The College of Social Sciences and the Connie L. Lurie College of Education Receives $2.4 Million Grant from the U.S. Department of Education to Advance AI Literacy

Left to right: Dogukan Ozgen, Lois Takahashi, Ellen Middaugh, Anne Marie Todd and Clifton Oyamot are partnering on a new initiative designed to train SJSU faculty in the College of Social Sciences and the Connie L. Lurie College of Education to be AI literate. Photo: Emily Ngo.

What exactly is artificial intelligence, and how can faculty members learn how to become AI-literate? Ask 10 professionals across 10 industries, and you’re likely to get 10 different answers. How, then, can AI be understood, taught and applied ethically in higher education?

Thanks to a $2.37 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education, faculty members in San José State’s College of Social Sciences and Connie L. Lurie College of Education will soon be developing and delivering curriculum to help faculty and students recognize AI deepfakes and hallucinations, and improve their prompt engineering skills. 

The four-year project, entitled “AI is Only As Good As Its Users: Advancing Students’ Informed Use of AI in Higher Education,” is a joint partnership between the two colleges led by Lois Takahashi, associate dean of research and faculty success in the College of Social Sciences and Ellen Middaugh, associate professor of child and adolescent development in the Lurie College of Education. The project also involves Anne Marie Todd, dean of the College of Social Sciences, Clifton Oyamot, associate dean of academic programs and student success at the College of Social Sciences, and Dogukan Ozgen, assistant professor of child and adolescent development in the Lurie College of Education. It is supported by the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) to incentivize the responsible use of AI to enhance teaching and learning. 

San José State is the only California State University to receive an award, and the only institution in California to get funded under the AI Literacy category. The grant has two stated goals: to create an action-based AI literacy curriculum that increases critical thinking capacities, enables deepfake detection and builds prompt engineering skills to use AI responsibly; and to build a professional development seminar series and faculty network that accompanies the curriculum to expand AI literacy instruction and integration.

The project will also evaluate instructor confidence in teaching about AI and create a digital repository and train educators to scale across the campus.

Takahashi explains that she and Middaugh plan to tap into existing faculty learning communities in both their colleges to focus on curricular design and study various pedagogical approaches.

“We’re going to convene a group of subject matter experts involved in curricular design, and we would like to get input from across campus, including senior leadership and from external stakeholder groups,” she says. “I’ve been hearing from employers who want to know if our students understand how to use AI responsibly.”

Middaugh adds that because the technologies themselves shift frequently, it’s even more important that students of all majors grasp how to effectively detect false or biased information, as well as how to best harness these tools to their benefit and the benefit of their communities. 

“As AI technology evolves, the specific tools and practices will likely evolve,” Middaugh says. “We are trying to see through all the changes in technology to get down to the core competencies that are going to be necessary regardless, such as being able to engage in effective research strategies, identify relevant information for a project, or use the technology for [clear] communication. These are competencies that I’ve been working with for years around social media [with previous and current projects funded by the US Department of Education].”

For example, students need to understand how to use AI tools in such a way that wouldn’t violate a company’s proprietary information or threaten work-in-progress. All students, regardless of major or discipline, need to understand how to cite sources appropriately, and perhaps more fundamentally, how to identify credible sources.

“This grant represents an authentic collaboration between our two colleges,” says Anne Marie Todd, dean of the College of Social Sciences and co-PI on the project. “Our program design and evaluation plan leverage existing infrastructure, programs, and collaborations in the AI education space at our campus. This pilot  is an opportunity to demonstrate how the integration and collaboration across campus around AI literacy results in feasible, effective and scalable strategies.” 

Read the announcement of federal funding from the U.S. Department of Education.