"I have felt skeptical of my professors' skepticism towards AI. It's kinda like in elementary school or middle school where they said 'you need to know these numbers because you won't have a calculator in your pocket at all times' and I was like 'dead wrong, I do have a calculator in my pocket on my phone at all times.'" Participant in student focus group, November 2024 In November 2024,  Academic Technology Support Services,  in collaboration with academic technology professionals across the University of Minnesota system, convened student focus groups and asked about their use of generative AI technology. Focus group participants included students from multiple system campuses at the undergraduate and graduate levels. The goal was to learn when and why students use generative AI in their classes. Toward that end, we asked students: What do you consider when deciding whether or not to use AI for an assignment or to support your learning in t...

This spring Extra Points will feature a series of conversations focused on how faculty and staff around the University of Minnesota are using generative AI to do University work.  Lauren Marsh ( Academic Technology Support Services ) and Bill Rozaitis ( Center for Educational Innovation ) interviewed Emerging Technologies Faculty Fellows Molly Vasich and Kris Cory , Associate Directors of First Year Writing, Writing Studies, in the College of Liberal Arts. The following has been revised for length and clarity. Tell us about your roles in First-Year Writing, and how that is informing your work. Molly Vasich: Kris and I are Associate Directors for First-Year Writing, a program housed in Writing Studies. We support 35 full-time faculty members and 15 graduate instructors who teach sections of First-Year Writing, the only universally required course for undergraduates across the Twin Cities campus. This semester, we have about 2,400 students taking First-Year Writing.  We h...

This fall and spring Extra Points will feature a series of conversations focused on how faculty and staff around the University of Minnesota are using generative AI to do University work.  Adam Brisk ( Information Technology Systems and Services) and Cody Hennesy (formerly with the University Libraries ), interviewed Emerging Technologies Faculty Fellow   Al Fattal Anas . He is an Assistant Professor of Marketing in Crookston’s Business Department. The following has been revised for length and clarity. Tell us about your role in the Business Department, and how that is informing your work with generative AI. Al Fattal Anas: I'm an assistant professor in Marketing, and I'm on a tenure track. I teach courses like principles of marketing, marketing research, consumer behavior and marketing strategies. Instead of thinking about generative AI as something working against you, I’ve been exploring using it as an ally. We need to redesign assignments and assessments and further ...

 This spring Extra Points will feature a series of conversations focused on how faculty and staff around the University of Minnesota are using generative AI to do University work.  Bill Rozaitis ( Center for Educational Innovation ) and Cody Hennesy ( University Libraries ) interviewed Emerging Technologies Faculty Fellow   Tim Doherty , Senior Lecturer of Chemistry at UMR’s Center for Learning Innovation. The following has been revised for length and clarity. Tell us about your roles in Chemistry and the Center for Learning Innovation at Rochester, and how those are informing your work with generative AI. Tim Doherty: I'm a chemistry instructor at the University of Minnesota, Rochester. In our lab courses, we teach students how to write lab reports. With the advent of large language models, it became clear that this is something we can’t ignore. We wanted to explore how AI could help students write lab reports. Since it’s such an emerging area, there wasn’t exactly a ...