Faculty, staff, and administrators are trying to understand AI's potential benefits and risks to higher education. Colleagues from MIT recently published a handy guide  that provides good advice on topics ranging from “guidelines, guardrails, and governance” to “acceptable AI use.” In recent months, much has been written about the potential for AI to decrease the workload for campus administrators—from admissions to advancement and from counseling services to the registrar’s office. 

Instructors, on the other hand, have had mixed feelings at best with the arrival of ChatGPT and other large language model-based programs. Although a fair share of essays have expressed instructors’ feelings of loss and nostalgia, there is also a sizable number of professors who embrace AI in their classrooms, knowing that students will need to be AI literate for life after college. They realize AI is here for good and will change everything, including classroom instruction. We are, of course, only at the beginning of the AI revolution, and time will tell how drastic changes will be over the next decade.

When it comes to classroom instruction, we know that human connections are of utmost importance for student success.  In 2020, Peter Felten and Leo M. Lambert published Relationship-Rich Education: How Human Connections Drive Success in College. Based on almost 400 interviews with different college constituents at 29 colleges and universities, the book demonstrates that there is a direct link between learning, student success, and person-to-person relationships. According to Felton and Lambert, 

the key is not tasking each student with identifying a single mentor who will meet all of their needs, but rather creating a relationship-rich environment where students will have frequent opportunities to connect with many peers, faculty, staff, and others on and off campus. One-on-one mentoring is powerful, yet it is expensive to structure and nearly impossible to scale to all students; relationship-rich environments, on the other hand, are a flexible and affordable means to connect every student to the transformative ends of higher education. (p. 6) 

In other words, college success not only hinges on what you know but also on who you know. Together with Isis Artze-Vega and Oscar R. Miranda Tapia, Felten and Lambert have taken this idea and turned it into a student handbook. Connections Are Everything: A College Student's Guide to Relationship-Rich Education is like a roadmap for relationship-rich education which can be downloaded for free in Project Muse. It should be on every incoming first-year student’s summer reading list. 

Positive relationships with peers, faculty, and staff are undoubtedly the secret to college students' success. And yet, it seems that AI has the potential to enhance relationship-rich education. Salman Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, argues in his new book, Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing), that an AI tutor can significantly enhance personalized learning. Based on Open AI’s large language models, Khan created Khanmigo, which for $4 a month can help students with their assignments 24/7. Instead of simply answering a particular question, the bot walks students through a problem, helps them understand it, be it mathematical or otherwise, and fills in any gaps the student may have. In other words, the idea of Khanmigo and similar bots is to provide on-demand, personal, one-on-one tutoring. Other educational bots are designed to function as teaching assistants. Last year, a pilot program at Georgia State University showed that the AI teaching assistant named Pounce, like the school’s mascot, had a measurable impact on student success. To expand its program, Georgia State received a $7.6 million grant from the Department of Education to make Pounce available in all basic math and English courses.

We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, and it remains to be seen how our society, including higher education, will change over the coming decades. Will AI teaching assistant bots on screens be replaced by AI-powered social robots in the near future? Will we have social robots roam schools and college campuses? As far-fetched as this idea may sound, social robots in educational settings have been around for some time already. The Pepper robot has been a classroom staple for almost a decade in places such as Singapore, where preschoolers have embraced the robot. Ilona Buchem, professor of media and communication in the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences at the Berlin University of Applied Sciences in Germany, has also used the Pepper robot in her classes. While she only uses it as a teaching assistant, she envisions robots as “members of students' working groups in collaborative learning. A robot could not only moderate the group work, but also be a member of the group, presenting a new perspective or encouraging the students to argue, negotiate and be critical.”

Will AI eventually replace instructors? Not when it comes to community college faculty in California where the state’s legislature just signed a bill that excludes AI bots from being the instructor on record. But is it completely far-fetched to assume that in the near future, social robots with AI capabilities will play a greater role in society in general and on college campuses in particular? Will there be increased student demand for robots? Will relationships with robots affect student success similarly to relationships with humans? And while we are trying to find out the answers to these questions, are we robot-proofing our students in the meantime? 

Written by Gregor Thuswaldner, Professor of World Languages & Cultures and former Provost and Executive Vice President, Whitworth University