AI Adoption in Higher Education - Michelle Miller
Assumptions about “digital natives” can obscure the wide variation in students’ actual technology skills and preferences. Age alone does not determine technological competence, and universities should avoid stereotypes when designing courses or determining how students are expected to use artificial intelligence. Instead, institutions and faculty should clearly communicate what role technology and AI will play in individual courses so students know what to expect.
The discussion also challenges the broad concept of “AI adoption” in higher education. AI use can range from acknowledging AI in a syllabus to teaching discipline-specific applications, developing AI literacy, examining ethical implications, or working directly with advanced technologies. Greater precision about these different forms of AI engagement can help universities move beyond debates over whether faculty have simply “adopted” AI and focus instead on how courses prepare students to thrive in an AI-influenced world.
Speaker Biography
Michelle Miller is the author of Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology (Harvard University Press, 2014), Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning, and the Science of Memory in a Wired World (West Virginia University Press, 2022), and the forthcoming book The Attention Spectrum: How Attention Really Works and How to Make It Work for You (W.W. Norton, Spring 2027). Dr. Miller completed her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology and behavioral neuroscience at the University of California, Los Angeles and currently serves as a professor of psychological sciences and the executive director of the Institute for Advancing Applications in Artificial Intelligence at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona, USA.
