Program Development

GWU · 2020–2025

A description of the background and programmatic planning for a multi-pronged effort to respond to the introduction of generative Artificial Intelligence (genAI) at GWU.

Overview

As the inaugural Director of Strategic Digital Learning Initiatives, the central piece to my role and unit was to be a leader in the creation of enablement programs and community for digital fluency and AI literacy. For the first couple of years in the role my attention went to supporting the academic side of the GWU-Adobe Creative Campus partnership. In this time, I created the GW-Adobe Science Education Initiative in collaboration with Sylvain Guiriec, PhD. But right as the GWU-Adobe partnership dissolved, OpenAI announced ChatGPT in November 2022. From that point forward, my focus shifted to helping faculty and staff grapple with the technology and explore how they could use with it in teaching, research, and work.

By March 2023 I was asked by leadership to develop a strategy for the central library to respond to generative Artificial Intelligence. I immediately reached out to my network of faculty across every college and school, and had over 20 one-on-one discussions to get a sense of attitudes, perceptions on the value of the technology, and what people would like to see come out of the library. Feelings ran across the spectrum, but the feedback was to create asynchronous educational content, workshops, organize community discussions, and to generally help push people into a new age

The Plan

While the plan took input from faculty and leadership, I was trusted to put together the direction, assemble the resources, and execute. Doing this pulled from my experience teaching, joy in working with (educational) technology, standing-up programmatic operations, networking, and overall commitment to service. Soon after documenting my plan and discussing it with my leadership, I prepared a series of slides to socialize and present to leadership. This plan involved 3 core ideas:

  1. Awareness — Intentionally building channels and messaging to make the community aware of genAI tools, discussions happening on campus, resources being developed, policy implications, and actions I/we were taking.
  2. Literacy — Designing, developing, and delivering programming that faculty and staff could attend/use to learn about genAI, practice using it, discuss use cases, matching the technology to use cases, and introducing frameworks in research.
  3. Integration — Creating opportunities for faculty and staff to work with myself and their peers to explore how to infuse genAI into teaching practice, research, and work.


Guiding councils

Community was an important part to my plan because for any transformation to be successful it needs to have broad input, shared ownership, and felt engagement from diverse stakeholders. To this end, I successfullly created the GenAI Faculty Advisory Council that brought together faculty and staff from the entire organization. (This was later renamed GenAI in Teaching.)

Digital communications

This was about creating a website that could serve as a single hub of communications from the library to GWU on generative AI. At this time, there was no unified web-development team and I thought it was important to have unity in message.

Programmatic efforts

Ultimately everything except the quarterly symposia and competitions were created. It took significant effort, but I was able to rally action across teams to achieve these efforts.

Impact

Over 1.5 years I was able to drive and grow the original plan to accomplish so much for the university. This was possible because of a handful of faculty, my team, other library team members, and a few staff from other schools. The following is a list of outcomes:

  1. Video produced genAI faculty case studies (3)
  2. AI microlearning series: Getting Started with genAI (11)
  3. Internally produced genAI guidance resources (∼5)
  4. Formation of a library genAI staff working group (1)
  5. Delivery of multiple presentations and discussions on genAI (10)
  6. An established library website on genAI
  7. Launch of multiple genAI workshops (9)
  8. A collaborative survey of 336 undergraduate students using genAI
  9. Collaboration with the GWU Open Source Programming Office on AI tools
  10. Monthly contributions to and support for the CCAS AI seminar series

Nonetheless, some ideas were left on the table before new leadership changed direction and restructuring led to my layoff. Those in backlog were:

  1. Development of an AI agent to guide instructional/learning design and media design
  2. An AI Institute for faculty and staff to develop AI literacy skills
  3. A section of content added to the Course Design Institute focusing on course (re-)design with genAI
  4. A podcast series for interviewing faculty and staff on the use of genAI in teaching, research, and work
  5. A professional development series teaching skills to get faculty started with using genAI
  6. A series of library produced teaching and learning symposia
  7. A library produced genAI LibGuide
  8. Monthly staff presentations and activities to promote upskilling with genAI
  9. A series of student competitions with genAI tools