What Higher Ed Leaders Can Learn from CSU’s ChatGPT Edu Rollout:

Changing Higher Ed podcast 315 with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Dr. Leslie Kennedy

Transcript: Changing Higher Ed podcast 315 – with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Dr. Leslie Kennedy

Introduction to Changing Higher Ed^®

Welcome to Changing Higher Ed^®, a podcast dedicated to helping higher education leaders improve their institutions. With your host, Dr. Drumm McNaughton, CEO of The Change Leader, a consultancy that helps higher ed leaders holistically transform their institutions. Learn more at changinghighered.com. And now, here’s your host, Drumm McNaughton.

[00:00:31] Welcome and Purpose of This Podcast

Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David. My guest today is Dr. Leslie Kennedy, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Academic Technology Services at the California State University’s Office of the Chancellor. Leslie provides leadership for system-wide academic technology, libraries, online education, and affordable learning initiatives. She also co-leads the academic aspects of the CSU system’s generative AI initiative, advancing responsible adoption to enhance teaching, learning, and administration.

*Report referenced in this podcast: https://www.calstate.edu/impact-of-the-csu/technology/ai-empowered-csu/Pages/ai-survey.aspx

[00:01:05] Meet Dr Leslie Kennedy

Drumm McNaughton: The Cal State system has a multi-pronged approach to AI strategy, which is driven by faculty and informed by multiple surveys. And Leslie joins me today to share how the CSU system is addressing and rolling out AI to the nation’s largest public education system in an ethical and responsible way.

Leslie, welcome to the program.

Leslie Kennedy: Thank you. It’s very nice to be here.

Drumm McNaughton: I’m looking forward to a really good conversation today.

[00:01:35] Why Systemwide AI Matters

Drumm McNaughton: You’re with the Cal State system, and you guys are doing some amazing things with AI. Really, in tune with what our focus is going to be today is, how do you implement AI as a system? So before we get into it, would you mind giving listeners a little bit about your background?

[00:01:52] Leslie’s Education Journey

Leslie Kennedy: Well, thank you very much. My background is very much in education. Out of undergrad, I was credentialed as a teacher, taught for a while abroad, and then segued into teaching in the college level, became a tenured faculty member in a community college, in a local college in the Southern California area.

[00:02:11] From Teaching to EdTech

Leslie Kennedy: And then slowly with additional training and education, segued into academic technology. So currently I’m the Assistant Vice Chancellor of Academic Technology Services, where we work on the intersection of academics and technologies to support instructional environments.

Drumm McNaughton: Well that, that’s certainly a mouthful. What’s the most interesting project that you’ve had, in your role as the AVC?

Leslie Kennedy: There have been so many. It’s just been a wonderful experience.

[00:02:46] Affordable Learning Wins

Leslie Kennedy: We do– One of the areas we focus on is affordable teaching and course materials. We have one of the largest programs in the country around driving down costs for students and their course materials.

[00:02:58] Adoption Curves and Change

Leslie Kennedy: And then this project, this AI project that we’re working on now, has been a fascinating journey and lots of learning paths intersecting there, but also growing, watching a system grow through a transformative time, which was something that I focused on my– just really quickly in my dissertation, was the adoption of technologies from the instructional side and the whole Rogers adoption level curve that talks about the mainstream versus the both ends of a adoption curve, being i- incredibly innovative or not interested at all.

And that’s definitely happening right now in our transformative and innovative time of adopting AI in the instructional environments of CSU.

Drumm McNaughton: It reminds me of a book that I read years ago by Geoffrey Moore called Crossing the Chasm, and it was talking about high-tech marketing, riding the wave, et cetera. When you’re talking about the Rogers diagram and I’m thinking innovative versus non-innovative, I hate to think where most of us in higher ed fall out.

Leslie Kennedy: Well, the goal is mainstream, and that chasm happens a lot in the images that you see of Rogers Curve, adoption innovation curve, because it is a large leap to get to that mainstream. So Yes. But we have plenty of faculty who are creative and interested in change and adopting new strategies based on what their students’ needs are. So it’s an exciting time.

Drumm McNaughton: It is, especially rolling out AI as you have.

[00:04:37] CSU Scale and Structure

Drumm McNaughton: Now, the CSU system is the biggest college system in the country, is it not?

Leslie Kennedy: It’s the largest four-year regional comprehensive university system in the country, correct.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes. 22 different campuses as I recall.

Leslie Kennedy: Yes, we have 22 universities, very independent, and throughout the state covering the 800 miles from one end to the other in the states. The idea is to provide as many options for students to attend university as possible so that the, so that there are campuses near large urban areas, but also in the rural areas as well.

Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm. And the AI initiative, you talked about that as being one of the most interesting.

[00:05:21] Early AI Roots at CSU

Drumm McNaughton: What’s the history behind AI at the Cal State system?

Leslie Kennedy: Well, I would say based on some conversations with faculty, several have been involved with AI at different levels for quite a while since AI, came out of the– in, in the late ’50s time period and then ’60s began to grow in different capacities, different areas of focus. So some of our faculty have been involved in various research projects around that, depending on what their discipline is.

[00:05:50] ChatGPT Sparks New Focus

Leslie Kennedy: But in the recent times, we saw that OpenAI released the ChatGPT tool in 2022, so then it became more of a focus for the CSU to consider the adoption of and support of strategies around AI, generative AI, which is now very much a part of many of our worlds and whether it’s our personal lives and/or our work lives and/or our instructional lives.

[00:06:22] Faculty Resolutions Drive Action

Drumm McNaughton: Well, something I didn’t know that you educated me on when we spoke last week was the faculty actually brought a resolution about in 2019 about AI, and obviously COVID got in the way of a lot of things, including this. But again, in 2023, the resolution was resurrected. It started with faculty.

Leslie Kennedy: Yes, it did start with faculty. Very interested in how AI, generative AI, and just access to the tools are– were going to impact our students, especially in the future when they graduated in their work environment, so that we needed to become more mature in that area and interested in potentially utilizing it in some of the curricula that were being created and/or currently were being offered.

Then in ’23, it was more about encouraging the CSU to even become more involved and to consider an equitable tool that the students can get access to and a powerful tool that was also protected it from, the large language models, training the large language models, et cetera.

[00:07:34] Building the GenAI Committee

Leslie Kennedy: So from that ’23 resolution, this is from the statewide senate, by the way, and from that resolution, they also recommended convening a committee, a generative AI, system-wide generative AI committee to address these issues and to think through all the different aspects that are affecting the university.

The teaching and learning research environment, the efficiencies area, like such as productivity, HR, IT, all these different areas were being impacted by the fast pace of AI that was growing so much and so many of the tools and structures that we were using. So we did convene that committee and in ’24, and so we, we looked for representation from the faculty and the students and the staff, and it was led by our system-wide CIO and our deputy vice chancellor of academic and student affairs area and from the chancellor’s office, but then folks from the campuses were part of this committee.

And so through the meetings that took place in the committee, and they created subcommittees in which I outlined a second ago, teaching, learning, research, productivity, and H-IT, meaning more procurement in those areas.

[00:08:51] AI Commons and Key Report

Leslie Kennedy: They came together and one of the recommendations– They created a report.

It’s posted on our AI Commons. We have this, this– a location on our online that– where we post most activities that are happening in the California State University system. And so that report recommended, one of the many things it recommended was access for all of our users to a private and a robust enterprise level AI, gen AI tool. And so that opens the doors for the next steps in the CSU.

[00:09:25] The 94000 Response Survey

Drumm McNaughton: So you’ve got an AI Commons, but you also you had the reports, you had told me before that San Diego State was doing a lot of work, but you recently just released a report that went out to, had 94,000 respondents about how AI is being used. That I, I’ve never heard a survey with that many people.

Leslie Kennedy: Yes, we’re very fortunate in that we were able to distribute and receive over ninety-four thousand responses to an AI perception survey from all of our campuses and also from the chancellor’s office. So we asked– The survey questions were based on a survey that San Diego State had been facilitating since ’23, and so then it was expanded for the entire system, and so they could have some longitudinal data, but also s- that this is a beginning point for the CSU system office.

And that data had questions for faculty, staff, and students. And so we have a broad section of responses based on the questions. I think there were twenty-four criteria or questions on the survey that are now informing us even further. So I’m not sure. We can talk about any part of that survey if you’re interested

Drumm McNaughton: Oh, I definitely am interested. 95% have used AI. When you say 95% of 94,000, we’re talking what, about 90,000 people in the system have used AI? That’s pretty impressive.

Leslie Kennedy: Yes, considering we’ve only been doing this, well now just a year, but we ran the survey at the nine-month time, I think it was, we’d been running, that we’d had the system-wide generative AI tool, ChatGPT Edu, available since March of ’25, and we ran the survey in the fall. So Yes, and we had a very short window when we kept– that we ran the survey, so this was a quick snapshot of activities in the system.

So 95% of the respondents said that they had used one AI tool.

Drumm McNaughton: And, faculty, 55% of faculty are leveraging AI in the classroom, 69% are guiding students how to use it. These are all big numbers, especially seeing that many faculty, especially older faculty, don’t necessarily like technology.

Leslie Kennedy: Yes. It just ranges from all the faculty groups.

[00:12:00] Training and Faculty Support

Leslie Kennedy: And so, yes, we’ve been providing lots of resources. Another statewide academic senate resolution recommended that faculty take part in some of the AI online training that we have available. We have some facilitated versions.

We have some self-paced. We have short courses, longer courses. So trying to focus on the introduction to what generative AI does, what tools are available, what types of strategies a faculty member may consider in their instructional environments, and then also considering the ethical responsible uses of it.

So we have quite a spectrum of resources there.

[00:12:42] Innovation Challenge Grants

Leslie Kennedy: And in order to provide support for faculty to explore using gen AI in, in their instructional environments, we released a AI Educational Innovations Challenge last spring., The faculty were able to apply for funding up to $60,000 depending on what their strategies were.

And so, we received way more applications than we expected. We thought we would get about 50, and we got 417 applications, and we were o-only able to fund 63 of them. But we were able to, with $3 million, we’ve been funding 63 programs or projects around the exploration of innovative use instructional strategies of using AI in their instructional environments, continuing to enhance critical thinking, promoting ethical AI use, and integrating it into their curricula as well.

And we have we’re– we’ve already received their interim reports. There’s been a lot of interest and excitement and experiences that are going to be sharing soon. We’re in the process of setting up webinars for them to showcase what they’ve been doing. And then we’re hoping that the resources by June, when the project is meant to end, we will have 63 projects to showcase across the disciplines in the system that will then hopefully be resources for faculty in their disciplines to consider as they move forward as well.

Drumm McNaughton: That is fabulous. And we’re jumping a little bit ahead because that’s part of the implementation which is really important.

[00:14:22] Student Ethics and Integrity

Drumm McNaughton: But one thing I did want to key back on is something you said about ethics. One of the key themes in your survey was that 8 of 10 students say they would not submit AI-generated work as their own.

I mean, that says a lot about the ethics that students, one, come in with, and two, what they’re learning in the Cal State system. Kudos to you folks.

Leslie Kennedy: Mm-hmm. Well, we’re trying very hard. We do have a AI micro-credential for the students, up to 10 hours where they can learn these perspectives, how to use it, what’s out there, and then also the responsible uses of it. And the faculty are guiding them as well as they are determining their syllabi statements as to how the students are able to use, whether or not, for– Actually, I should say whether or not they are able or can use AI in their instructional environments.

Drumm McNaughton: One of the interesting things that I saw about the survey was the ethical uses, and we just talked about that just a second ago. Verification of the output, 97% of faculty, 94% of staff, 88% of students say it’s necessary to verify the accuracy. Again, going into one of those ethics things. That, that relates right back to one of my previous guests who talked about the necessary of verification and making sure that there’s a human in the loop

Leslie Kennedy: Yes, that’s something that we encourage as much as possible around the responsible use of AI, that there definitely needs to be a human in the loop, and that the output from the tools is a support, if anything, but that a student needs to verify all or any of it. It’s something that’s in our responsible and ethical use statements, and we see it reinforced more and more in, in the classrooms as well.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes, and with that, again, I’m coming back to this, but I was blown away that students will not submit. Eight out of 10, they wouldn’t submit AI-generated work as their own That’s really neat. Especially when I think back, some of the clients that I’ve had early on, I would say it’s probably about three years ago, working a strategic plan with an academic institution.

It was the academic strategic plan, and we used AI to generate strategies. We already had the tactics, and the faculty there were horrified. They said that was plagiarism, which it isn’t. It’s just using a tool in a different way. But to say eight out of 10 said they would not submit AI-generated work to me is amazing.

Leslie Kennedy: Well, it’s, Yes, as I said, we’re trying very hard to help inform our students and the faculty are doing that. And, this is all relatively new, so it’s really about take– being cautious and learning the strategies and the tools as much as possible and the frameworks that are being developed by the tools and the resources that it’s, they’re creating that are going to impact us in the future.

So part of that is discussing and understanding what, what’s happening at the moment, and it’s changing so quickly on a regular basis and evolving. Students are understanding better and better, and so are the faculty, what is tolerable use of AI in the instructional environment and what is not.

[00:18:10] Rolling Out ChatGPT Edu to the CSU System

Drumm McNaughton: So Leslie, in the CSU system, your implementation has been fast. You’ve got the system, then you’ve got 22 institutions, universities under that. Talk us through how you’ve implemented this.

Leslie Kennedy: Well, we’ve started with a system-wide committee that helped recommend and provide guidance in various areas. And then once we went ahead with a resource from our own ChatGPT Edu license, we announced that to the system. We had already been pre-announcing that we were coming in that direction to their campuses, and we met with all of the leadership groups, meaning our president’s council, the CIO council, the, multiple other councils, the provost council, and the vice presidents of student affairs councils or council, and then just, the myriad of resource bodies that are within the system. We’ve got a procurement council, we’ve got the library deans council. We have lots of groups of constituencies.

So we continue to meet with them for input and their feedback. And then we slowly made the ChatGPT Edu tool available. In the meantime, we were creating training resources. So at the central office where I am, at the chancellor’s office, we had released a training course for faculty on introduction to teaching and learning with AI.

Then San Diego State offered, and that course, by the way, the intro course was created at our campus at Monterey Bay and then was offered to the system.

Then the San Diego State offered their shorter course, ten-hour micro-credential courses that we made available. And then Fresno State offered a staff introduction course for higher ed professionals, so we offered that.

So we’ve got a myriad of tools that are being made available as the campuses began to ramp up their potential resources within their programs on their campuses. So we’ve had over four thousand faculty and/or students and/or staff taking part in these training courses at the system level.

And then the campuses are providing theirs as well. So let’s see, the implementation then the campuses slowly began to provision the, um, ChatGPT Edu tool into their system. They had to make sure single sign-on worked and all those different aspects. So by this fall, class of ’25, all campuses were live.

So currently, we know that, and this was from last week’s numbers, about two hundred and twenty-five thousand accounts have been created in the system in our ChatGPT system. And so that could be faculty, students, and staff. So it’s been a rollout at pace. The campuses chose to, to roll it out for their campus based on their capabilities and governance requirements and discussions and so, but by fall of ’25, everybody was using our ChatGPT Edu instance.

So then there’s been other a-activities around how it’s being used, how we can leverage that tool for efficiencies in the HR procurement, those areas, activities, facilities, et cetera. But a real focus on supporting the students and the faculty as this is impacting instruction in various ways.

Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm. You’ve rolled it out, you’ve been doing it fully deployed for a full semester now. If anybody wants to find out more about this, can they go up to your AI Commons and find out this information, any university?

Leslie Kennedy: Yes, it’s a public website, and it has quite a lot of resources there from the process that we went through to what’s available throughout the system. Our ethical responsible use statements are there and the training resources are there. And we not only have that aspect of what we have created in the system or are supporting at the system level, my office, but also because we’ve partnered with many of our technology vendors in a workforce acceleration board, which is quite unique for the CSU, they have also shared their free training resources.

And so we have a section on our AI Commons that provides access and windows into Adobe, OpenAI, Microsoft, AWS, IBM, and more as we continue to grow that area of resources that are being made available as well.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes, and that website for, your listening is Gen AI, that’s genai.calstate.edu. Is that correct?

Leslie Kennedy: Correct.

Drumm McNaughton: Great.

[00:23:19] How CSU is Keeping Up with AI Changes

Drumm McNaughton: As we’re drawing down to the end of our conversation today, tell me how you’re staying abreast of changes in the AI world. Is that challenging given how fast things are changing?

Leslie Kennedy: Yes, we work closely with OpenAI because since we rolled this out, it was on the 4.0 version, and now I’ve– I haven’t checked today, but, it’s moved through the 5-point-something version. And each time we see different elements made available. So we try to inform, keep that information on the website, and then also they facilitate training webinars for our– anybody who’s interested in viewing those.

Our courses that we have been, we’ve been offering at the system level, the online training courses have– were just recently updated in the late fall time period, and so we’re trying to update them on a regular basis as well. And Yes, change is very quick, and it’s exciting because of all the new resources that are being made available.

So again, as I said, we’re informed the, of the changes from the OpenAI perspective, and then we try to filter that information out to the system. From the teaching and learning side, it’s changing quickly as well. We try to– We have that the Gen AI system-wide committee meets on a regular basis, almost quarterly, the subcommittees even more often, so that these groups can, can discuss and share resources and provide input on where we should be headed.

We’ve got two faculty that are running their own podcast. It’s called My Robot Teacher, and they’re exploring. They’re from our Cal Maritime Academy, and they are, they have a great number of activities around interviews around where we’re going again and how we’re adjusting with our interviews with faculty.

We also have another podcast by two other faculty at Chico State called Unfixed, and they also talk regularly with faculty about some of the changes that are happening in their disciplines and how they’re addressing them, et cetera.

Drumm McNaughton: Nice.

[00:25:27] Cal State Systems Key Learnings

Drumm McNaughton: What are some of the key learnings? Cal State system’s been doing this for three-four years now. What are some of your key learnings?

Leslie Kennedy: I would say that, it’s the, one of the key learnings is to be flexible and to, in the, in this process of trying to provide innovative learning and teaching environments for our students and our faculty, and even our staff, is to be as open to change and providing as many resources as possible to adapt to the changing environment that is being affected by gen AI.

So flexibility and openness to change, has been very much a learning experience for us.

Drumm McNaughton: What other learnings have you found out, on a system-wide level, if there’s another system who wants to roll something like this out?

Leslie Kennedy: That there’ll be some hiccups along the way. Communication is, Yes, communication is vital and sometimes very challenging to filter into the ranks, into the faculty and student ranks. And so, and not as much the staff, but even there, and because of the nature of the university environment, faculty are focused in their areas, plus also are sometimes very busy and not able to take advantage of all the opportunities for training during the semester, and to be aware of the changes that are happening so quickly.

So, yes, just communication is in a large system, you can’t be redundant enough. And share as much information as possible on a regular basis, whether it’s through your strategic communications team and also connecting into the campus leadership, and then also the key areas where there might be some interest in the AI tools, in, in whether it’s the teacher ed education group or it’s computer science or history or writing.

We’ve been really fortunate that we’ve been able to distribute additional funding around first year writing programs which is an area that’s been probably the, one of the most challenged in regard to using Gen AI.

Drumm McNaughton: Of course. Well, thank you. This has been a fabulous conversation for me and one of the neat things about doing the podcast is I always get a chance to learn from experts such as yourself, so thank you very much.

Leslie Kennedy: Well, my, my pleasure, and thank you very much for being interested in the California State University system rollout.

Three Takeaways for System Leaders, Presidents, and Boards

Drumm McNaughton: Well, absolutely. As we always do, our last two questions. Three takeaways for system leaders, presidents, and boards. What do you need to do about AI?

Leslie Kennedy: Well, to definitely be aware and to be planning strategically for its impact in the teaching and learning environments, also in other areas of the university. And to work closely with a team including faculty, students, and staff for their perspectives and to make sure that you’re meeting their needs as much as possible.

Also having a plan for measuring the success of the program, of the project as well is really important. And that’s something that we’re develop– we’re in the process of measuring at, as we speak, and that’s very important to have that ahead of time as well. Or at least in process as you roll out an AI initiative at your system

Drumm McNaughton: Will those types of things be also be up on AI Commons?

Leslie Kennedy: Yes. When they’re available, they will be.

Drumm McNaughton: Great. That’s going to be a great resource for so many schools outside of the Cal State system, so thank you for making that available. What’s next for you? What’s next for the Cal State system?

Leslie Kennedy: Well, we’re again continuing to create opportunities for the students to have experience in the AI world. So we’re very fortunate to have been able to offer several hackathons for students that where they get access to certain tools. IBM just facilitated a hackathon for the LA five campuses, and was extremely successful.

The students got access to their Watson, their supercomputer, and other AI tools. So these are students that were just, had to solve real-world problems using these advanced systems. And we have that also happening this summer at our Cal Poly San Luis Obispo campus with AWS supporting that. And we just saw NVIDIA do that for our students up at San Jose and Cal Poly Pomona just ran a hackathon.

And these are for not just for computer science students. We have philosophy students, students of history, a real cross-section of students, health sciences students that have been participating and learning the ins and outs of the technologies that could be impacting their work in the future.

So the more we can do those kinds of hands-on resources and potentially embedding micro-credentials into the curricula so that students not only have that experience in their current curricula or instructional environments but also have some evidence of that micro-credential in certain areas of using AI is also another area that we’re exploring right now.

Drumm McNaughton: Some fabulous things going on there. Thank you so much for sharing those.

Leslie Kennedy: My pleasure.

Drumm McNaughton: Leslie, again, thank you so much for being on the program. I look forward to the next time our paths cross about AI.

Leslie Kennedy: Thank you so much, I do look forward to that as well. It’s been a pleasure

Drumm McNaughton: Thank you.

Thanks for listening today, and a special thank you to my guest, Leslie Kennedy of the Cal State system. Leslie, thanks so much for helping us to understand how Cal State system is rolling out AI. Very, very impressive. Thank you.

To my listeners, thanks again for tuning in. See you next week.