Artificial intelligence (AI) is taking the education industry by storm and has the potential to positively impact both students and faculty. Most students already use AI in some form, but faculty have been slower in adopting AI tools. A 2023 study revealed that nearly half of students regularly use AI, but less than 22 percent of faculty members use it.
As higher education faculty battle with increasing workloads, the need for AI becomes more apparent. While AI can’t replace human touch, it can take over repetitive, time-consuming tasks and effectively reduce faculty workload. This strategy gives faculty more time and energy to focus on their students, improving both student success and faculty retention rates.
Read on to discover why faculty workloads are increasing and how you can combat it using AI.
Faculty constantly have to do more with less, resulting in overwhelming workloads. These high workloads place immense pressure on faculty and require them to work longer hours, which can affect their job satisfaction and overall well-being. The factors contributing the most to high workloads include:
The good news is that your institution can reduce faculty workload with AI. Today, many higher education tools and software support AI integration, making it easy to implement. With AI at their disposal, faculty can accomplish more in less time and boost their productivity. They can also meet faculty workload guidelines, which is hard to do when workloads become unmanageable.
With better workloads, faculty can maintain a good work-life balance, feel less stressed, and focus on tasks that matter. Stress at work and long work hours can cause burnout, so lightening their workload can keep this issue at bay. The results are worth it — happier staff stay in their roles, create a positive work environment, and give their best to students.
Many institutional decision-makers are skeptical of allowing faculty to use AI due to ethical concerns and a lack of understanding. However, you can ensure effective and ethical AI use in your institution by developing AI policies with guidance from experts. These policies dictate how faculty can use AI, giving them guidelines and best practices to follow.
Consider allowing faculty to use AI for:
Faculty members often have several repetitive tasks to complete weekly. They can seem never-ending and take up significant time and effort. For example, faculty have to write emails, check student work for plagiarism, grade assignments, and create lesson plans. Some of these tasks require limited human input, so they’re the perfect candidate for AI implementation.
Identify the menial tasks faculty do daily and see which ones AI can take over.
AI can speed up course design in various ways. It can even help with content creation, but it can’t replace human expertise. The goal is to use AI to make designing courses quicker and easier without compromising on quality.
For starters, faculty can use generative AI — which uses algorithms to produce content like text, images, and speech — to help create course objectives. These are the desired outcomes for students who complete the course. AI can generate lists of objective ideas based on input data, which faculty can use as a baseline.
AI is also useful for summarizing information, finding content gaps, and gathering learning resources. It can generate ideas for questions in assignments, exams, and projects. Additionally, faculty can use AI to create rubrics based on course objectives and content.
Once faculty finalize course content, they have to determine how they’ll teach it to students. Traditionally, lecturers would teach content using presentations and textbooks in classes. AI speeds up lecture preparation, as it can quickly create lecture notes, presentation slides, and quizzes based on course content.
Today, faculty must also consider how to deliver content online for remote students. AI can quickly make learning more engaging by adding gamification elements that make learning feel like playing a game. AI tools can also monitor the behavior and create adaptive learning environments that change to meet each student’s needs. Plus, AI can automatically make content more accessible by converting text to speech, creating live captions, and translating information in real time.
Gathering and analyzing student data helps faculty make informed decisions. However, manual data collection and analysis is time-intensive. AI is an excellent solution as it can quickly collect and present data in an easier-to-understand way. Faculty can consult the summarized findings to uncover insights, which is a deep understanding of a situation or problem. They can then align their choices to better meet student needs.
Nothing beats one-on-one support and empathetic feedback from instructors, but faculty only have limited time to dedicate to students. Using AI tools, faculty can identify struggling students quickly and ensure their support has the biggest impact. For example, a learning platform with AI integration can monitor student progress, analyze trends, and predict outcomes. When it identifies an at-risk student, faculty receive alerts so they can intervene early.
AI can also act as a remote tutor, answering questions students have when faculty aren’t available. It can provide real-time feedback for less involved tasks, allowing faculty to put their time into giving detailed feedback where it counts. Ultimately, AI can handle the easier support requests and give faculty back some of their time.
If you’re not yet harnessing the power of AI to support faculty, now’s your chance! At Watermark, we specialize in innovative software that uses the latest technology to assist faculty. With over 20 years of experience helping higher education institutions, we know how to solve workload challenges.
That’s why we created Watermark’s Educational Impact Suite, an integrated hub of tools specifically for higher education. The software uses AI to streamline data collection, accreditation, course evaluations, faculty reviews, project assessment, curriculum development, student support, and more.
Give back valuable time to faculty and staff with Watermark. Browse our software range and request a demo today!
