What Do Faculty Need?

For a needs assessment, we ran two focus groups in summer 2023, and our colleagues’ attitudes and practices ranged from regularly using AI in classes and clinical settings to actively trying to ignore it. For example, one faculty member stated, “I wanted to stick my head in the sand and not know about this because I’m not into technology.” Some were excited and had already embraced the new technology, while others were wary of the changes this might bring to the learning process as well as their need to invest time in learning about AI.

In the midst of these conversations, emerging scholarship on AI in higher education urged faculty to be more creative when it came to assessment and called us to remind students that “education is more than an exchange of tuition dollars for a diploma” (Supiano, 2023). University websites, large and small, provided guidance and resources for designing syllabus statements and assignments (Brown, 2023; Castillo, n.d.).

For faculty working with students on a daily basis, however, calls for pedagogical redesigns met with varied responses. Reflective of the national conversation, our focus groups stressed that both formative and summative assessment are fundamental parts of teaching. Relying on AI as a cognitive shortcut might be appealing, but faculty saw process and struggle as a part of learning. By way of analogy, one focus group member said:

If you don’t use your brain to struggle with things, then you’re not developing the cognitive sort of capacity that you probably need in the future. It’s sort of the difference between exercising and watching someone exercise. They’re very different outcomes for you.

The sentiment that “exercising” one’s brain was crucial for development was echoed across disciplines. These concerns echo debates about passive and active use of technology in the classroom and the “Google effect” on memory (Giebl et al., 2023; Weber et al., 2022). When thinking about math and engineering, one faculty member worried that students’ reliance on AI for background knowledge would negatively “affect their ability to be creative in the future.” Similarly, another focus group member lamented that if AI is trained on the old solutions to these challenges, students will not have the capacity to think outside of the box on these social issues. Focus group participants also highlighted the need for content knowledge and critical thinking in the workplace.

Designing Sessions that Center Faculty Expertise

An interdisciplinary group of four faculty members designed six professional development sessions throughout the 2023–2024 academic year. The administration provided stipends for the organizers as well as a small stipend for faculty who attended at least four of the six sessions. Marketing for the sessions began during a faculty development session offered over welcome week. As a part of the work done over the summer, we pitched to the administration a keynote address on the topic of AI, and we were able to book Dr. Torrey Trust from the University of Massachusetts to offer an address which gave faculty an overview of AI and the likely impact on higher education for the coming year. Immediately following the address, we facilitated a conversation about impacts and concerns specific to our campus community; at the end of this we advertised our year-long series of workshops on the topic. For each topic we offered one session in person with light refreshments, and then the same session on Zoom later that week. Our goals for these sessions were to provide an introduction to generative AI uses (and misuses), give faculty practical tools and resources to engage with AI, and create community.

For our first session, for example, we decided to take one step back from AI to focus on education itself. We asked colleagues from our Education department to ground us in the basics, asking such questions as, “What is good teaching?”, and “How do we know our students are learning?” Only at the very end of that session did we ask the question, “Where does AI fit?” Reviewing frameworks like Bloom’s taxonomy (Iowa State University of Science and Technology Center for Excellence in Teaching, 2026) in light of generative AI reframed the current challenges in light of old learning dilemmas.

Going back to fundamental questions such as, “What are the learning objectives?” and “How am I assessing student learning?” is even more important in the age of AI. For example, for an English faculty member, the wholesale use of ChatGPT for a paper might hinder that faculty member’s ability to assess whether a student understands standard English grammar. On the other hand, using AI to help students troubleshoot Excel errors might be appropriate if the learning objective is to use online resources to solve software challenges. These kinds of discussion asked faculty to reflect on their own and their students’ metacognition strategies for learning (Tocco et al., 2023).

These sessions highlighted other areas of faculty expertise. For example, in a session on ethics and bias in AI, colleagues from Hispanic Studies and Digital Media and Design were able to share their findings on race and gender bias being perpetuated by AI outputs. They were also able to share their strategies both for engaging students with AI in the classroom, and for opening up conversations about race and gender bias with students through engaging with AI. By inviting administrators to the final session, faculty and administration were able to collaborate with an eye towards creating campus-wide AI policies, though having both constituents in the room for only one session proved inadequate to create policy, which had initially been our goal. Table 2 provides a brief description of each of the sessions. We encourage facilitators to tailor their sessions to their institution’s needs.

One challenge we repeatedly ran into with our sessions was the wide range of expertise and experience with AI within our faculty, which ranged from never having tried out ChatGPT to already incorporating AI into daily assignments. We learned early on that any hands-on work we were going to do with AI tools would need to be carried out in small groups based on skill levels with AI. In this way we were able to provide a safe environment for some faculty to engage in their initial experiments with AI, while other faculty were able to create a small faculty learning community where they were swapping assignments and strategies.

Outcomes and Extensions

At the end of the six sessions, we conducted a brief assessment of session effectiveness via an online survey. Qualitative responses indicated that faculty felt these sessions were “helpful,” “thought-provoking,” “amazing,” and “very informative.” The attendees indicated that they learned basic information about AI/ChatGPT as well as other tools and applications; they were able to set up accounts and practice using prompts; and the sessions allowed them to explore how to use AI in their teaching. They also appreciated the option to use Zoom to be able to attend.

For our part, we hope that these sorts of professional development session can continue at our institution and others, even given shrinking budgets across higher education. In lieu of a stipend, for example, one institution awarded a certificate for attending professional development sessions (Bifulco & Drue, 2023). This model highlighted faculty expertise and was flexible enough to meet the needs of faculty while creating a sense of community.

Biographies

Sarah Fisher, PhD is the Associate VP for Academic Affairs- Institutional Effectiveness and Student Success and an Associate Professor of Politics at Emory & Henry University. In addition to teaching for more than a decade, she has published work on kinesthetic learning and teaching research methods as well as traditional work in political science related to conflict studies.

Ruth Castillo, MLIS has served as the Director of the Emory & Henry University Library in Virginia and the Head of Reference and Instruction in the library at Charleston Southern University in South Carolina. Her research focuses on integrated information literacy and web based technologies for research and library services.

Kelly Bremner, PhD is a Professor and Chair of the Theatre, Music and Dance Department at Emory & Henry University and also serves as a founding board member of the Center for Teaching and Learning for the Appalachian College Association. Her research interests, aside from her work in the performing arts, are focused on advancing teaching and learning in higher education.

Shelley Koch, PhD is a Professor of Sociology at Emory & Henry University. Her research focuses on food inequality and intersectionality in addition to research methods, specifically community-based engaged research.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank their stellar colleagues at Emory & Henry for their thoughtful and engaging discussions about ChatGPT, AI, and education more generally.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors have no conflict of interest.

Appendix A. Focus group questions