The experiments are part of 63 faculty-led projects launched in the CSU system this summer as part of a push to bring AI into curricula. Funded through CSU’s inaugural AI Educational Innovations Challenge, the projects range from arts and humanities pilots to general education reforms and full program overhauls. More than 400 proposals came in, and the chancellor’s office awarded a total of $3 million to the winning projects.
“It’s just disingenuous to say, 'Well, I’m not going to have it in my classroom,' because it is in your classroom, whether you address it or not,” Elisa Sobo, professor of anthropology at San Diego State University (SDSU), said. “And allowing students to use it with no guidance, is, in fact, rather irresponsible.”
CO-CREATING A MUSICAL WITH GENERATIVE AI
Jamie Johns, theater instructor at CSU Stanislaus, said he likely wouldn’t have applied if a friend of his, who is a big fan of AI, hadn’t encouraged it.
“Here in the creative world, we’ve got a lot of misgivings about it. We’re afraid that it’s going to take over composition and the creative things that humans do,” Johns said. “[My friend] said, ‘That’s all the more reason why you should try to look into it.’”
The course has no restrictions on AI use, but relies on transparency from students to glean information on how AI can be useful in the field. Students will use a custom platform that lets them compare outputs from different models and saves conversations. Students will also do much of their engaging with generative AI within class, either in person or online.
“As opposed to going home, working with the AI, and then showing me your results, and then we'll talk about it, this was going to be us sitting with a bunch of laptops together on a single platform and being able to have a live conversation while this digital conversation is happening,” he said.
By the end of the semester, the class aims to produce a staged one-act musical with a musical score and demo videos, as well as resources for campuswide adoption, if successful.
“It won’t be what other classes are doing,” Johns said of the musical. “But that’s just a cool byproduct for the journey of discovering how these tools work and how we should consider working with them, or consider not working with them at all, if that’s what we come to.”
As part of their grant requirements, many class-level projects, including Johns’ course, aim to produce open resources that could be adapted by other instructors across CSU. Others are designed from the outset to work at a broader scale.
A PROGRAM-LEVEL AI PLAYBOOK
At San Diego State, Sobo is leading an initiative to develop an AI-Ready Curriculum Overhaul and Redesign (ACORN) toolkit, essentially a framework for integrating AI literacy into whole degree programs.
“When ChatGPT came on the scene and everybody seemed to lose their cool,” she said she drew on the harm-reduction model of medical anthropology. “People are going to use this, it’s out there. So how can we be part of the answer, versus just sticking our head in the sand?”
Sobo is one of two AI Faculty Fellows at SDSU, and in that role, she has seen interesting integrations from colleagues across campus, including using AI in music courses about the Beatles and for archaeological research.
The next step, which the ACORN project targets, is the program level of curriculum.
“Triage mode can only serve us for so long, right?” she said. “We have to enter a space where we're looking at this systematically, so that the changes that are made make sense with each other.”
Going course by course could lead to students seeing one aspect of AI literacy covered multiple times while other areas aren’t covered at all. ACORN’s goal is to prevent gaps and redundancies. Ideally, that means students in a given major will encounter AI in a logical sequence, perhaps holding off on AI tools in an introductory course until foundational skills are mastered, she said.
A small task force comprised of faculty from a variety of disciplines and two AI Student Fellows will meet and design the toolkit this fall to be tested in the spring. Each faculty participant will be assigned a student assistant to help them free up time to participate in the task force.
“We’re hearing from the students this sense that everything is kind of piecemeal,” she said. “So, if it’s program level, there’ll be more coherence to their experience.”
The CSU system's AI challenge helped open the door for instructors like Johns, who said he may never have applied without the nudge of a colleague, and the funding. For Sobo, funding was essential not just to start something, but to scale it thoughtfully. Both saw the short timeline of the challenge, with proposals requested in April and funding announced in July, as emblematic of how quickly higher ed must adapt to AI.
“This old cycle of two years just doesn't work anymore,” Sobo said.
