AI in Education: CSU’s Bold Higher Ed Strategy - Adventures in Advising

In this episode, Matt and Ryan dive into the California State University system's landmark rollout of ChatGPT to over half a million students, faculty, and staff. The CSU’s bold AI initiative is meant to reshape higher education by tackling equitable access, responsible use, and workforce readiness. We also explore tough questions about AI’s impact on jobs and sustainability, as well as how CSU leaders are responding. Panelists include: 

California State University Office of the Chancellor:

• Dr. Leslie Kennedy - Assistant Vice Chancellor
• Dr. Ed Clark - Chief Information Officer
• Dr. Felix Zuniga - Campus Engagement Partner

California State University, San Bernardino:

• Dr. Bradford Owen - Associate Vice President of Faculty Development and Chief Academic Technology Officer
• Gerard Au - Chief Information Officer

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Transcript

Ryan Scheckel  
Well, hello there academic advising friends. Welcome to another episode of adventures in advising. Matt and I are super excited for the guests we have today, continuing our conversation on AI from multiple perspectives and and so we can get started with who we have today. 

Matt Markin  
Just to kind of give a little bit of an overview, it's like, you know, Ryan and I have talked about AI over the last year, and we've had various episodes about the different perspectives and different ways of thinking about AI. And kind of over the last few months, one of the larger initiatives we've heard about was regarding the California State University system that is leveraging the power of artificial intelligence to create AI empowered higher ed system that maybe surpass existing models. And part of that is adopting AI technologies such as ChatGPT to be more accessible to students, faculty and staff at all their CSU institution. So yeah, it's a delight to have various individuals from the California State University Office of the Chancellor and also from CSU San Bernardino. And maybe to start off our introductions, we'll throw it over to Felix.

Felix Zuniga  
Thank you, Matt and Ryan. I'm really glad to be here. My name is Felix Zuniga with the California State University at the Office of the Chancellor. I serve as a campus engagement partner, where I work with all of our IT leadership across the system and our system office. And mainly, I'm here because I'm a part of the ChatGPT implementation team, which we're doing at the CSU. So it's a large implementation of ChatGPT, over 500,000 faculty and staff in the CSU, and just really happy to be here. Thanks. 

Matt Markin  
All right, Leslie,

Leslie Kennedy  
Hi everybody. I'm Leslie Kennedy, and I'm the Assistant Vice Chancellor of Academic Technology Services at the Chancellor's office in Long Beach, California, and I'm also part of this AI implementation team. I'm in the I represent the Academic Affairs side, I guess, for the most part. And I've been around Academic Technologies for a long time, so it's been a very exciting time, and we look forward to sharing more about that.

Matt Markin  
Wonderful. Ed.

Ed Clark  
Yeah, Hi Matt and Ryan. It's so great to be here as well. My name is Ed Clark. I'm the CIO for the California State University system, and I'm looking forward to telling you more about what we're doing right.

Matt Markin  
And how about our friends over at CSUSB? We'll start with Brad.

Bradford Owen  
Thank you. I'm glad to be here. Brad Owen, Associate Vice President for faculty development and Chief Academic Technologies officer. I am co chair of our ChatGPT steering committee with Gerard AU, Chief Information Officer.

Matt Markin  
All right, last but not least, Gerard. 

Gerard Au  
Hello. I'm Gerard AU. I currently serve as the chief information officer here at Cal State, San Bernardino, and overseeing all of the IT portfolio for CSUSB, and as Dr. Owen said, he and I had the pleasure of CO chairing the steering committee, so as we rolled ChatGPT out on our campus for our faculty and staff at the end of March and, you know, to students in the middle of April. So we have been blessed with the committees of advice to help us with this roll up. 

Matt Markin  
So Ryan and I will kind of take turns asking questions. And we thought the first one, maybe we'll throw over to our friends at the Office of the Chancellor to kind of give us the the foundation or basis of this, you know, can you tell us a little bit more about the background, like how this conversation started regarding this initiative?

Ed Clark  
I'll give it a shot. And, you know, I invite Leslie and Felix to jump in. One of the things that we were noticing and across higher ed of course, is different universities are adopting these tools at different times, right? And some, you know, you saw Harvard, some of the elite schools got out there very early, and they said, We're going to roll out these tools to our entire communities early on. So you saw Harvard was out there, Michigan was out there, Florida, others, University of Chicago, and that was a concern for us, because, you know, in our system, we also want to make sure that our students have access to these tools, that they're prepared to use them as technology starts to transform industries and fields and all those other things. And so we were investigating, you know, with our industry partners, like, who can partner with us to really give us the access we're going to need. And that became even more important because we saw that some of our campuses, I think San Diego State, was first to roll out an AI tool for their community in the system. The concern is that some of our campuses have, you know, they're larger, they're better funded, and so they're going out and, you know, creating their own technology environments where some of our smaller schools would not be able to afford to get those tools. Yes, and so we couldn't as a system, just stand by and watch, okay, some students and some faculty are gonna have access, and some are not, right? That was one of the first things we're like, how do we ensure that everybody has access to these tools across the system, as opposed to the typical institution by institution adoption, you'll see in other parts of the country? Should I pass it on to you Leslie?

Leslie Kennedy  
Sure. I think that we were very excited to consider our students needs and our faculty needs in regards to the use of AI in instruction, but also in the future for our students around the concept of workforce preparation. And we'd also been prompted by our governor's office to see what we were trying to prepare for our in regards to programs for our students, in order to make sure that they had some exposure to Gen AI and in their various disciplines and and also be exposed to ethical and responsible use strategies around that and and just really help them be able to compete in the workforce with their with their learning experiences in addition to what they were focusing on in their majors. So combination of all these areas, equity and then also access for the future. In preparation for the future was part of our reason why we wanted to we went forward with our strategy that we have right now. I'm not sure if you have anything else to add Felix. 

Felix Zuniga  
I would say access and equity were the biggest things on my mind. I also just think about the responsibility. You know, many of us being in tech for as long as we have, have seen when, when major shifts happen, you know, like the internet, right, and just social media and big, big movements that have happened in the past mobile technology. And I think this is one of those ones that we know we saw right away as, hey, this is a game changer for education, for every industry, really, that it touches, and so I feel a personal responsibility to help shepherd that within higher education, because I think we can't afford to be left behind. 

Ed Clark  
I was going to build on Felix's point, because, you know, one of the things that I was sharing with our Board of Trustees is that this time that we're seeing with, you know, AI technologies is very similar, in my opinion, to the early web, right, where we saw a Netscape and Lycos and these kinds of brands that kind of came, became huge and went. But today we we know the Internet has transformed how we do everything. And I'm holding my phone here. We do everything via these phones. It's becoming visible to us. It's fundamental to how we conduct everything from academics to business to personal entertainment. And in my opinion, we're heading down this same path where the artificial intelligence is going to be baked in, eventually, to everything we do, and to Felix's point and Leslie's point, we have to help prepare students, our students, for this future that's emerging very rapidly.

Ryan Scheckel  
You know, I listeners this podcast have heard Matt and I and other guests talk about the potential of AI, and I hear what you all are saying about that, but we also live in an economic context, a financial context, and especially for a multi system, a multi institution system, the decision to make this sort of capital investment in a technology that, while so much potential, so much potential influence On the world, we still wonder about its adoption. For a lot of folks, AI is just a thing that makes an interesting picture on their phone. And I'm curious how a system your size and as individual administrators and campuses are looking at this, how do we effectively address concerns about the financial cost of initiatives like this. I hear student access and I hear equity. I hear the possibility of the significant impact, but that's in for many people yet to be proven. So at a time where funding and resources feels tight, a big ticket item like this certainly stands out. And I'm curious about the thought process on that and and how best to address those concerns.

Ed Clark  
I can take a you know, I can tell you a little bit about the financial picture and the history from the CSU's point of view. There had been a number of meetings with, you know, some of the biggest players in this space. You know, Microsoft, AWS, you name it. With the CSU CIOs, we have 23 different CIOs, and, of course, me at the Chancellor's Office, and we're we're noticing that these technologies were very expensive. So on average it was $20 to $30 per person. Per month, right? And so when you multiply that by, in our case, 500,000 people, that is an impossible, an impossible amount of money for for our kind of system. Yet we were again seeing other universities around the country making this investment, you know, saying, Hey, we're going to be the AI, you know, center of the United States and so on, so forth. And so we kept on negotiating with different partners and trying to find someone who would work with us. I had a, you know, I had a conversation with open AI at EDUCAUSE in October of last year, and I said, we have 500,000 students. One out of every 20 people with a bachelor's degree in United States graduated from our system, right? Which is an amazing it's a huge impact. Yet the price of your product is helping to build a digital divide, right? So there's going to be people that are going to have access to these tools, learn how to use them. They're going to go out and they're going to get a certain kind of job and certain kinds of opportunities that will not be available to our community, but the pricing of the product is so impossible for us to reach. How can we partner to get to a pricing that makes sense for us? So, you know, and then we, you know, at a certain point, it was like $12 per person per month. That's the lowest price they had for their edu plan, again, too expensive for us, where we eventually got that, because it's, you know, public record. Now, the price that we actually paid in the end was $1.88 per person per month. So it was a price that had never been offered to anyone, any system in the world. And so that's when, when I brought that back to the Chancellor's Office, they were saying, You know what, we're doing all these budget cuts. We're doing those other things. But this is a price point we need to jump on it. We need to provide this access to our community. It's never been offered to anyone else. We have to take advantage of this and make sure that we provide this to everybody, and all the students, faculty and staff. So that's, that's kind of the background of the negotiations, the conversations, but into opening eyes credit. I mean, I think there was, you know, concern from all parties well, like, what about the other people that did pay all those other rates? Well, you know, hopefully by this time next year, the they'll see their rates also come down. But the magic for them was we were operating as a system, rather than those individual universities. And like, like I said, where we had gone down, we already seeing some of our universities cutting their own deals. That's what they weren't interested in. The fact that we're going to affect a whole system is what allowed them to offer this opportunity to us. 

Ryan Scheckel  
Maybe I need to find a CSU program to enroll in, then, because I know what I'm paying in a month.

Ed Clark  
Yes. And to your point that you just made an excellent point, we also could see in the data that many of our staff and faculty students, the ones that had more money, were able to buy their own plans, and so again, even that, that equity of some of our community members who couldn't afford it were getting left behind.

Bradford Owen  
Ryan, I'm putting the link to some of our San Bernardino programs in chat. So please, please have a look at those. 

Ryan Scheckel  
I appreciate it. Brad,

Gerard Au  
Yeah, and I think, you know, just to maybe augment and add to Ed's point too, right? Having the chances often and the CSU system stand behind it really helped anchor right, the need and how we are rolling this out at our campus. Give you a little quick stats, right, as we we haven't even rolled this out to students for a month, right? It's only been about three weeks, and we rolled it out to the faculty and staff at the end of March. Just a quick snapshot, right? We have closed almost 4000 of our users already using this platform. Before that, you know, we have about 130 users who had already their own account or paid account, just in the month of April, there's been over 130,000 messages that has been sent through ChatGPT, just from one campus, right? This is just San Bernardino again. Keep in mind, only half of the month of April student have access to so just to talk about the scale of things and the support that we have received as a system wide adoption that allows us to, you know, have equitable access for all 18,000 students here that no one really has to worry about. Okay, do I have this tool or not, right? And meaningfully, as Dr. Owen, feel free to chime in as we were consulting the campus on our adoption. The message was very clear, right? We can't leave our students behind. Students are very strong advocate to ensure that they have the same access as faculty and in doubt. You know. Also giving us a little bit of a buffer window. We also heard our faculty concerns, right, that they need to be ready. They need to be able to see it just a little bit in advance, so that as they need to finish the rest of the term, how can they redo the curriculum if they need to for next year, so that everybody has a little bit of a head start, right?

Matt Markin  
Well, I guess this is a, maybe a good segue for Brad and Gerard in terms of like, you know, you you get this initiative coming down to San Bernardino saying, Okay, this is system wide adoption. How do how, from an institution standpoint, how do you go about implementing something like this? 

Bradford Owen  
The chancellor's office left it up to the individual campuses, of which there are 23 to decide on the timeline of the rollout, and we weren't quite sure how to go about that. We we decided that we would make it available to faculty and staff just as soon as it was technically possible. And in our case, that turned out to be March 24 and then we formed this ChatGPT steering committee to help us decide about student access, because we knew already from faculty this was a bit sensitive, politically. There were some faculty concerns among faculty leadership, like on the faculty senate, some department chairs that they didn't want students to have access before faculty could get acclimated to this new tool. But when Jordan and I visited the Associated Students incorporated board, which are the student leadership, they very strongly and unanimously said, the Office of the Chancellor has paid for this for us as a matter of equity, and we want access to it as soon as possible. So we took that to our steering committee, many of whom are were faculty senate officers, and in the course of discussions, we settled on April 14 as a student access date, so three weeks after the faculty and staff access date, so that after some of those Initial faculty concerns about the suddenness of the access and the some concerns about academic integrity. It's been pretty, pretty quiet in terms of the acceptance of the the access, and this the students pointed out to us when we visited the student leadership we raised we've sort of played devil's advocate with them. And said, well, faculty are concerned that students will have access to it to in the middle of the term when faculty have not made their assignments and assessments AI resistant, and the students said, Look, we have been using these tools since fall 2023 I think, is when they first came out, we are already using these tools. So it's not like we're going to have sudden access to it. So they faculty, they put it bluntly. Faculty should have thought of this before and implementing ChatGPT across the CSU is not going to make a huge difference in that way.

Gerard Au  
And I'll also add, you know, through that consultative process, I think you know, both faculty and student voices were heard, right? So student again, you know being strong advocate that, you know, we have 4000 students that we're graduating this year, right? We need them to have those first hand experience prior to the graduation as they look for jobs to indicate that they have some kind of, you know, AI ChatGPT, some kind of Gen AI experience right as they're looking for jobs, because those are skill sets that people are looking for as they're, you know, as they're entering the workforce. And I think we also made sure that we had some assurance from faculty, because the Faculty Center had gone through and revised the policy against academic integrity, right? So the assurance, from their perspective, is how and to what extent the faculty want to use that in the course is under the faculty purview, right? So that they can be clear with their specific courses, with their students, that this is the the level of Gen AI work that we would accept and, you know, and then there are several faculty member who actually, on the side, have spoken to us about, yeah, we've been dipping our toes in these tools, you know, here are some methods that you can do in class, right, that can allow students to use, for example, ChatGPT for enhancing their work and not to replace their work, right? So, you know, there are some faculty on campus that have already thought this through.

Felix Zuniga  
I just want to add to some of Gerard's numbers. To date, we have over 75,000 users across the system who have activated. And that's not what without that's without all campuses being done yet, right? Like Brad said, every campus gets to decide when that rollout is going to happen. And I think we're close to like, 6 million chats already. Gerard, just as a stat for you as a system and and like you said, Bradford, they were using the tools before we when we were talking to open that early on, they were telling us those who use their university accounts to subscribe to the ChatGPT tool specifically, was very high, right? So we already knew that there was a lot, and that's not accounting, not counting, the ones that are using the private email addresses, Gmail or other tools, because we didn't have, you know, access to that kind of thing. So it was real important to know that there was already a high usage. We're letting the universities decide for themselves and doing all the support on the back end to help them do that, because other schools had initiatives in progress already, and, you know, we don't want to disrupt what that is. So it's up to them to figure out when was the best time for them. Best time for them, and this whole kind of experiment is really to expose them to the tools and to the skill sets around AI, not necessarily one tool over another, because, as we know, like prompt engineering can travel many different tool sets and understanding how llms work and all of the AI aspects on the back end are transferable between the different tools. But Leslie, I love to queue you up to hear about the faculty perspectives that you've heard and some of the things that you're working on for the chancellor's office. If I could, you know, jump in, Matt and, you know, tee up, Leslie for that.

Leslie Kennedy  
Thank you. Well, so based on the statewide Academic Senate resolutions that first one was proposed in 2019 where they wanted to see the system, look at AI tools and and the implications for instruction and potential impact, etc. And then further resolutions. Over the last few years, we were able to organize Ed and others at the leadership level, we're able to organize a system wide AI Committee, which included faculty so to come together to discuss, as I mentioned, the impact and the potentials around Gen AI, especially since Gen AI dropped around 2022 23 so that was one of our first steps to include the stakeholders, including faculty in a discussion around what we can do around teaching and learning and and some of the recommendations that would could come out of that have informed us in our implementation of this project. Since then, in the last few weeks, part of our strategy around the AI strategy is to provide educational innovations as opportunities for the faculty and students and staff. And so we released a call for proposals for to provide funding for faculty who wanted to explore the various strategies that could possibly be utilized in their disciplines. And in regards to utilizing Gen AI and then also embedding critical thinking skills and strategies around that and other types of questions that have been coming up around the use of Gen AI in the instructional environment. So that was released about a month ago, and as of this last week, we closed that call for proposals, and it exceeded our expectations, the number of faculty who applied for grants around this challenge that we call that we're calling it, and so it's indicating to us there's a lot of interest among the faculty across our system. We have about 28-29,000 faculty. We see right now, we thought we might get about 50 proposals. We got a 417 and we have a certain amount of funds that we can spend, and they've exceeded that as well in the request. So it's going to be competitive. But the point is the work that they went through to develop the proposal and to share the creative and energetic ways that they would like to incorporate Gen AI to support their students, whether it's with chat bots for tutoring or advising or around instructional strategies as well. What has been amazing. So we're very excited to see that creativity and interest by our faculty. That's just a small group of them, but it's just, in many ways, represents a larger group, and that many of them are collaborating across their departments and across their divisions, and then even across our campuses, some of them are working with other campuses on these proposals. And the intention there is to again, to be exploring different ways to utilize and ChatGPT or AI tool in with to support the students success. And that's really the key, is to develop strategies around that, as we've just talked about all the other aspects of it earlier. So that's probably the most recent activity that's happening with our instructional side in regards to potential use of it. So what we're hoping in a year they have a year to implement, is that we'll have, we'll see a lot of use cases and a lot of publications coming out of these experiences that will inform the rest of us and help us. And in a year, where will we be? We don't even know with regards to how much things will change, so it's exciting to see some sort of a baseline being created for the most part, and then what? What, what we'll be building off of in the future?

Bradford Owen  
Thank you. Leslie catalyzes me to to say which, I guess is obvious, and it it, it resonates with what Ed said at the beginning. This is a very powerful technology, and as with the early days of the Internet and World Wide Web, we don't, we can't really foresee where it's going. So it's a very exciting and fluid time, and how faculty are going to use it. And part of what the dynamic there is, it's more change that the faculty have to cope with since the pandemic, it's been a on our campus. It's been one big change after another, the pivot to completely being online, then we went to semester system, then we changed learning management system, then the challenges of the budget, where the teaching load changed, and now this, so it's a lot for faculty, and they to use this properly, they have to rethink their pedagogy, and that takes some work. You know, faculty may tend to get a course set up, and they teach it more or less the same way, semester in and semester out, but this is to really think about how to use this. They have to, first of all appreciate its potential and how students may use it in classes, and then think about how to redesign their assignments to take advantage of it so it becomes a productive pedagogical resource and not something that that students will use to to make shortcuts in their coursework. 

Ed Clark  
You know, several. I mean, everybody keeps bringing up this other part, which is one of the really interesting survey tools that's been developed recently was at San Diego State, they developed an AI survey, and they surveyed faculty and students at, you know, I think six of our universities, and even universities outside of the CSU at this point, but over 70% of those students in the that were surveyed say they they consider, they believe that AI is going to be crucial to their job, their employment opportunities, and that employers are going to be expecting them to have those skills. And one of the key aspects of our AI strategy in the CSU is this workforce acceleration board. We have an AI workforce acceleration board, and the thought behind it is interesting, because it is that some some statistics that might be interesting to you, over 30 of the top 50 AI firms in the entire world are headquartered in California. That's tracked by Forbes. Forbes tracks the top 50 every year, but over 50% of the AI workforce in the United States is international, which is not necessarily bad in itself, but it does lead to a question, who's preparing the workforce for California and the United States? And if you talk to employers, they will say over and over again, yeah, we're expecting your students to graduate and know how to use these tools. Because these tools are transforming our industries, our sectors. They need to know these things. So there's kind of a tension between what students think they're supposed to learn, and sometimes what you know, what we as academics. How much do we bake that into the classroom? How much are we prepping them for the future? So this workforce acceleration board is an opportunity to bring in the governor's office, these industry partners. We have Google, Microsoft, Amazon, all these big names and our faculty and our academic leadership. So we have this board that sits there and talks about, how can we change how we prepare our students for this uncertain future? As some of you have already pointed out, that in my mind and from what I can know, what I know of is super unique. There is no other conversation like that happening anywhere but the CSU has got all of these stakeholders in a room talking about how we will prepare our students as AI transforms industries, fields, academia. So I. That's an important component as well. 

Ryan Scheckel  
Definitely sounds like y'all are taking a comprehensive approach in this very early and fast moving process. But as someone whose primary role of my institution has always been in a staff capacity, you know, I'm curious how y'all are ensuring that not only faculty and student points of view are being heard and and utilized, but also making sure that staff who work in especially student facing capacities are prepared to not only use the tool themselves, where it's appropriate and and they see the benefit, but also to address this new influx, if nothing else, at a conversational current around AI.

Leslie Kennedy  
Maybe I'll jump in really quickly. So there are many strategies that are happening on campuses, but also at the CEO, we've been able to adopt a course that Fresno State created for higher ed professionals, and it's a four week facilitated course. We've already wait listed within a two weeks of a posting that course, and we're now adding more sections. So that is an introduction AI from the instructor, from the staffing perspective, from the workforce perspective. And so that's quite popular. And so that is one, one strategy we have. I know our IT group has been running webinars on and bringing in open AI to provide very comprehensive overviews as to how to use the tool effectively. And then we have on our site. We have a website called Gen AI, dot cal state.edu it's calling it the hub. And there are other courses that are available there around prompt engineering or how what large language models are are doing, etc. And there's a whole section on acceptable, responsible use as well within the CSU, and recommendations for various areas of whether your students, staff or faculty, but there's a lot of resources there being offered by our industry partners as well. So we're trying to provide as many resources for all types of learners who have this much time, a very little bit of time, or a little bit more time to get to know the topics that you mentioned, Ryan, anybody else here might have some more interesting information around that? 

Ed Clark  
Well, I think to your point, Leslie, you know, I mean the third component, you know, we've actually talked we've actually talked about each of the components we talked about. Hey, one component was access and equity for our entire community. Two, was this workforce acceleration board, right? And then three is all about like, how do we become more effective as a system? In other words, our staff? How do we empower them with these tools to have even more impact than they have today, whether they're an advisor or facilities worker or whatever it is, being able to know how to use these tools, have access to them and expand their impact, is the third component of our strategy.

Bradford Owen  
I'll just weigh in on student support and student use of chatgpt. I think typically, we let faculty take the lead on pedagogy, of course, on instruction and how information is going to roll out and and the whole learning experience. But in this case, I don't think we can wait for our faculty as a whole to figure out the best uses of ChatGPT, and there's a real opportunity and a bit of a void right now to help our students learn the most productive uses of it, ahead of our faculty getting on top of it in terms of pedagogy. And I know on our campus we we're not we're not there yet. We need to do more work on student preparation, student professional development, if you will, in using chatgpt, both in a in the context of their academic careers and for uses later on.

Gerard Au  
Yeah, I'll also speak on behalf of the range, right? You can, you know, if you let student lose you, they can either come up with something really, really fantastic and great, or they could use it very, you know, incorrectly, right? So, I think, you know, it does take a lot of that effort, you know, as a campus, right, to guide them about, you know, what's the best use case? How can you use it in a professional career, as well as for learning and teaching? I'm actually I have a scheduled meeting with one of our computer science club, which they we typically sponsor a hackathon every year for them, they're planning on doing one in June, later on this year. I. About the possibility of letting them run wild with the tool right, to solve a campus problem or solve a industry problem with something that now we have placed in their hands and see what they come up with, right? So there's kind of that broad range of spectrum with a university can support, you know, our next generation of workforce and students on how to best leverage these tools in both an academic or professional setting versus just a research and development. Just play with it and see what you come up with. 

Felix Zuniga  
I'd like to add that in addition, our team runs the annual tech conference that we used to get together and talk about technical things all the time, but due to, you know, travel restrictions and budgets, we're not getting together in person. But last year, we made the decision to create what we call AI in July. So it's like a month long tech conference. And this year is the second year, and I'm very proud to say we have, like, almost programming that's going to fill the whole month of July. Some something's very practical, other things very high level, but everything's around AI, higher education, the workforce, everything that we're talking about today, bringing them some speakers to talk about, you know, what does aI mean for the future, the ethics behind it? You know, one of the things that I feel personally is like, if we're going to change and challenge those perceptions that people have against the negative aspects of AI, what better way to do that than to empower, you know, the largest, most diverse set of students that we have in the United States, within the CSU, to be those change makers and do those kinds of things. So I would say, I'll put a plug in AI in July, there's a lot of programming that's going to be available, a lot of great speakers, a lot of panels, and we're just tapping into all those different aspects and really throwing a focus in on that?

Matt Markin  
Yeah, I think what's also helped, at least from from my end being at CSUSB, is Brad and Gerard, you had a kind of, I guess you would say, a town hall, zoom with students, faculty and staff, and you both had mentioned, like, a Canvas course that was offered for faculty and staff. So I actually signed up for that. And I'm going through week five or six right now, of a seven week, and it's very, it's very been, it's been eye opening for me, even though it's more faculty centered, but it's made me kind of rethink, like my thoughts on on AI, and it's really led to interesting conversations. I mostly meet with students as an academic advisor, so even just to tell them, hey, you actually have this new tool available to you on your student profile, that you can have access to, and actually talking about ways to maybe implement AI as like a study partner, study buddy, or ways that they might be able to use it as, again, it led to really interesting conversations. I do want to ask this, and this is open to anybody. So a couple months ago, CSU, UC, California Community Colleges and private institutions known as calcan had a virtual conference sponsored by the Office of the Chancellor, and a couple concerns that came up, and I was wanting to see if you had heard these concerns before, and maybe possible answers to it has been, well, concern I have will be, will AI replace my job? And also from those regarding climate change, have commented about like, how much energy consumption is used by utilizing AI any way to address a couple of those concerns.

Ed Clark  
Sure, I think these are actually very common concerns. They've come up with almost every presentation you know, I've had. And I think that you know, the title of our AI strategy was, it's intentionally titled The AI empowered CSU. And the reason why we chose empowered is it emphasizes the importance of humans. In the middle, we believe humans are key to the CSU and our mission, and we're about enabling human success, right? And so we want AI to help expand, you know, increased impact that our staff, you know, we have the largest system in the country. And you know, if you can impact 100 students today. Can you impact 200 students tomorrow? These are things that we would think about. How do we expand the impact and the effectiveness of the work our staff does? So and of course, you know, I run an IT shop, so everybody that works in my shop is a staff person, right? So that's all part of it as well. And I would say that, you know, I think that the other part about sustainability is such a good question. It is actually important, you know, I'm, you know, I think there's two parts of my answer, and I'm eager to hear what others folks say about this too. One is, we've had, you know, people come in with criticism. Well, AI has misinformation, it has bias, it has sustainability issues. And in my mind, as this is being adopted faster than any other technology has ever been adopted, that's what's happening right now. We need to have the critics out there and participate. We need you to participate. Say, Yeah, we're concerned about bias. We're concerned about these things. Is, how are we going to address it? Because we have to shape this technology for our mission, for our students, for our communities. If you don't participate, it's sort of like complaining about an election where you didn't vote, right? So participate, be part of it. Help us shape the future. That's what we're asking. The whole community to jump in on on this sustainability question, there's two parts of the answer that I think are important. One is, we do have an at the AI commons that Leslie stain created, you know, some very, you know, grounding courses. You know, there's a micro credential you can get one of it is sort of responsible usage. You don't have to use the top model for every time. So it'll default to like, whatever ChatGPT's latest model is. You might be okay. Now it's gonna throw 4.5 at me. Do you really need 4.5 to say, hey, you know, how old is Madonna today? Right? You're over using that resource. It's like driving an f1 car to the grocery store to pick up some milk. You wouldn't do that. So that responsible usage. If you use the mini for that, you're hardly using any energy at all, right? And so there are ways that we can mitigate the sustainability issues with AI, and that's something we're trying to spread across the system. The other thing is, the best thing that happened with deep seek. Remember that Chinese model that came out around December, and everybody's like freaking out. What they showed is you could, you didn't have to have all these crazy GPUs. You could get the same effectiveness, very close to the same effective with much less power hungry resources. And so what that also shows is this technology is evolving very quickly, and so those energy demands will decrease over time, as part of the technology evolving. Anyways, I said to probably talk too long. I invite others to step in.

Felix Zuniga  
I would add that the, you know, the tools themselves, like open AI, has acknowledged that, and they're working on, you know, product timeline, things like where it's going to help you negotiate which which model you should be using to ask that kind of question, right, to help with token usage and that kind of thing. So we're told that that's that's coming real soon. So I think as these tools are developing, like Ed said, we're helping to influence that. And we have a very frank and open conversation with open AI, with this implementation, and how things are going and what we need to see that's different, and it's really going to impact all of education and how it's rolling out across education, I think.

Matt Markin  
And just kind of looking at the time flies when we're having a good conversation. So this was very enlightening. Thank you so much for joining Ryan and I on this podcast episode to talk about this So Leslie, Ed, Felix, Brad, Gerard, thank you so much. T

Leslie Kennedy  
Thank you. Very nice to meet you.