The Grammarly team is still buzzing from the 2024 EDUCAUSE conference in San Antonio, Texas. The largest annual higher education educational technology conference in the United States, EDUCAUSE features some of the most influential and innovative higher education leaders and vendors, providing an invaluable opportunity to observe sentiments, trends, and critical sector challenges on the horizon. If you missed EDUCAUSE, here are some key takeaways and insights we learned after several days spent interacting with our higher education stakeholders.
Takeaway #1 – AI is still top of mind, but attitudes are shifting
AI is still the dominant topic across all leadership departments in higher education. Over 150 sessions focused at least, in part, on AI over the three days of the conference. However, compared with 2023, the general attitude in higher education has shifted from “What do we do about generative AI” to “How do we thoughtfully implement gen AI responsibly at scale?”
Fewer and fewer leaders are spinning their wheels when developing an AI strategy; the majority are moving into the implementation phase, starting with clear use cases that maximize AI’s potential to impact institutional efficiencies and student learning without exposing institutions to extensive data privacy and academic integrity risks.
Takeaway #2 – Unlocking AI implementation at scale requires new frameworks, readiness assessments, and cross-campus collaboration
The colleges and universities that are furthest along in their AI journeys are treating AI as a campus-wide strategic imperative that requires diverse stakeholder input. For example, the University of Illinois–Chicago’s Tuesday morning session offered attendees a case study on practical AI experimentation with a clear goal and purpose. UIC developed a Change Enablement Practice framework for mobilizing internal stakeholders around AI implementation.
Developed by the Academic Technology team, the framework seeks input from a diverse collection of institutional leaders who work in security, accessibility, communication, pedagogy, and course design. Together, the committee vets solutions and collaborates on making informed decisions aimed at key instructional and operations pain points that AI can help address.
For example, UIC is currently entering year two of a Grammarly for Education pilot aimed at providing always-on writing support for its primarily commuter student body. The pilot has seen widespread adoption after the first year, reflected by an 88.2% student and faculty satisfaction rate.
Further illustrating the importance of cross-campus buy-in, Wednesday featured two engaging sessions on AI implementation strategies. “Are You Ready?” featured panelists from EDUCAUSE, AWS, and San Diego State University (SDSU) and provided an overview of EDUCAUSE’s AI readiness assessment as a tool to evaluate institutional AI readiness. Strategy and governance, capacity and expertise, and infrastructure are the primary buckets to assess.
Kyle Bowen’s session later in the day echoed the importance of instructional buy-in by showcasing Arizona State University’s community of practice approach to AI implementation. Bowen and James Frazee, the CIOs of ASU and SDSU respectively, shared AI sentiment survey results on their campuses that reflected the desire to seek student input as well. Both surveys showed an increasing willingness on the part of students to use AI in their coursework and a belief that AI is an essential skill for workplace success. SDSU’s survey showed that 71% of students believe that AI will become an essential part of most professions; the survey also demonstrated how much student AI use has increased in 2024, with ChatGPT usage increasing 37% year-over-year to 82% and Grammarly usage increasing from 22% of the student body to 63%.
Takeaway #3 – Faculty need guidance on using AI effectively
Despite growing recognition of the importance of strategic AI implementation, there is still widespread faculty concern about how to actually get started with a transformative technology in ways that contribute to, rather than hinder, effective learning.
Practical paths to faculty enablement
Grammarly held two sessions focused on those very topics. Our Tuesday session with the University of Texas at Austin unveiled our recent co-created Faculty Guide to Getting Started With Gen AI, a new free resource aimed at helping faculty of any discipline get started with relevant gen AI use cases.
During the session, Dr. Julie Schell, UT’s Assistant Vice Provost of Academic Technology, emphasized the importance of “ethical resilience” in the new AI era. It is higher education’s role to help students develop the ability to engage thoughtfully with AI output and develop the sense-making to understand when to use it and for what purpose, without uncritically accepting AI’s role and output in any given use case.
On Wednesday, Grammarly tackled the question of academic integrity in the gen AI era directly, with Sarah Moore, Provost Teaching Fellow from the University of Texas at Dallas, and Marley Stevens, a senior from the University of North Georgia, both of whom provided a faculty and student perspective, respectively. Moore and Marley emphasized the actual costs of a “detection-forward” institutional posture toward AI, using their lived experiences to demonstrate the pitfalls of relying on AI detection to prevent cheating with AI.
Marley is known colloquially as “Grammarly Girl” in social media circles because of her TikTok videos last year that mentioned Grammarly as part of an ongoing academic integrity dispute over a false accusation that she used AI inappropriately. Since that time, Marley’s case has become a case study of what happens when institutional and faculty policies lack transparency and clear opportunities for student-professor dialogue that can prevent false accusations from damaging student academic standing. Marley recounted that she lost her scholarship because of the incident and never had the opportunity to truly defend herself in the academic integrity process.
From detection to transparency with AI
During that same session, we unveiled our Educator’s Guide to Grammarly Authorship, which provides faculty guidance on leveraging our new Grammarly Authorship feature with students. Authorship is a new way for students to prove where their text came from in written assignments, and provides faculty members with two-sided transparency on how students used or did not use AI in their assignments.
The guide helps faculty reorient themselves around a non-detection-forward solution that sheds more objective light on where student text came from and how to approach conversations where AI use may be suspected. The reception we received from faculty and admins alike was overwhelmingly positive; in the four weeks since we launched Authorship, nearly 1 million Authorship reports have been generated and shared with faculty, and that’s only the beginning.
Learn more about Authorship here, and be sure to check out the new faculty guide.
Grammarly is your partner on your AI journey
Our EDUCAUSE experience instilled new confidence in our company’s ability to meet colleges and universities where they currently are. Grammarly is the ideal tool to help institutions implement AI responsibly, with a clear use case of improving written communication for faculty, staff, and students. Grammarly can help institutions overcome the analysis paralysis from which so much of the market is currently suffering, with one-day implementation and seamless integration into the entire institutional tech stack.
Our generative AI capabilities are thoughtfully integrated into varied writing workflows and can be turned on/off by specific user groups. As mentioned above, our new Authorship feature fosters a culture of transparency and trust at a time when increasing AI use drives a wedge between students and faculty. No matter where you are on the AI readiness assessment, Grammarly for Education is here to help.
If we missed you at EDUCAUSE this year, we hope you’ll reach out to a member of our team and explore our faculty guides for getting started with gen AI and using Authorship with students.