At Penn State, AI isn’t the future. It’s the present, President Eric Barron says
Penn State President Eric Barron says he gets a lot of questions about how artificial intelligence, when it enters the economy, will affect the university.
His answer? “The university is working hard on a lot of different areas here.”
For Penn State, AI isn’t the dystopian technology used for sleep learning and intelligence-based hierarchies depicted in Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” but a tool to make everything from learning and teaching to admissions and hiring easier, Barron said in an interview with the CDT this week.
On Friday, Barron showed the board of trustees how Penn State is using AI to make work more efficient, which has a domino effect on increased student services and better student outcomes, and how it plans to use the technology in a socially responsible way.
AI in student support
Penn State’s World Campus began a pilot program in late 2019 using AI to sort student requests, effectively freeing up thousands of hours of academic advisors’ time to focus more on individual student needs. Through a contract with Google Cloud, subcontractor Quantiphi built a custom machine learning system for World Campus’s advising system.
The system had 86% accuracy in its testing phase, Barron told the board, and the system will be tracked for one year on its effectiveness.
Project LIFT, which was also tested this past fall with 12 advisors from University Park and Lehigh Valley, scans historical student data to identify and flag at-risk students and notify advisors to follow up with those students, he said.
For Counseling and Psychological Services, which “seems to operate at capacity,” said Barron, Penn State is testing certain technology options to reach more students and identify which students need to schedule face-to-face appointments with counselors.
Among those options are a self treatment wellness app called WellTrack, self-assesment tool CCAPS Screen, the Penn State Crisis Line and Crisis Text Line, off-campus referral service ThrivingCampus and the YOU at College Wellness portal coming this summer. Penn State is also considering a pilot tele-counseling program at University Park and an upcoming contract to offer same-day support to students with CAPS oversight.
The Student Engagement Network is in the midst of designing a Student Engagement Portal, which aims to use AI to refine student activity options based on past activities, Barron said.
“How does a student go into the portal and find their way through literally a couple of thousand opportunities?” he said in a meeting with the CDT. “And so this is like Netflix, where it’s listening to what your interests are and it starts to point out to you things that are there that are similar.”
Additionally, a team from Penn State Berks participating in the Nittany AI Alliance Challenge built a web application that uses AI to find top resume criteria employers look for and in turn help students tailor their resumes using that criteria. Career Services at Penn State is using that application to assist students in their career searches.
AI in instruction and faculty
Last week, Penn State announced the launch of a new research center studying the ethical implications of AI and how to use the technology in a socially responsible way.
Penn State’s Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence “promotes the thoughtful development and application of AI and studies its impact on all areas of human endeavor,” said a release from Penn State News.
“Given the rapid expansion and progression of interdisciplinary research and the wide-ranging impact of artificial intelligence on society, this center will engage and enable Penn State scholars and educators to work together and use AI to address the grand challenges of our time,” Andrew Sears, dean of the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), who led the founding of the center, said in the release.
Penn State also has a number of of faculty competitions and projects that encourage innovation in AI for instructional uses. The annual Open Innovation Challenge through Teaching and Learning with Technology, set for March 21 this year, has Penn State faculty present their ideas in education and technology. Winners are selected by online votes.
One winner, Penn State Beaver IST instructor Ashu Kumar, created a voice-activated classroom assistant for taking attendance and tracking class participation points so that the instructor’s teaching isn’t interrupted by those tasks, said Barron.
Penn State also has multiple labs and online resources dedicated to immersive experiences, including the newly opened Center for Immersive Experiences, he said. Those immersive experiences, provided through virtual reality or 360 video and accessible by computer almost anywhere, he said, increase learning potential.
“All of a sudden, no matter where you are in the world, you have the same classroom experience,” he said.
Penn State instructors are also using AI in everything from building free, open source textbooks through BBookX — saving $200,000 in student textbook costs — to improving course content through Eureka! and generating better test question answers through an engine called Inquizitive.
AI in Penn State institutional projects
The admissions process for both incoming and transfer students at Penn State can be daunting, said Barron, but the university is using AI to make the process smoother.
A Nittany AI Alliance student team is working on an AI tool that would scan and process a Penn State applicant’s transcript, upload it and submit it back to the student for verification and submission, he said.
“That’s an enormous time saver for a student,” he said. “You can just upload it and have the machine place everything.”
Another project, building off of the 2018 AI Challenge winner Lion Planner, involves developing a “smart recognition tool” for transfer students to scan or type in their course to get an “instant preliminary estimate” of valid credits that can transfer to Penn State, Barron said.
Penn State is also using AI in development to generate more online giving and marketing for enrollment. One “intelligent matching tool” can look at previous donors’ passions and interests in order to make online giving more fun and “narrow options” based on those donors’ search history, he said.
The university also uses AI to target ads for increased enrollment and measure how effective current online ads are in attracting prospective students, he said.
In addition, Penn State is exploring the use of AI in employee and faculty recruitment, which would automate the analysis of talent profiles and initial engagement through text, email or chatbots, and candidate pool screening for shortlisted or past candidates.
“The idea is that everything from a classroom — to make it easier for students to do things and find things — to admissions and development, we’re using tools so that we can go from, ‘Oh my goodness, I have to process 85,000 of these,’ to making that simpler and having the human time be more personal ... or to teach better classes,” Barron told the CDT.
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