Good afternoon all, 

Sandrine Desforges here. I am a Research Associate at HESA and have been leading the work on our AI Observatory since its inception. I’ve had the pleasure of popping into your inbox every Friday or so during the past academic year to share ‘AI in Higher Ed’-related news, as well as hosting our monthly AI Roundtables (if you’re new here, you can catch all the recordings online). After a productive summer break (we have some exciting things coming up your way!), it feels great to be back!

As you might have already read in Alex’s Welcome Back post, this AI blog will shift to bi-weekly – but we’ll change the approach a bit, hoping to bring you even more food-for-thought with a bit more of a critical analysis on what’s happening in the sector. 

I know you’ll miss me every other Friday, so make sure to subscribe to OTTSYD if you have not already to read Alex’s poignant opinion pieces every Monday through Wednesday, to listen to our weekly World of Higher Education Podcast, and to receive our new feature, The Fifteen, which will be a bi-weekly rapid-fire round-up of interesting stories in global higher education. 

Now, enough company updates. Today, I want to spend a bit of time reflecting on what happened over the summer break… and believe me, A LOT has happened. 

At the beginning of the summer, two US Senators introduced the NSF AI Education Act of 2024 with the goal of boosting the integration of AI in education. If that bill were to pass, the National Science Foundation could start awarding scholarships and fellowships to both undergrad and grad students in various fields with the goal of increasing the adoption of AI technology, as well as AI research. The bill also plans for professional development opportunities for current educators and STEM workers and would make it a priority to educate at least 1 million workers on AI by 2028. The bill also calls for the creation of Centers of AI Excellence in various community colleges across the country. Finally, the bill instructs NSF to collaborate with scholars to lead research projects on the integration and impacts of AI in the classroom. Now, this is all very ambitious, and the bill would have to pass through the whole US legislative process to actually be adopted. Still, it will certainly be interesting to keep an eye on our neighbors from the South.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic Ocean, the EU AI Act received final approval from the EU Council in May, making it the first regulation of its kind around the world. The EU AI Act adopts a risk-based approach, with stricter rules for higher-risk AI systems. AI systems used for education and vocational training fall into a high-risk category, which requires them to be registered in an EU database. While GenAI tools (ChatGPT and the like) are not classified high-risk, they will still have to comply with some transparency requirements and EU copyright law, including 1) disclosing that the content was generated by AI; 2) designing the model to prevent it from generating illegal content; and 3) publishing summaries of copyrighted data used for training. The Act will only become fully applicable 24 months after its adoption, but certain obligations will start being enforced this fall. It will certainly be interesting to see if and how other countries fall in line and adopt similar regulation. As a reminder, although it has been in the work since 2022, Canada still has not adopted its Artificial Intelligence and Data Act – any progress on that front has been stagnant since the tabling of Bill C-27. Additionally, it is still unclear if and how Budget 2024’s $2.4 billion investment to ‘secure Canada’s AI advantage’ will impact post-secondary education. 

Enough about policy for now, let’s turn towards practical impacts of AI. On the workforce front, Statistics Canada just released a study on exposure to AI in the Canadian labour force. Their study shows that about 60% of Canadian workers could be exposed to AI-related job transformation, and that this transformation would be most prominent for employees in professional, scientific and technical services, finance and insurance, information and cultural industries, educational services, and health care and social assistance. If colleges and universities are still not assuming their role in adequately preparing graduates for an AI-enabled workforce, they are clearly doing a disservice to their leaners. Earlier this week, UNESCO launched its AI Competency Framework for Teachers and AI Competency Framework for Students, which could help PSIs figure out how to embed AI skill building in their curricula. The competency frameworks identify progression levels for both learners and instructors, as well as specific competencies, curricular goals and learning objectives, and recommended pedagogical methods, learning environments and contextual activities. As many post-secondary institutions across Canada (and globally) are looking to build AI literacy within their walls, these frameworks can provide solid ground to start.

There are many more things that happened, and we’ll spend the next few blogs unpacking them together. I look forward to continuing this chat with you soon! In the meantime, if you want to nerd-out on anything ‘AI in Higher Ed’-related, reach out to me!

Have a great weekend, all.

– Sandrine Desforges, Research Associate
sdesforges@higheredstrategy.com