UNK AI Taskforce

Co Chairs

Megan Adkins
Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and Academic Innovation

Beth Hinga
Assistant to Senior Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs

Subgroups

A brief overview of the subgroups

Student Experience: The integration of AI through the holistic and dynamic journey each student undertakes throughout their time at UNK.  The student lifecycle encompasses multiple dimensions including academic life, health/wellness, college experience, life after college.

Faculty/Staff Development: The ongoing and multifaceted process of equipping faculty and staff with the knowledge, skills, and resources they need to excel in their roles, adapt to changing demands, and contribute meaningfully to the institution's mission.

Faculty Teaching: The dynamic process by which academic instructors at UNK utilize various methods and approaches, facilitate student learning, knowledge acquisition, critical thinking, and curriculum design within specific academic disciplines.

Academic Integrity, Ethics, & Research: Ensuring ethical research and upholding academic integrity in higher education by adhering to core principles of honesty, respect, and responsibility, and conducting rigorous inquiry that advances knowledge without compromising these values.

• Ethics: Moral dimensions of development and use, focusing on questions like fairness, transparency, accountability, and non-discrimination.
• Research: Systematic investigation to establish facts, uncover new knowledge, and solve problems.
• Academic Integrity: Adherence to principles of honesty, trust, and fairness in all academic work.

Cybersecurity, Privacy: The design, deployment, privacy, and utilization to ensure responsible innovation, secure digital environments, and the respectful protection of individuals' data and autonomy.

• Cybersecurity: Covers the protection of digital systems and data from unauthorized  
  access, use, disclosure, disruption, modification, or destruction.
• Privacy: Represents the right of individuals to control their personal information and decide how it is collected, used, and shared.
• Educational Technology, Instructional Design: Instructional design of courses, modality of teaching which provides the framework and the "why" behind the use of an educational technology tool, and the use of technology itself to become the tool to effectively facilitate learning and achieve the desired outcomes.
• Educational technology: Tools, resources, and systems that leverage digital and emerging technologies to enhance teaching and learning. This could include virtual reality environments, adaptive learning platforms, interactive simulations, and more.
• Instructional design: The systematic approach to designing, developing, delivering, and evaluating learning experiences. This involves understanding learner needs, setting learning objectives, choosing appropriate instructional methods, and assessing learning outcomes.

Data Analysis and Visualization: Knowledge creation, understanding, and communication of information.

• Data analysis: The process of collecting, cleaning, processing, and analyzing data to extract meaningful patterns, trends, and relationships.
• Visualization: Transforming data into visual representations like charts, graphs, and maps to facilitate understanding and communication.

Background

As we witness in real time the rapid emergence of AI across many aspects of daily life, including its potential to transform the quality of education, learning outcomes, and experiences in both promising and concerning ways. Moreover, while technology presents remarkable opportunity for innovation and knowledge creation, so too it presents challenges in areas like academic integrity, intellectual property, and job security. Throughout the country, universities have been steadily formulating guidance on positive ways to engage generative AI in classwork and research, with some already having published institution-wide approaches.

At the University of Nebraska at Kearney, work has been underway within several units to develop similar initiatives and policies. However, most of these efforts are independent and not necessarily connected to one another, and their goals vary from simply setting policies for how AI can and cannot be used by students to providing guidance on how to constructively engage AI.  To align with the UNK community the following charge has been given to the AI task force.

Charge

This charge outlines the initial responsibilities and goals for the UNK Artificial Intelligence (AI) Task Force, providing a framework for strategic exploration, recommendations, and implementation of AI technologies across the campus. The task force will explore, coordinate, and optimize the use of Artificial Intelligence technologies to the benefit of students, faculty, and staff at UNK and work towards enhancing the academic sector by leveraging AI innovations responsibly, securely, ethically, and inclusively. The task force reports directly to the Senior Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs, with whom it will share regular progress reports.

Scope of Work

1. Gather information about initiatives throughout UNK and effective practices being adopted at other universities that are likewise focused on balancing the creative, multidisciplinary, and ethical use of generative AI.
2. Develop specific recommendations for how generative AI can be used to amplify learning outcomes in undergraduate and graduate education and for faculty and students.
3. Create a set of recommended guidelines and best practices that can be adopted – and adapted – University-wide regarding the use of AI by students and faculty and help prevent its misuse or negative impact.
4. Lay groundwork for a University-wide repository of examples of positive uses for generative AI that others can adopt, as well as misuses others should want to avoid.

Timeline and Requirements for Report and Communication Plans

The task force developed a communication plan with expected dates and methods of planned communications outlined below. While the task force is conducting their work the Office of Graduate Studies and Academic Innovation will offer professional development opportunities revolving around artificial intelligence beginning after spring break in the spring semester, 2024.

The task force will begin work to develop guidelines and recommendations for new steps to the SVCAA after the Kickoff meeting scheduled for February 19, 2024.

March 2024: A landscape analysis of AI usage, and guidelines will be completed comparing all Regent peer institution groups.  In addition, a SWOT analysis based on the subgroup topic and the UNK academic sector will be completed.

April 2024: Subgroup guidelines and recommendations of AI at UNK are completed and submitted.

May 2024: The UNK AI Taskforce comprehensive report is submitted to the SVCAA.