AI Efforts

The Center for Instructional Design and Educational Technologies, in partnership with the Center for Faculty Excellence, is pleased to announce AI Mini-Grants for Course Integration to faculty for the 2024-2025 academic year. For more information, visit https://www.ithaca.edu/faculty-hub/awards-grants/artificial-intelligence-mini-grants

Come visit our AI Exploration Lab to discover the power of generative AI, experiment with AI tools and their uses, learn about responsible use, and receive guidance from our student Generative AI Exploration Guides. Our team offers workshops, scheduled group appointments, and walk-in hours in Friends 109. 

Fall 2024 Hours
Monday9:00am-10:45am
12:00pm-1:45pm
3:00pm-6:00pm
Tuesday9:00am-1:00pm
3:00pm-6:00pm
Wednesday10:00am-1:00pm
Thursday9:00am-1:00pm
3:00pm-6:00pm
Friday9:00am-1:45pm
3:00pm-5:00pm

The Presidential Working Group on AI at Ithaca College reflects the college's dedication to embracing advancements in AI and ensuring its integration aligns with the educational mission, core values, and vision for a responsible and equitable future.

The group, consisting of faculty, staff, and students, and facilitated by members of Information Technology and Analytics, is tasked with exploring and developing strategies to harness AI's potential and recommending responsible use across the campus. The group's charter is guided by seven essential questions, aiming to help the college start to answer or address these questions, which range from enhancing students' experience to improving operational effectiveness and assessing the impact of AI on workforce skills and roles. Deliverables resulting from this work will be proposed for adoption by the President’s Cabinet and will shape the college’s strategic approach to AI.

NameDatesDescription
Claude AI PilotMay-August, 2024This project aims to explore Anthropic’s Claude AI and its capabilities, determining strengths, weaknesses, and use cases. We will explore the differences between the free version and paid license and compare to other popular AI chat tools.
Zoom AI Companion PilotMay-August, 2024This effort will explore the features of the Zoom AI Companion and test technical configurations before making this tool available to the whole campus in August 2024. This is a generative AI digital assistant that can be leveraged throughout the Zoom platform including Zoom Meetings and Whiteboard.
Teams Premium PilotMay-August, 2024This project is to evaluate the features of Microsoft Teams Premium. The objective of this project is to understand the value proposition for our organization and to provide recommendations around its use. Additionally, this project will establish a feature comparison between Microsoft Teams Premium and Zoom AI Companion.
Microsoft For Copilot 365 PilotApril-November, 2024This project is to evaluate Microsoft 365 Copilot which provides an AI assistance feature within each product in the Microsoft 365 environment (Outlook, Teams, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc.). The aim is to explore the tools, identify use cases, understand the value proposition for our organization, and to provide recommendations around its use.
AI for ICare SupportMay-October, 2024Develop an AI tool that can extract and summarize student information for the ICare support team.
AI Service Desk AgentFebruary-September, 2024Create and launch alpha version of an AI Service Desk agent, trained on IT’s service catalog and knowledge base, that can answer questions and create a ticket.
Ithaca Insights PrototypeJanuary-March, 2024Creation of a usable AI prototype to answer questions about IC for potential students.

Tools & Resources

Please be aware that AI chat bots, software, plugins, and other AI tools may collect, store, or share information that you enter in chats or otherwise upload to them. If you use products that the college has not approved through contract review, you may expose data to unauthorized parties. Depending on the nature of the data, that may violate FERPA or other regulations, or violate IC policies. For more information, please see this article:https://help.ithaca.edu/TDClient/34/Portal/KB/ArticleDet?ID=1638

Microsoft Copilot is an AI-powered chatbot. It uses natural language processing and machine learning to generate text and images from plain text. It can be accessed through any browser at copilot.microsoft.com, and it is also integrated into the Microsoft Edge browser with additional capabilities such as PDF file analysis. Read more here: https://help.ithaca.edu/TDClient/34/Portal/KB/ArticleDet?ID=1492

Zoom AI Companion is chat tool built-in to Zoom meetings that, when activated by the host, lets participants ask questions, see action items, or catch up on parts they missed, by using the meeting transcript.

Microsoft Copilot is an AI-powered chatbot. It uses natural language processing and machine learning to generate text and images from plain text. It can be accessed through any browser at copilot.microsoft.com, and it is also integrated into the Microsoft Edge browser with additional capabilities such as PDF file analysis. Read more here: https://help.ithaca.edu/TDClient/34/Portal/KB/ArticleDet?ID=1492

Zoom AI Companion is chat tool built-in to Zoom meetings that, when activated by the host, lets participants ask questions, see action items, or catch up on parts they missed, by using the meeting transcript.

The Center for Instructional Design & Educational Technology (CIE) team partners with faculty to build and deliver exceptional courses, and to explore emerging and creative technologies including generative AI. Visit CIE’s website here: https://www.ithaca.edu/information-technology/cie

This channel hosts video resources to guide users through various AI experiences including generative AI tools, best practices, and "how to" tutorials: https://media.ithaca.edu/category/Video+Tutorials%3EArtificial+Intelligence+%28AI%29+at+IC/340631632

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