The Future of Higher Education - 12

Part 3: Technology and Education
virtual presence so compelling as to call the
technology " an empathy machine. " XR offers a
new domain for the arts. Moreover, to the extent
businesses and the rest of the world embrace
XR, higher education has some responsibility to
prepare students for that changed technological
environment.
At the same time, XR presents numerous
challenges to educators. First, there is not very
much academic content available, and the tools
for making more sometimes require teams
of trained professionals to produce. Second,
campus support strategies are generally not
in place yet, especially at the enterprise level.
There needs to be a way to make the hardware
available (and it is expensive) to ensure that
campus networks can handle through traffic
and to support students in learning a new digital
paradigm. Third, faculty will need a good deal of
professional development to be able to decide
when (and if) to use XR, then how to deploy
it for the best learning experience. Fourth, XR
platforms tend to be incompatible with each
other, meaning campuses must either choose a
" walled garden " to remain within for some time,
or to invest even greater funds to engage with
two or more.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Perhaps even more ambitious and challenging
than XR to academia is emerging artificial
intelligence (AI) applications. While AI is an
established field, with projects dating back
decades, it has generated a dramatic new
offshoot through large language models (LLMs),
which enable " generative AI. " These are tools
that let users create, with a bit of prompting,
content in text, images, and other media formats.
ChatGPT, Bard, Claude, and others have shown
themselves capable of " writing " texts at great
length and with verisimilitude. Midjourney,
DALL-E, and others have generated images with
increasing complexity, detail, and sophistication.
These tools also produce erroneous, surreal, and
biased materials. As of this writing, generative
AI is the subject of global fascination and
controversy, a sketch of which lies beyond our
scope. We can instead forecast its implications
for higher education.
At the level of teaching there are many ways
faculty and students can (and do) use generative
AI. The applications can assist writing on
multiple levels, from creating initial drafts
to revising human work, serving as a virtual
colleague to critiquing input. Writing classes
already use ChatGPT et al. for other purposes,
such as producing content for students to
critique. Obviously one challenge the tools
present is academic honesty, as students can use
them to produce assessed work with minimal
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Part 3: Technology and Education
The Future of Higher Education

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The Future of Higher Education
