Universities should ensure that all their students learn to use AI as part of their studies or they will leave them unprepared for the future skills market, a conference has heard.

Speaking at the London School of Economics, Ravi Pendse, vice-president for information technology and chief information officer at the University of Michigan, said that universities risk letting students down if they fail to successfully incorporate AI into their teaching.

“I believe that no student from any institution of higher education should graduate today without at least one core course in AI, or a significant exposure to AI tools,” he said.

“We would be doing a disservice to our students if we let them graduate without this background.”

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Pendse told delegates at the Global Approaches to Generative AI in Higher Education conference, hosted in partnership with Peking University, China, that it was the “responsibility” of educators to make sure that students are “exposed to these tools”.

He added that academics also needed to incorporate AI into their own work to keep their research and pedagogy “creative”.

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“We need to be thinking about how to evolve our pedagogy,” said Pendse. “I’m saying this respectfully to all teachers, myself included, but if you’re teaching the same way that you taught two years ago, five years ago, 15 years ago, or 20 years ago, you have to take a real look at how your pedagogy is evolving, because with AI tools, your pedagogy has to evolve.”

Agreeing that AI should be embedded into higher education, Jaeho Yeom, president of Taejae University in Seoul, South Korea, said that “21st-century education should be really quite different from 20th-century education”.

“Explicit knowledge” can now be outsourced to AI and he said that classroom teaching should instead focus on group discussion and “bringing out” creative ideas.

Universities have already been asking themselves these “fundamental questions about what is the purpose of higher education, and what makes good education”, said Claire Gordon, director of the Eden Centre for Education Enhancement at LSE.

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“How do we educate our students to develop the knowledge, skills and disposition to be effective citizens and workers in their future lives? It seems to me that generation AI throws up new questions that those of us working, teaching and researching in higher education have been grappling with for years.”

She added that AI raised questions over “what makes a good assessment”, but Pendse said that even before AI complicated learning, there was no such thing as a “perfect assessment” method.

juliette.rowsell@timeshighereducation.com