This summer, I did a lot of thinking and learning about helping others find the benefits of Generative AI. The result was a (slightly) changed AI Circles approach, a new series for graduate students, and the relaunch of AI in the Classroom as Teach Guy about AI, which will launch its first episode in a couple of weeks.
The key for me was to create a low-consequence, high-benefit event. So what happened? Wednesday afternoon came (twice) no faculty showed up. In July, I thought about backing off a voluntary workshop because, at the end of the day, it was still a workshop. And a workshop asks faculty to give up the one thing they don't have in abundance in September: time.
My first instinct after the empty room was more outreach: Email department representatives, print a second flyer, speak at faculty meetings, then give it four weeks. Not entirely wrong, but missing the point. That is what you do when you believe the offer is right and the marketing is wrong. The offer is wrong, I said so after the Google Education professional series I did in August (seems so far away).
So, starting over, there will be no standing faculty professional learning hour. In its place, a consultation lab, which is the thing I proposed in August and then did not do. Asking faculty to bring one artifact: a rubric, an assignment, a pile of open-ended course feedback; then we spend twenty minutes on your problem rather than on a tool. Faculty leave with the artifact finished. Then we can talk (if wanted) about workflows.
Work with graduate students was more successful (five showed up- not exactly a roomful but more than 0 faculty). We combined room and zoom and were very explicit about benefits and topics. Fatemeh made sure that students received notices twice during the week. After one session, I am hopeful but not sure, mostly because graduate student workloads tend to increase during the semester, leaving less time for non-mandated learning.
So… the graduate learning series will stay exactly as it is. We will be recording the first fifteen minutes of each session so that people who cannot make Friday at ten get something, encouraging them to come the next time.
Five is a small number, and I am not going to pretend it is a huge success. Five people chose to spend an hour on this in the first week of classes. The question becomes if it will grow, stay at this level or decline- time will tell. The second question I cannot answer yet is whether a consultation lab will attract anyone and if it does will it build any collective capacity at all.
Finally, the unconference on September 26 will tell me something about the appetite beyond UNL’s walls. The lab and student learning series will tell me the rest by December.
