“I’m of the mind that with AI now, we as faculty have to move the goalposts way out there,” says Scott Murff, an associate teaching professor of strategy at the BYU Marriott School of Business. As faculty integrate AI into their classrooms, they say they hope that their students will not only accomplish more, but that they will become more. “Instead of getting to the end of the road, now we want our students to go to the moon.”
Murff says that students and faculty at BYU have a responsibility with the new technology because there are people in the world will use AI unethically. “I think the best we can do is teach correct principles and inspire students to use AI for good,” he says. “By leveraging these tools fully, our students will be even more capable of impacting the world.”
To that effect, a course about using AI created for BYU Marriott has been adapted for a much wider audience. David Wood, Glenn D. Ardis Professor of Accounting, originally created the course to help faculty and students expand the way they use and approach AI. Now, he is working with a team of students to create an online course, funded by an accounting firm, to share that knowledge globally.
“We just passed 150,000 completed quizzes and 40,000 students across the world learning things like generative AI,” Wood says. “It’s been satisfying to have a student team helping to develop what’s educating the rest of the world on these topics.”
Wood’s policy within his own classrooms is that students can use AI for anything unless specifically told otherwise. “I’ve started to give much more project-focused assignments and seeing what students can build, create, and invent with AI,” Wood says.
Information Systems Professor James Gaskin implements similar policies for allowing students to use AI to complete their projects. And, to aid the more-than 3,000 students taking IS 201 each year, Gaskin trained and integrated an AI model into the course’s online textbook to act as an always-accessible teaching assistant.
“Students can talk to the book as if it were a TA, and they can ask it anything about the class,” Gaskin says. He adds that students particularly appreciate that they could ask questions they might be embarrassed to ask a human TA. The AI teaching assistants are capable of some things that most human TAs can’t do, such as instantly translating portions of the textbook and answering questions in any language.
Gaskin’s colleague in the information systems department, Assistant Teaching Professor Laura Cutler, creates more time for her students by using AI in lesson planning. “I have had more time one-on-one with my students,” Cutler says. “And a lot of that is in scheduled class time or experiences, where I'm available to give them feedback and be that personal touch for them because I'm not busy doing class prep in the same way.”
And Wood says he’s excited to see how AI continues changing coursework at BYU Marriott. He invites his students to be conscientious in how they use the new technology: “You can use AI to become more, and you can use it to become less—choose to become more.”