In April 2024, Academic Technology Support Services (ATSS) conducted focus group sessions with UMN instructors. The sessions’ goals were to: understand instructors’ level of awareness about generative AI.  understand how instructors perceive acceptable use of generative AI for their academic courses. learn how instructors would like to be involved with shaping how generative AI is used in education and what support, if any, instructors desired around the use of generative AI. Note: throughout this post, ‘generative AI’ and ‘AI’ are both used to refer to the broad category of artificial intelligence that can produce content such as text, images, video, audio, and/or code. Focus group process ATSS partners with Usability Services to establish the session goals, determine participant recruiting criteria, craft the interview protocol, and set the ground rules for the focus group sessions. During the sessions, the project team takes notes and documents their observations, including di...

In April 2025, Academic Technology Support Services (ATSS), in collaboration with academic technology professionals across the University of Minnesota system, conducted a series of focus groups to understand instructor sentiments and address the complexities of integrating generative AI into higher education. Focus group participants included instructors from multiple University of Minnesota campuses. The goals were to gauge instructors' feelings about the value and applicability of these tools in and beyond the classroom, and to identify where common assumptions about generative AI break down across different disciplines. Note: throughout this post, “generative AI” and “AI” are both used to refer to the broad category of artificial intelligence that can produce content such as text, images, video, audio, and/or code. Focus group process ATSS partnered with Usability Services to establish the session goals, determine participant recruiting criteria, craft the interview protoco...

Around the world, generative AI is changing how we work, how we teach, how we learn, and how we think. The rapid proliferation of AI technologies and their initial hype suggests that the future of teaching, learning and writing will require some integration and collaboration between humans and AI content generators. In these early days of AI, instructors and researchers are already encountering and exploring ways AI technologies emerge in the context of teaching and learning. On September 29, 2023, Academic Technology Support Services, the Center for Educational Innovation, and the Writing Across the Curriculum program hosted instructors from several disciplines to share their experiences using (or responding to) ChatGPT in their classrooms in Spring 2023.   Jay Coggins - Applied Economics Jay Coggins, Professor of Applied Economics, inaugurated the panel by observing that our students will likely use AI tools throughout their careers, and explained that responsible use would be a ...

Are you struggling to keep pace with artificial intelligence (AI) and its rapid pace of change? At Academic Technology Support Services, we were too, so we created this post to make sense of the AI tool categories and how they can support the teaching process. In the post, we compare various AI tools and delve a little deeper into the category of AI Agents or Assistants. Due to the rapid pace of AI functional development, combined with the proliferation of terms, definitions, and tools, this blog post has a significant caveat: This is our attempt to start/continue making sense of what’s new and upcoming in the use of AI; we aren’t looking for a right or wrong way to use an AI platform, or to accurately define groups of AI tools, but instead gain an understanding of how the various factors interact. Whether you agree with our characterizations or not, join the AI iCoP discussions and let us know your thoughts. After our AI review, we will apply AI concepts and tools to an example from ...

What is the role of Generative AI in...  personalized learning and time-saving approaches?  instructional design and course assistance? academic writing and research?  the ever-evolving relationship between instructors and students? These were some of the questions explored in the Explore Generative AI tools workshop held in mid-October 2023. Guided by an AI critical literacy approach, participants sought to: understand the basic concepts and technologies used by AI evaluate AI platforms/systems and their outputs for accuracy and bias consider the ethical implications of AI on societal impacts such as work, creativity, culture, politics, etc Participants were introduced to AI tools in the following four areas. Each of the areas included use cases and demonstrations of AI platforms. Writing Instruction and Support Bill Rozaitis, Education Program Specialist from the Center for Educational Innovation, discussed uses for generative AI in writing instruction. There is a growi...

"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 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.  Colin McFadden, Technology Architect for the College of Liberal Arts, presented to the Emerging Technologies Faculty Fellows on the topic of GenAI in September. His comments are edited for clarity and length. In your role as Technology Architect for CLA, how do you use Generative AI? Colin McFadden: I use Generative AI day-to-day for both technical and non-technical work. When I’m working on software or hardware development, generative AI provides both code suggestions, and can help me think through complex requirements. I also love to have generative AI do an initial proofreading pass of documents or articles that I’m working on. I’m still learning where these tools are useful and where they’re not - for example, some programming languages or frameworks still present a challenge, and yo...

  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 and Sara Schoen ( Academic Technology Support Services ) interviewed Emerging Technologies Faculty Fellow Nicole Dillard from CEHD’s Organizational Leadership, Policy & Development department. The following has been revised for length and clarity. Tell us about your role in the College of Education and Human Development (CEHD), and how this is informing your work with generative AI. Nicole Dillard: I'm a faculty member in the Human Resource Development program, which is part of the OLPD (Organizational Leadership, Policy & Development) department. I teach both undergraduate and graduate courses, and I'm piloting my project in my undergrad course OLPD 3310: Identities in the Workplace. Prior to the fellowship, I don't think my role was significantly influenced by my u...

 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 ...

Co-authored by Lauren Marsh (ATSS) and Mary Jetter (CEI).  Are you wondering how and when your students should use generative AI? Are you exploring how to harness generative AI to augment your teaching? Many instructors are asking these questions as they contemplate using generative AI in their courses. Recently, the Emerging Technology Faculty Fellows were asked to try an experiment following these steps: Review resources that address the appropriate use of GenAI, for example, Appropriate Use of ChatGPT and Similar Generative AI Tools .  Then consider the web resource Advancing Meaningful Learning in the Age of AI,  which provides a revised version of Bloom’s taxonomy intended to help instructors evaluate and make changes to course assignments or assessments in light of GenAI.  Identify a single assignment from your course. Break the assignment into a series of sequential tasks. For each task, consider the following prompts: Decide whether or not students cou...