AI and Learning at SDSU

Are you curious about our approach to generative AI? We have stayed on top of the research and practices evolving around the use of AI in education, with a strong focus on exploring teaching and learning affordances while staying student-centered and recognizing the inherent challenges of this new academic disrupter.

Check out this section from the article “I Don’t Want to Be Taught and Graded by a Robot”: Student-Teacher Relations in the Age of Generative AI, written by Instructional Technology faculty fellows, students, and team. It provides a little introduction to how we, as a campus community, have approached AI and learning.

At San Diego State University (SDSU), we seek to foster authentic learning for our 37,539 students. In other words, we favor “process” over “product” where appropriate to learning objectives. In this spirit, we’ve taken an innovative approach to GenAI.

Rather than viewing GenAI as an apocalyptic threat to education, we chose not to give in to panic. Instead, we decided to study what was happening on our campus, using a rapid assessment approach to understand how much our students already knew about GenAI, how they used it, and how they felt about it. Initial, informal focus groups and interviews led up to a large-scale survey co-designed with student input.

The students also played a key role in promoting the survey, resulting in a tremendous response: we received 7,811 replies. This is the largest turnout recorded worldwide, to our knowledge, for a study on students’ interaction with GenAI. Further, to ensure a full understanding of the findings and how we might act on them, we had diverse campus stakeholders review them with us.

Our inclusive methodology empowered us to respond thoughtfully, responsibly, proactively, and in a locally relevant way to the rise of GenAI. One significant outcome has been the creation of a tailored training program for teachers, designed to meet our students’ needs.

The fact that our campus is part of the California State University (CSU) system—the largest, most diverse four-year university system in the United States—means that our experience could be widely informative for other campuses, too, as we all grapple with how to optimize teaching and learning and settle into the new normal that GenAI entails for student-teacher relations. In April, our training program was rolled out to all 23 CSU campuses; our survey, too, is being applied by various CSU campuses as well as in other US universities and worldwide, with instantiations as far away as Peru and Kuwait.

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