ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Dong is one of many students of all demographics, experiences, and backgrounds looking to build or expand their skills around AI to improve future job prospects. The World Economic Forum predicts that, by the end of this year, 85 million jobs may be displaced by automation – yet, in that same time, about 97 million new roles will emerge related to AI. Those incoming machine learning engineers, data scientists, and AI researchers will be a key part of the redistribution of work among humans, machines, and algorithms in the not-so-distant future.

Artificial intelligence encompasses a variety of computational systems that can perform tasks that typically involve human intelligence, such as learning or reasoning. Over the last three years, AI-powered tools have become common, thanks to increased, cheap availability to everyday consumers and many industries. Today, AI tools can help users plan daily activities or find needed information. Meanwhile, many businesses are using AI to streamline their workflows and speed up otherwise time-consuming tasks.

As a whole, higher education was initially slow to respond to these shifts but has recently built sizable workforce development activity around AI.

At CSU Global – and across the CSU System – that includes the creation of formal course work as well as support for the types of interdisciplinary research that provides AI experience that employers now expect in new graduates. CSU Global offers certificates in Azure AI automation as well as Python application development and has seen steady growth in its online master’s degree in artificial intelligence and machine learning, which Dong earned. That program went from just 20 total enrollees in 2020 to 539 in 2025. To date, 316 students have graduated with the degree.

CSU Global President and CEO Becky Takeda-Tinker said she has seen a growing urgency to upskill the existing workforce and better train others using AI. The university is focused on building a foundational familiarity with available AI tools and associated ethical considerations. To that end, CSU Global has woven ethics and compliance, work-based applications, and various AI tools throughout its courses, including its AI and machine learning curriculum – not just as standalone topics, but as practical considerations in every course.

“The rapid pace of change in AI presents both significant opportunities and challenges for the university and its learners,” Takeda-Tinker said. “Maintaining flexible, dynamic curricula that can quickly adapt to emerging tools and trends will be essential to meeting student and industry workforce needs into the future as we continue our focus on supporting economic success for our learners, state, nation, and beyond.”

At the same time, she said, universities are realizing the need to implement AI capabilities across all functions to better support student achievement.

“We also realized quickly the need for an institutional-wide embrace and understanding of AI and what it could support in every area of the university’s operations. From transcript review for transfer credit, to curricular development, to learner 24/7 support, and assessments for interests and talents leading to program and career options,” she said. “So – just as our students are doing – CSU Global academic leaders, instructors, and staff members are also learning and implementing AI for their own workplace success.”

The entire CSU System is navigating similar dynamics around AI’s use. Over the next decade, the System will need to navigate changes to curriculum and the classroom while also acknowledging changes and challenges to workflows. It will be a careful balancing act: While many leaders admit the technology is still a fast-moving target, efforts are already underway to facilitate familiarity, describe best practices, and organize a coherent response to the challenges ahead.

Higher education has debated the use of generative AI since the fall of 2022, when the technology became broadly available. So far, there are no clear answers, yet faculty and administrators understand this powerful tool will eventually reshape everything from the core student-teacher relationship to the university’s daily operations.

Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that learns from a mixture of publicly available data, such as message boards, as well as copyrighted material, such as news and research articles, to then create entirely new material, such as written passages, images, or computer code. ChatGPT is the first and still the most popular publicly available example of the tool. It generates a response by predicting the most likely next word – one after another – based on everything it found on the subject. While answers are conversational and almost humanlike, the system is essentially using patterns and probability based on existing material in its data sets to create a coherent response.

These AI systems can act almost like a superpowered search engine, combining and summarizing disparate bits of information on complex topics into a tidy narrative with links to supporting information. Users can also prompt the system to act as something like an administrative assistant – asking it to build travel itineraries, draft meeting outlines, or review human-generated text for errors. However, that seemingly boundless potential is bordered by ChatGPT’s inherent reliance on the data it was trained on. Biases in the information it pulls from can unintentionally reinforce stereotypes or advance incorrect information. Additionally, ChatGPT is known to “hallucinate” responses that sound plausible but are inaccurate.

All of this has given faculty cause for concern about how students may use the system to speed run their course work in pursuit of completing a degree rather than an education and development of critical thinking skills.

It is Joseph Brown’s job to help faculty and the broader CSU Fort Collins campus move past that fear. Brown is director of the Academic Integrity Program at The Institute for Learning and Teaching at CSU. The institute broadly supports innovative and inclusive teaching practices across disciplines through professional development for faculty and support for student learning and academic success. In his role, Brown is responsible for helping faculty navigate both the opportunities and challenges that come with AI in a classroom setting.

As a former English faculty member with a research interest in science fiction, Brown is well suited for this type of work and has been leading efforts to integrate AI at CSU for the last three years. He said initial skepticism from faculty has softened as they have begun to use AI in their everyday lives and are now seeking a way to co-exist and leverage the technology in the classroom.

“I’ve heard, probably more than anyone, our faculty’s concerns about how this new technology is changing student learning,” he said. “But a fear or suspicion that it would be used for cheating has now sort of given way to curiosity about its use in teaching approaches and testing student learning that either account for, or incorporate, the use of generative AI. They also recognize that ignoring or banning it is shortsighted and probably impossible.”

Brown said there is a large need for training in this space across campus. That’s in part because technology keeps evolving, but also because there are still many ethical and pedagogical considerations about how generative AI is used.

To that end, Brown maintains an active blog that aims to help faculty think about topics such as “AI proofing” their syllabi. The site also explains how the technology works in plain terms and offers guidance on detection tools and their associated limitations. He has also hosted a parallel set of workshops on similar topics and led the creation of the CSU AI Community of Practice in 2023. That group of interdisciplinary leaders meets regularly to share ideas and host guest speakers to build a shared understanding across units on campus. That is important because challenges with AI are not discipline specific.

Brown said we are in the “messy middle” stage and that “no one has figured this all out yet.”

“When students first hit campus, they are looking around to see what is going to fly for the next four years. We need good answers for them right at that point, so there is no mistake about the requirement to do authentic course work here and how they can and cannot use AI in pursuit of that goal,” he said. “Direct, faculty-led conversations on this topic that start with curiosity and hope are key to developing the kind of culture of integrity on campus we want to build.”

Denise Henry is the director of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Leadership at CSU Pueblo. That center also increasingly supports professional development for faculty around AI.

“Students are coming into our university having already used AI, and they are going to be expected to use it when they leave for work,” Henry said. “This is here to stay, and we need to prepare them for it. One of the biggest challenges we are facing is the development of workflows around AI that did not exist before and the need for updating our teaching and assessment practices for it on top of regular faculty workloads.”