How Higher Ed Institutions Are Using Built-In Generative AI Tools

Rice already has a Gemini pilot running among a select group of students, with an eye toward “understanding what data is protected and how it’s being used,” Padley says. “We really have to be careful that things we’re using in an academic environment are FERPA-compliant. We’ve only recently gotten clarity on that for those tools in the past couple of months, and we’re still exploring what that means.”

Once the pilot is complete, Rice will scale up its efforts, according to Padley. This will require a series of steps before implementation.

“We would bring it to our AI advisory committee and give them another opportunity to chime in,” he says. “We may bring it to the faculty senate as well if it’s affecting pedagogy. We really need to go through those governance practices.”

READ MORE: Google Gemini has practical applications in higher education.

One early use case already has emerged. OpenStax, nonprofit initiative out of Rice, makes college textbooks available for free. A recent partnership between OpenStax and Google Gemini could potentially make them “even more easily available,” Padley says.

It may soon be possible, for example, for Gemini to leverage OpenStax content to inform faculty lectures, writing lessons that address student learning preferences.

“If I took the course content and the research on student learning and merged them with the AI capabilities, I might be able to produce content that would be better tuned to how the students are going to learn,” Padley says.

Built-In Generative AI Tools Offer Customizable Security Parameters

At Carnegie Mellon University, IT leaders like the built-in tools for their inherent data security.

With AI delivered by major vendors within existing products, the school can customize its protections.

“We can develop appropriate terms and conditions, from a contract standpoint, to protect our intellectual property and the private data and sensitive data that we’re the custodians of,” says Stan Waddell, vice president for IT and CIO. “That’s extremely important and helpful.”

When it comes to using those AI capabilities, “the No. 1 use case that I hear is simple productivity enhancement,” he says. “You need to write an email, and you use prompts to draft the email. Or you need to refine some writing or shift the voice of the writing, and you use prompts to do that versus going through numerous iterations on your own.”