Welcome to Generative AI and Workforce Education: A Faculty Guide
Welcome to Generative AI and Workforce Education: A Faculty Guide! What you have found yourself exploring is the culmination of a research project that was undertaken across the Winter and Spring academic quarters in 2024 (roughly January to June 2024). This guide was not initially part of the research project but emerged as an idea for a deliverable midway through the project. It is a short guide, with community college faculty as the intended audience, designed to be referred to and briefly inspiring. It is a fairly experimental text designed to connect faculty readers with ideas and resources to start reflecting on and conversing about technological impacts now and going forward.
What is in this book? In addition to information about the author and the Spokane Community College Teaching and Learning Center, this book explores the structure of the author’s research project. It also contains an overview of the results of the project: discussions between faculty, conclusions and takeaways from the conversations, and a bibliography of published resources related to the impact of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) technology on workforce. Hopefully the content will lead to solutions around evolving instructional methods that consider workforce education and GenAI. As of the time of this writing, GenAI is impacting wide swaths of higher education, but conversations around workforce impacts are often absent, chaotic, or rapidly changing.
The conversation of GenAI, if it can even be generalized, often includes a dichotomy between academic misconduct (e.g. asking a tool to complete an assignment) and more sophisticated, practical uses. The conversation is a spectrum of conversations, of course, but the disruption of the technology as it leads to the former often prevents conversations around the latter (and vice versa).
With respect to the immense challenges that GenAI poses with academic misconduct and ethical uses of technology, this book is more centered around the latter: what is the workforce facing with GenAI technology and how are students being made aware of it, and taught about it, and how will they be prepared as they go through a workforce program at a college so they can be competitive and successful in their future jobs and careers? This guide will not directly answer these questions, but is designed to amplify the conversation and point readers in some directions that may be helpful as they support their students and grow as educators.
