot of the excitement. But there’s no energy to run toward this as an opportunity. Because people are still exhausted. They’re they’re exhausted from doing three or four jobs on their campus. They’re exhausted from the the types of students that are coming in not that we don’t love them. But there are different students that requires a different level of attention and care. That takes time. And so, you know, I think when we look at the quality of the services that we could provide some examples, I would contribute to the discussion that I know we’ve used to think about how to leverage the generative use of AI is, you know, taking qualitative data from surveys that we know that can be randomized anonymized and looking for themes and just the qualitative stuff, the things that people are saying on their way out from withdrawal data, things that maybe the Nessie investigators are giving to us extracting some of their conversational pieces, and that we’ve looked at ways to gamify existing programs and procedures. So if you’re trying to get students to do things, chats up to offset creating games, and incentivizing students to do the things you’re asking them to do, when they don’t want to do it, something we learned on our campuses might be happening on your campuses, students don’t want to come to a time to program if I have a trivia night, from six to eight in the pub, they’ll show up whenever they we put a time they don’t want to come and we actually got those ideas and learn those behaviors from students and then as chat UBT, how to help gamify them coming earlier that can really maximize the time being there. You know, and I think from a design thinking perspective, putting in policies, procedures, and saying, What do you think about this chat? GPT? Is there a better way to do this? Because that’s also helped us think through our processes and procedures. And the last example, I’ll give you around quality of services to improve is utilizing chat. GPT is, you know, the the new system where you can upload documents, chat, GPT, four, and now you can create your own GPT, which is pretty cool. Is that creating a GPT that allows you to analyze the language used in your communications, that removes deficit thinking and creates positive thinking, because I know a lot of people are trying to move away from deficit model communication, chat. GPT is awesome and give you some ideas on that. So while I haven’t seen the changes yet, from what AI could do, I think there’s pockets of us who are trying to figure things out, while also addressing the many other challenges that we’re facing in higher ed.

Heather Shea
Heather, can

Mallory Willsea
I jump in for him? Yeah, and of course, one thing, you know, where Ed kind of started around, you know, the this observation that people are still exhausted coming off of the pandemic, I think is such a reality. And we can’t like, we can’t overstate that enough. Like there is such a challenge right now, with talent shortage in this industry. People have been wearing three, four or five different hats for years at this point, just the combo of retaining the really great staff. But also, as soon as that person leaves the information, goes out the door with them. And then recruiting for those roles is harder than ever and there’s been reports that Sear from like the Chronicle in Huron, saying that eight and 10, higher ed leaders are having a harder time filling roles than ever before. So this is a really, really significant challenge in the industry. But as Ed was talking about how that leads one to feel like they might not have the time to invest in learning about all of these new tools. I don’t know if everyone’s seen this cartoon, but it’s of the like, guy pulling the cart with the square wheels. And the person standing behind holding the round wheel and saying, Hey, can I can I help you improve? And the responses? No, thanks. We’re too busy don’t have the time. Right. And I actually think like, that is what AI is right now. It is the round wheel, that we have all been like pulling the square wheeled cart now for years. And I think that’s why I am so excited about AI because I feel like it is absolutely transformational. And, and the investment in just a few hours of experimentation. And getting comfortable with these AI tools pays so much in terms of the dividends on your own personal or your team’s productivity on the other side. Yeah,

Heather Shea
yeah. Mallory let’s stay with you for a moment because I, you know, we’re talking about the benefits for for staff, for sure. And the ways that this can make our lives easier. Can you talk a bit about how AI can enhance student engagement? And promote some personalization that maybe wasn’t possible before?

Mallory Willsea
Yeah, absolutely. So I, I feel like whether you’re 16 years old, or 66 years old, the expectation has really changed as a student or a learner in terms of just the speed of information and the availability and accuracy of it. And, you know, so so students are expecting now, not later when they have needs or questions, and especially are very traditional age students, like they grew up navigating through voice with AI with Alexa and Siri. So they’re very comfortable with these types of tools. So I feel as though the future of these interactions is very conversational, and requires 24/7 availability, which we’re now you know, like, we were just talking about talent shortage, right? Like, are we going to, we’re not going to force our staff like to stay, you know, into the wee hours of the morning, but students are not operating on that nine to five schedule. So if we want to be engaging them and supporting them in the best way is, it has to be more than just what our current staffing can allow for. And that’s where I feel like two really great use cases of AI. The automation of critical information, and then using a conversational AI powered chat bot are where we can have the fastest impact on the student experience. One example might be say you’re dealing with a current student who has food insecurity and needs help, well, when they need help, they need help. And that might be at 3pm, on a Saturday, or at 3am on a Tuesday morning. And so they obviously might not be able to walk into the office to get that assistance. And so maybe that student then goes to the website, but it is a human powered live chat. And they get met with an email form, right, that’s not solving the challenge in the moment when they need it. So you know, this, the future is kind of now, thanks to AI. And that’s where a more AI driven interaction can help fill that gap. And if you, you know, if you think about AI chat bots have old versus the ones of 2023, post open AI. You know, those smarter AI chatbots are learning and conversing. And every interaction, they get more context and they can respond more effectively. It is less about having these pre programmed q&a answers, and more about the Chatbot just having high competency and high warmth. And so it can just find the right answer based off of the knowledge that you have given it. And it can communicate in the moment and 100 plus languages, right, like it can do just so much and when we think about those possibilities and how you can amplify that across 2000 students or 10,000 students or 50,000 students. You know, AI is not going to take the jobs away, but it’s going to allow the staff Half members to work with the students, one to one who need that escalation versus, you know, we like we have a customer who has a 79% resolution rate right now just within their first three months of using a chat bot, like that has taken so much pressure off of that team to then actually be able to go focus on the interactions that matter most. Yeah.

Heather Shea
Paul, what would you add?

Paul Gordon Brown
Yeah. It had me thinking one, if AI can fix chatbots I’m all for it. Because anytime I encounter a chatbot, I’m immediately like, why?

Paul Gordon Brown
This is such a waste of my time. Now I have to you know, anyways,

Heather Shea
representative.

Paul Gordon Brown
Oh, my God. Yeah, it’s exactly. It’s exactly like that. But, you know, one of the things I often talk about, so I’ll consult on curricular approaches and residential curriculum, which is a different kind of paradigm, paradigmatic way of thinking about engaging with students. And one of the things I talked about within with that, which I think is also germane here is, you know, if you think back to I would venture to guess all of us when we were on a college campus, how did we find out about things, posters, bulletin boards, right, we probably had telephones, wired telephones in our rooms. And the competition for student time is just completely different now than it was when we were in college. Like, it’s not even the same like students today, you know, when I was in college, you want to watch a movie? Well, the Res Life channel where someone’s putting in a VHS tape that then plays on loop for like a week, and then they swap out the four movies, right? They can watch any movie ever made at any time they want on any device, they want, completely differently, changes the equation. And all of our higher ed paradigms have always been built in this kind of analog mode of like, you have to physically go to a lecture hall where someone will speak at you and it’s not interactive. And the types of educational experiences our students are expecting, are the ones that they already see in their phones. And in their use of technology. It’s customized, it’s personalized, like, Why do I have to go through all of this when you know, it can be surfaced exactly when I need it. And I think that’s really the promise of AI is it can finally, close that gap, if we’re able to embrace it in such a way that personalized student learning is going to be much more successful for our students today, who probably will hold multiple jobs and change industries. Whereas you know, my father’s generation, he worked at Eastman Kodak Company for 50 years. That model works great for someone that’s going to stay at a company and work at it for 50 years. Obviously, we all know what happened to Eastman Kodak Company. That’s not the type of jobs that our students are going to have. And so the learning the educational process, the engagement has to mirror what they’re going to go into. And that’s exactly where this kind of personalization and the things that AI can do so well, is I think what’s so important here.

Heather Shea
We’re going to shift us unless somebody else has something else they want to add here. And I want to talk about different stakeholders, because I do think that this is perceived differently by educators, administrators, students. And as I also think about like how each of them consider the way AI is going to shape the future of higher education. What are some of the, like key considerations for each of these groups in creating collaborative and inclusive approaches within our spaces? Mallory, do you want to start us off with thinking a little bit about this along the lines of administrators? And we can just go from there? Yeah, absolutely.

Mallory Willsea
This is where I’ve definitely spent a lot of my time this past year thinking. And I just believe AI is a game changer. So you know, anybody who’s looking to streamline their administrative tasks and have an impact to their team productivity, as well as use, you know, data analytics differently and be able to actually query the data like a human and find insights. I think there’s a ton of opportunity to deploy a variety of solutions, whether it’s third party tools, like a chat GPT or a clod all the way to eventually the the future is that AI is just going to be baked into all of the tools that we’re already using. So what we can do right now as admin is get really good at and comfortable with prompting these tools because that’s definitely a skill set that we you know, we’re only limited here by our creativity. So many cool ideas like you You know, for music, all the way to website copy and kind of everything in between, right? Like, if you can think of it, AI can probably support you in doing it. So when it comes to removing that blank page syndrome, right, like that is a problem that never has to exist for our teams ever again. We’ve talked a lot about the talent challenges. But streamlining hiring is a huge use case, from writing job descriptions, to interview questions to even rejection emails that kind of take into account all the notes that you might have about that person, it can be a huge time saver there, when you have to deliver maybe executive level reports to the cabinet or summarize information from a recent speech that the President has given, but deploy that to different segments of the student body. AI can help you kind of recraft content and you know, adjust the tone so that it is going to resonate with whomever it is you’re communicating with. So I, you know, I think if anybody walks away from listening to this podcast, I hope one of the takeaways here is investing in the experimentation is well worth the time. And whether you’re preparing for a meeting or managing a schedule, or just using it to act as your brainstorming partner, like there’s no right or wrong. And Chad GPT is not going to judge you, right?

Speaker 4
judgment free zone, you can make mistakes, and then say try again, or delete it all.

Paul Gordon Brown
And how do we know it’s not silently judging?

Heather Shea
Respond to positive impact, I say, Oh, thank you, that was really good. Oh, I’m so glad that you enjoyed what I just wrote.

Paul Gordon Brown
Unfortunately, we can’t read our own in text, right.

Mallory Willsea
A hot tip that I got last week was to actually tell chat GPT or you know, your gen AI tool of choice, that what it’s doing for you is really important for like keeping your job or whatever it might be. And that the AB test it, the quality of the output is better when you get the Gen AI tool to be invested in you and your success off of what it’s creating. So there’s there’s a fun little tip.

Heather Shea
I have another another tip, and then I’d love to open it up for other folks have ways that they’ve thought about this. So I am not not famous, but like more like sending off the maybe a little bit too tersely worded or angry sounding email, like I’m really frustrated with something and and so I put that email into chat DBT. And I was like, can you make this a little bit softer? And it’s like, okay, this, this is better. This might not you know, I’m reading the room a little bit. I don’t know. That was one that was one that I had. That was super helpful. So tone is really a valuable tool. Other thoughts? And what tell us about what you think is on your mind? Yeah,

Ed Cabellon
I mean, I think with this, Heather, I think that there’s needs to be a level of trust gained on your campus to use this tool. I mean, to say that we’re going to this is going to influence our strategy and how we’re going to do things, I think you need to have some small wins and some experimentation as Mallory’s already outlined. So I think on your campus, finding opportunities with colleagues to test it out, try some small things that you know, might might help with a student experience. I would also recommend that folks, partner with their supervisor, and maybe talk about the things that you want to do. And so that way, you’re protecting the institution from possibly uploading things into Chechi PT that your institution doesn’t want you to do. One thing that I’ve done, because I do have a small business is, you know, looking, we, my team, and I had our at my small business, we mapped out our customer experience using chat GPT, we asked it to ask us questions about the customer experience we wanted in our brewery, and it mapped out things that we didn’t think about, and it was great. And so it got me thinking, what if we mapped out the student experience through chat GPT with the right people in the room, and it generated conversations about expectations about how we do things, why we do things that way? Is this just the way we’ve always done it? And could there be other opportunities to do it better with AI with technology? And, you know, I think you really do need to experiment before that change is gonna happen because this technology represents another change and we know how well Higher Ed does with change. And so, at a time, you know where there’s opportunity, you need to garner the support through those collaborations across your campus. Because I know when my staff is experimenting with it, and we talk about it, and then look at ways to implement, I’m working with legal, I’m working with our, you know, our friends and I are making sure that we’re doing things in a way that supports the win that we might be able to get by using this data and, and this technology. So I certainly would say those things that at least I’m thinking about related to, you know, working on a campus and trying to get people to just just try it, try it for one simple thing, ask it a question, you know, upload your upload a presentation that you want to do and have it generate the your slides for you for using dolly because it dolly is already there. And it’ll it’ll generate some slides, it might inspire you to see what some what could be a great slide deck for your presentation. So I mean, there’s definitely so many ways you can use it in your day to day tasks now.

Heather Shea
So I want to go towards the as we were prepping for today’s conversation, the place where most people go to in higher ed institutions, and that is around academic integrity. And you know, you were just raising some some pieces, Ed that I think we’re kind of leading us in this direction. So art, I’m really curious what your thoughts are, as a former dean of students here about how AI generated essays advancing plagiarism, like we can’t detect that it was aI generated, you know, what are some of the challenges there? And then how can we help our our colleagues broadly, like, think beyond just that as the main reason why we should reject everything, AI?

Art Munin
Absolutely. I love this conversation. And I’ll try not to get too much on the soapbox, as I started out, because I got a lot of feelings and thoughts about it. But this is influenced by I was a Dean of Students for more than a decade at three institutions. And what I learned in all that time, is the overwhelming majority of students are honest and hardworking, overwhelming majority, right? I absolutely detest when we make, you know, you know, rules, policies, whatever it is based on the lowest common denominator, because Are there going to be students who cheat? Absolutely, there always has been. But whatever. And this is, you know, maybe a controversial point, but one that I think is important make, whatever percentage of students are inclined to cheat, the same size percentage exists in faculty and staff. Right, it exists in all sectors of society, you can see it in the Chronicle, you can see it in Inside Higher Ed, right, this isn’t just held to students. And so I mean, even I’ve had great ethical conversations with folks, hey, we all use champion GPT in our work. And so if you use it to create something, when you write about that on your resume, what are you gonna say? You’re gonna say I created, yada, yada, yada, you know, whatever it was, I mean, I think there’s all these ways in which you know, is being used. So, you know, as I think about it, within the contract process, I think we need to tread carefully. I think if AI can assist in identifying plagiarism, I’m fine with that. But it can’t be given decision making capabilities. It’s a piece of data in the process of a judicial process that is run by a trained staff member who will use it as one piece of data and a larger investigation is appropriate. You know, I trusted my staff in those in those times in order to make, you know, those reasonable decisions, taking into account all the data that is at play, which includes most importantly, the conversation with the student, the actual conversation when we’re talking to someone about what happened. And you know, as a last point to this, and I’d be curious, and other folks thoughts, too. I’ve loved in some like how, as a panel, we’ve also situated AI’s use within our own histories in higher ed, because we all are carrying with us what we’ve brought with us. And you know, when Paul was talking about the res hall channel in the movies, like it just brought me back, and it’s a good reminder that I sometimes have to challenge myself to say, you know, when I went to college, it was literally a different century. Yep. Right. It was it was a while ago at this point. There is a lot of tools that come on board that have changed our student judicial process, like when I started this student judicial process. I didn’t have access to cameras on campus. I didn’t have access to swipe data in and out of residence halls. You know, there was So many more things that have come up. So it is just another piece of data. So I really try and get people to tap the brakes. On, you know, the overwhelming worry of what AI is going to happen, you know, it’s going to occur, you know, within plagiarism plagiarism cases, I’m sure it will occur. I have, you know, trust in, you know, reasoned and train staff members in order to effectively manage that as hopefully a developmental and learning moment for students.

Heather Shea
Thanks, art, what are the rest of you think about this in particular?

Heather Shea
You said it all. So don’t touch it. I didn’t know. I know. I mean, the thing I have seen is I’ve definitely seen, you know, Syllabus statements and some engagement around how to cite that you’ve used, you know, generative AI as a part of your writing process. My thought as a faculty member is if a student was like I wrote this paper, you think Chad GPT, I’d be like, Yeah, I’m, am I grading you then? Or am I crazy, chatty PT. So I might have some concerns with that. But I don’t know that it is, the sky is falling kind of thing that everybody says says it is.

Mallory Willsea
I remember when I was in college, when all the whole Wikipedia thing happened and kind of live did that. And I feel it feels very similar to me in some regards to how some institutions are going to extremes around, you know, banning the use of AI in the classroom setting. And actually, maybe Heather, I’m kind of curious to get your perspective on this. Because, you know, here I am on this panel sitting here talking about, you know, the admin side, and all the great ways we can use generative AI to make our teams productive, and, you know, assist with content creation, and all of this. And if I was going to go hire an intern or an entry level, content creator, to join my team, I might actually really value the fact that they were exposed to AI as a student, and maybe if they had some really great stories to share in the interview process about how, you know, their 40 page paper, you know, got got the draft outline through chat GPT, or this or that, like, I might actually be looking for that. And so I am curious how, as a faculty member, like you react to that.

Heather Shea
Yeah, I mean, I, I this is, this is the big reveal that I was going to save to the end. But I generated all the questions for today’s podcast on chat GPT. There is there.

Art Munin
I feel so do know,

Heather Shea
it, but but the reality is, is that there’s so much utility in it, and to demonstrate that it can actually do some things that will make our lives easier. What are the things that now my time is freed to do instead? And I think that’s the key piece there. Now, if a student said to me, or if a doc student, for example, it was like, Oh, God, I did all of my qualitative data analysis for my dissertation, I fed in all of the transcripts, I’d be like, it doesn’t I don’t know how I feel about that researcher positionality statement, right. So we might have to have a bigger conversation there. But that’s super interesting. I am also really interested in the ways that institutions are dealing with access and and equitable access in particular, and, you know, students who don’t have either they accent and I think this is a this is a perennial conversation that we have every time we start talking about technology. But what are some ways in which institutions might address some of those challenges and limitations around supporting students who may not have that same level of access? So we’ll talk about one other kind of challenge there. And then, and then move to the last question. Paul, what are your thoughts? Yeah.

Paul Gordon Brown
I don’t, you know, earlier on when computers were wired to a wall, that was an issue. When I was doing research, and this is even six, seven years ago, since most of our technology has moved to mobile, and I would say you’d be hard pressed to find a lot of students who don’t have at least some kind of mobile device, that the equity issue As it relates to access to the technology is actually fairly minimal, and probably mitigated will, to a certain extent because of the ubiquitous ubiquitousness of kind of the technology that’s around. Now, how did they use that? Have they been trained on how to use that effectively? That’s, I think, where you’re starting to get into issues of equity, right? Like, do they understand how to use it? I mean, this is even true of the web. Can you do a Google search is not just Can I type something into a bar and come out with an answer, but do I know what to put into that bar? When I see those results? Can I interpret them and find the good one, or the one I should believe? I mean, you look at some of the societal societal issues that we have with fake news, conspiracy theories, etc. A lot of that has to do with media literacy, and, and those kinds of things. And I think that’s really where it where it kind of comes into play. You know, if you even think about AI, and we’ve been relatively rosy about it. There’s a lot of things even the people that design these things don’t necessarily know what’s going on inside though. You know, like, we don’t really know. And there’s kind of a meme around the internet of a show goth, which is from HP Lovecraft, the writer, which is this blob like entity with lots of tentacles, scary eyes, and then chat, GBT is a smiley face, just put on one of the tentacles, meaning the interface we see looks very benign, but what’s going on behind it, we actually have no idea sometimes what that looks like, or what it’s doing, or how it’s making those decisions. And it’s subject to its own bias, you know, some of these models are only as good as the information that we put into them. And I think we’ve all been on the internet. And we know that not all information on the internet is good. A lot of information on the Internet can be won. By I know, it’s a shocker, right? But like racist biased. And so these models can take on those attitudes without even you know, realizing it, or generate and go off in random directions that we never expected. So it’s less about equitable access. And I think more about equitable How do you what do you do once you have that access? And what does this thing that’s generating these responses? How does it get to that place? That’s to me, where the those real issues really start to come in play? Which is far more complex than Do you have a device or not? Right.

Heather Shea
Mallory, what would you add to that?

Mallory Willsea
I think Paul kind of set it all.

Heather Shea
Sounds good.

Mallory Willsea
But I you know, I think that as long as we can invest in proper training for our teams, to be aware of those types of biases, Paul speaking to, and get better at the use of these tools, this requires probably some budget, which can I, you know, can be hard to come by. But I think training is absolutely essential. And you know, it’s going to be on leadership, within colleges and universities to make sure that that exists, people are going to be using this regardless of whether the training is there or not. So to deploy this, and you know, the best ways, the most ethical ways that you know, training is going to fill that gap, we’re going to be launching a state of AI and higher ed research through enroll of AI soon. So look out for that, because we’re looking for, you know, a nice variety of industry leaders, from all different units within the organization to take this survey. And we’ll be collecting a lot of data around key challenges and concerns like these. So I think that it’ll be nice for the industry to have a benchmark, because we don’t have one right now. So enroll advise looking to provide that. And as soon as that is available, you know, hopefully we can make it available to this audience.

Heather Shea
That’s great. Yeah, we’ll we’ll at the end have you all kind of share how folks can stay in touch with you or like to your to your organization’s so my final question is really about, you know, the why, right. And, you know, I think the big conversation for a while now has been around the student success and what kinds of tools resources experiences contribute to success and whose success right so that’s also not just a monolithic, generalist idea. But I think about this, like technology advancement as a way to contribute to, you know, freeing up more time, you know, like the end of the day, I wrote by myself a very well, you know, constructed email, versus I had a cover a really good conversation with the student. Like those two things are really different. Art, why don’t you kind of tell us a little bit about your thoughts on like, how you think that this is, you know, maybe the thing that will help us connect get to that idea around student student success?

Art Munin
Yeah, I mean, it just started mucking it up, recycle a line that I said before, so I think it just it does help encapsulate of AI helping you leverage your Ei, helping you utilize your emotional intelligence, the most effective way, you know, I get to work with college universities on you know, recruitment and retention. And it’s, it’s just the never ending process of you’re, you’re in charge of admissions, you sit at your desk every single day, you hopefully have an unending list of students prospective students that want to attend your institution, where do you even start? What is going to be effective in the outreach rather than having to put so much discernment into what kind of message is going to be useful, what message is going to receive in the best way, and what also students are the most likely to attend my institution anyway, and you know, to be successful with that institution, to be able to take some of that labor off so that you can do the more difficult emotional labor of actually engaging with people. It’s going to help set you up in that best way possible. And I think about it through the lens, you know, again, put my dean of students hat on of walking around campus, you walk into the student center for lunch, I’m working out at Student Rec, you know, seeing students all around, everybody’s smiling. Everybody’s doing great. You know, we do a lot of work in this culture and face work, convincing everyone that everything’s but I think we all know that our campuses aren’t Neverland, you know, you there behind a lot of those smiles are some really difficult stories. And AI can help you be in a position to identify before the crisis before the concern. You know, I have appreciated in my career, that we, you know, we’ve put so many things in place to help, you know, build those safety nets, right. And one of those is early alerts, right, early alerts are fantastic. But at the moment, there’s an early alert, the students already in the hole. We’re at that moment, trying to help get them out of the hole. What if we knew ahead of time. And you know, when I described this to people, and I loved, you know, Paul’s description of you know, even some of the AI creators don’t know quite how this works. And that can sometimes, you know, bring a level of concern, because sometimes I look at it too, and it seems like magic. But I think about what is the worst thing that can happen. In this scenario, the worst thing that can happen is a student is going to experience an outreach of support and care that maybe they didn’t need, but we won’t ever really know. But the most positive outcome is that we’re going to prevent that early alert from ever digging off, and helping that student continue on that path of success. And so when I think about the use of AI, there are all sorts of concerns. There’s all sorts of things we need to really think critically about. But that ability to get staff in the right place at the right time with the right message, I think is invaluable.

Heather Shea
Thank you so much. Well, it’s the end of our time together. I’ve already done the big reveal that this episode is thanks to chat GPT. I would love to hear your final thoughts though we always ask the same question. If you could take a minute to summarize what you’re pondering, questioning, excited about or traveling. Now as this is student affairs now, and then if you would like to share how people can connect with you or follow up with you, that would be great as well. And, Paul, I’m gonna start with you.

Paul Gordon Brown
Sure. So, Edgar Belen and myself started talking about social media at a very early stage in its development, actually, you as well, Heather, you’re you’re kind of in this mix, too. And digital Task

Heather Shea
Force. That’s correct. Getting those things back in my 2011, I think, yeah, go ahead.

Paul Gordon Brown
And I reflect back on where I was, I won’t speak for you all. But I reflect back where I was, I think I was a little more wide eyed when it came to what social media can do and what it could be and things you should do. And if I look at that through my 2023 lens, I’d be like, Oh, I wouldn’t have said exactly that or suggested those things. And so when I look at these kinds of AI tools, I think I walk in with a much higher degree of healthy skepticism about certain aspects of it. And I wonder, I think that we shouldn’t be paused. I think there’s many things that it can do and I don’t think that should keep us from exploring and trying these things but I also am not doing it with the same level of gusto I may have if you had me talk about it 10 years ago. And so that’s really where I kind of think, with things, I think also to it for campuses that are looking at experimenting with these tools. I work at a software company, so I can be critical of software companies. It’s the Wild West, it’s hot, it’s the next thing, it’s the gold rush. And you will hear a lot of great grandiose things. And I don’t know that the technology is totally there to actually provide those, you know, go in, it should be you should experiment with it, it’s got so much promise, but you also have to go in with a little bit of a critical lens, on those kinds of things. So that’s kind of what percolates around in my head lately and coming out of this conversation. But you know, anytime anyone wants to engage with me, Paul Gordon Brown, I said, is my Google searchable name that will pretty much get shown me my website, all that kind of stuff.

Heather Shea
Thanks so much, Paul, for being here. Ed, what about you? Final thoughts?

Ed Cabellon
Yeah, I, I’m reflecting back on what Paul just said. And I agree wholeheartedly. And maybe it’s just more miles on the car. Yeah, me, we’re just we are sold, I get off my off my lawn. Exactly. Right. Thank you very much. I, you know, I am excited about AI. And, you know, last year when I got into it, using the, you know, leveraging our chat bot to improve our student success. You know, I, I’m excited because of the scalability of our students services opportunities that, you know, we’re not, there’s not a lot, there’s less manual parts on the front end, that frees our staff up to really meet with students, and I’ve seen it happen on our campus. And as a small private college, I think we don’t have the resources to invest in other tools like Student Success software, things like that, that might also help us unify data. So we’ve done a lot of that manually in enrollment management and with our IR folks. And now we’re starting to experiment. Well, what can I do for us in that realm? And, you know, I think for those who are out there, just saying, and maybe a little skeptical, like, Paul, I think on the other side of that coin, I would, I would share that set skepticism. But on your campus, I would just encourage folks to try and find folks who are willing to play in the sandbox, whether it’s helping you find an Excel formula that will help you tie that data together, because it does a great job with that, you know, whether whether it’s, you know, generating questions that you may not have thought about in a process or you know, things that you’re doing, just play with play with how it might help your students with that lens in mind. That’s where I think there might be some magic and some opportunities. So certainly, if folks want to connect with me on this from an enrollment management, retention or student affairs perspective, they can find me on LinkedIn. That’s where I spend most of my professional time nowadays.

Heather Shea
RIP Twitter. Okay. Um, Mallory, your final thoughts? Yes.

Mallory Willsea
This has been a terrific conversation. And I really appreciate the opportunity to be part of it. You know, when I think about what’s literally on my mind today, there is so much drama happening with open AI. And as as of this recording, we really don’t know the future of the CEO, Sam Altman. And, you know, he’s he was ousted, but now he’s back. But now Microsoft is having him lead an AI research team, but there could be a different outcome. And will we wake up tomorrow morning, and will open aI have any board members, employees or leadership left, it’s just really like, we don’t know. I also happen to have been in the Bay Area now for the past week. So it is literally all anyone is talking about out here. And it is just a reminder, and you said rip Twitter, right is a reminder that we don’t control these tools, or these companies are the future of them. And so I have more so than ever before these past five days been approaching AI with a little more skepticism and just open eyes. And you know, I’m sure that we can all benefit from just asking a few more questions, right. But by the time this episode drops, it could all be cleared up who knows like, and that’s it. That’s where my mind’s at, like, who knows the difference between a year ago today to now the difference from now to a year ago. It had we this is moving so quickly. And you know, higher ed can’t treat AI like it did the internet like we have to be on top of this and not move at a slow pace. You can find me online LinkedIn as well, because rip Twitter I really don’t do a whole lot over there anymore, but Mallory will see two L’s in the first and last name. And I’d love to connecting. Yeah, keep the convo going.

Heather Shea
Thanks, Mallory. All right, Art, your final thoughts?

Art Munin
No, I’m gonna bridge off the Wild West, it is absolutely the wild west out there. And so it just leaves me constantly thinking about how we all myself included, like get educated and developed. Because this isn’t something that we have encountered before. And there are lots of folks out there selling all sorts of fairy tales. And everything’s called AI. Now, some of it’s an algorithm, some of its four or five algebra equation. You know, there’s lots of things out there. And so for me, like I’ve been taking LinkedIn learning classes, I’m trying to read, I’m trying to engage you’re trying to learn because I want to be able to talk about this in in an articulate way that can truly say what the positives are, and what they’re also drawbacks and things you need to get take account of are. So I’m thinking about that development, thinking about how we can all and need to all continue to be learning and developing. And I absolutely love engaging with folks on this, I fully dive down the AI rabbit hole. If you’d like to chat more about it. You can find me on LinkedIn again, my name is Art Munin.

Heather Shea
Awesome. Well, I am so grateful to all of you for joining me for the conversation today. agree that this is just a really interesting time and, and maybe in you know, a year or so will be like remember when we did that conversation, you know, back in the early days, you know, who knows. So thank you for for joining me and for sharing your ideas and contributions today. And I just want to also take a moment to thank our behind the scenes, brilliant mind of our dedicated producer Nat. She does everything to make us look and sound amazing. We are so thankful for everything you do. And of course none of this would be sponsored possible without the support of today’s episode sponsor. Symplicity is the global leader in student services technology platforms with state of the art technology that empowers institutions to make data driven decisions specific to their goals. Maybe using AI I don’t know, I’m a true partner to the institution. Symplicity supports all aspects of student life, including but not limited to Career Services and Development, Student Conduct and well being student success and accessibility services. And you can learn more by visiting simplicity.com or connect with them on Facebook. Apparently, Twitter isn’t my script and LinkedIn. So to each of our listeners, we encourage you to visit our website as studentaffairsnow.com and click on sponsors link to learn more, or browse our archives. If you’re tuning in today and not already subscribed to our weekly newsletter, please do that while you’re there as well. Once again, I’m Heather Shea thanks to everybody who’s watching and listening. Let’s make it a great week.

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