“We’re excited to partner with Google, one of the most trusted leaders in industry certificates. This collaboration will boost the career readiness of our learners across the System and give them an undeniable competitive edge,” said USM Chancellor Jay A. Perman in a statement.
The no-experience-required Google Career Certificates will train students in cybersecurity, data analytics, digital marketing and e-commerce, IT support, project management, and UX design, said Nancy O’Neill, executive director of the school system’s William E. Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation. Students will also have access to the Google AI Essentials and Prompting Essentials specialization courses, she said.
Though career certificates usually cost $49 per month after a free trial, University System of Maryland students will have access to them for free, according to O’Neill.
The certificates typically take between three and six months when studying part-time, according to the university system. Students who complete the program will have access to Google’s “employer consortium,” a network of employers committed to considering certified students.
The emerging field of artificial intelligence, or AI, has become a hotly debated subject in academia. According to one expert in the field, universities that embrace AI are engaging in a delicate balancing act. They’re betting that the career opportunities proficiency in the technology provides will outweigh the risks that students will mainly use it as an easy way of cheating and taking shortcuts in their education.
“We’ve got to figure out: Is this a trade that we’re willing to make?” said Bryan Alexander, a futurist who teaches about the impact of AI on higher education. He added that individual faculty are largely left on their own to make decisions about how to handle artificial intelligence in their classes.
The programs are planned to begin in the fall, if not earlier, for participating schools and higher education centers, O’Neill said.
University of Maryland, College Park and University of Maryland, Baltimore County are among several schools in the system offering free access to Google Gemini to students and faculty. Each school determines which generative AI tools it uses, O’Neill said.
The school system’s posted academic integrity policy does not specifically reference artificial intelligence tools, but O’Neill said each institution uses that policy “as a basis to develop their own, more specific policies and procedures related to academic integrity.”
“Activity related to review of academic integrity policies in light of Generative AI would take place at the campus level,” she said.
Maryland’s state schools aren’t the first to intentionally bring the new technology into the classroom. In February, the country’s largest public higher education system, California State University, brought AI training and OpenAI’s tools to more than 500,000 students, faculty and staff, the LA Times reported.
A handful of other institutions around the country are also beginning to embrace AI, but one Georgetown University professor highlighted that they were the outliers.
“Most of American higher education has not made a strategic commitment to, engagement with or even policies about AI,” Alexander said.
Like any tool, AI can be used in classrooms irresponsibly or responsibly. For example, a student can use Gemini or ChatGPT to produce whole essays they can pass off as their own, which would be a clear-cut example of cheating, according to Alexander, or they could use those technologies to create Socratic questions or to work through difficult texts.
The problem of students using AI to cheat remains unsolved, with detection technologies sometimes yielding false results. Old-school methods, like Blue Book or oral exams, are unable to scale for larger classes efficiently, Alexander said.
Research about how the rapidly evolving artificial intelligence affects students’ learning and critical thinking is still in its early stages, according to him.
Gov. Wes Moore has expressed enthusiasm for initiatives advancing technology in the state, such as a partnership with a Department of Defense agency to make College Park the "capital of quantum." Similarly, Moore said during a spring trade mission to Japan that no state “is more eager and bullish on the future of what AI can bring.”
“This initiative aligns closely with his vision for building a more tech-forward, innovation-driven economy,” Carter Elliott, a spokesperson for the governor, said in an email Wednesday, adding the governor was “excited” about the partnership and strongly supported greater AI training opportunities for the state’s students.
“This is exactly the kind of public-private partnership that reflects the Governor’s broader commitment to economic competitiveness, workforce development, and making Maryland a national leader in emerging technologies,” Elliott said.
The future of artificial intelligence and higher education could bring total integration, where it becomes a fact of life for students, much like Google Docs or Microsoft Office, Alexander said. Or students could prefer artificial intelligence to higher education, as it’s generally much lower cost than a college tuition.
“A third possibility that I’m kind of fond of is that … generative AI is pretty flawed, it makes errors of all kinds… It might be that higher ed ends up looking more trustworthy than AI, so we might come out of this crisis looking better,” Alexander said.
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