Franklin Faculty just lately had the pleasure of internet hosting the annual Ladies in Business breakfast program sponsored by Indy Chamber. The annual occasion brings to our campus greater than 100 of the realm’s most engaged and profitable girls leaders in all areas of commerce.
This 12 months’s occasion targeted on the function of artificial intelligence within the office, and the panel dialogue was extremely enlightening. As one would count on, these trade leaders and their workers are utilizing AI in lots of purposes of their work, and so they supplied nice insights into each the potential and the dangers which have include the evolution of generative AI.
Maybe the seminal and most common perception gleaned from this system was the truth that AI shouldn’t be capable of present the distinctive human expertise needed for problem-solving. It allows professionals to avoid wasting huge effort and time gathering knowledge—and even synthesizing it to some extent—but it surely can’t accomplish essentially the most subtle and demanding duties that solely people can obtain via inventive and demanding considering and collaboration. One of many panelists outlined the sequence of acquiring usable knowledge from an AI supply and concluded with, “Then we hand that data to a liberal arts graduate who creatively is smart of all of it.”
Anticipating this and different new-age digital applied sciences, Franklin Faculty launched into a program 4 years in the past to embed digital fluency into all the liberal arts curriculum. This initiative, initially funded by a grant from Lilly Endowment Inc., mirrored our confidence that expertise ought to improve liberal arts schooling.
The very best preparation for the quickly altering nature of the knowledge financial system is the mixture of the “energy” expertise of the liberal arts—vital considering, analytical reasoning, collaborative engagement and efficient communication—with proficiency in essentially the most present digital instruments aligned with all areas of research and supreme profession paths. This embrace of digital schooling allows us to make a compelling argument for not solely the relevance of the liberal arts but additionally their superiority in making ready college students for the skilled alternatives of the long run.
Day by day in our school rooms, AI and different digital instruments are leveraged to reinforce pupil studying. Whereas enterprise college students use AI to develop enhanced search engine marketing methods, English college students are producing story concepts and studying what AI can and can’t do successfully. Math college students use AI image-recognition programs to raised perceive large knowledge and its makes use of, whereas journalism college students generate tales to apply enhancing and headline creation. The examples proceed all through the curriculum.
Latest developments of generative artificial intelligence have actually offered challenges in greater schooling, however these are manageable, and most really create studying alternatives about AI’s benefits and limitations. Franklin Faculty has embraced the expertise, recognizing its potential to equip college students with one other device for studying and profession preparation. Our Heart for Tech Innovation is a hub of exercise, from the maker area with 3D printers to the podcast studio to the digital actuality lab.
At present’s college students acknowledge the facility of expertise to assist them totally use their liberal arts schooling. We assist them learn to use that expertise responsibly, successfully and effectively.
As artificial intelligence and its purposes evolve each day, we welcome future iterations of tech instruments that can additional improve the liberal arts schooling and profession preparation of our college students. Know-how can ignite that have in innumerable methods, and we’re watching that occur in our school rooms each day. The liberal arts welcome that evolution of expertise to raised serve our college students and the industries that await them upon commencement.•
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Prather was named president of Franklin Faculty in 2020.