tag: Generative AI

As generative AI becomes ever more pervasive in society, business, and in higher education, there are increasing calls for colleges and universities to ensure that students are AI-ready when they enter the workforce. But organizations have different visions of what AI readiness actually entails. These frameworks include, to some degree, a set of AI-related skills that students need to more successfully enter the world of AI-inflected work. Ambiguity remains, however, around what skills…

Beginning this July, Ithaka S+R will convene a cohort of 15-20 colleges and universities to explore how existing information literacy frameworks can be adapted and revised to reflect the changing realities of an AI-driven information ecosystem. The project will bring together librarians, teaching and learning professionals, and other campus leaders committed to advancing AI literacy as a core learning outcome.

In April, we had the opportunity to attend the 2026 AAC&U Conference on Learning and Student Success, or CLASS, in Tucson, Arizona. This year’s conference centered around the theme of courageous care, with sessions exploring topics from campus culture and community building to the current state of AI literacy initiatives for students and staff. During the conference, we facilitated a roundtable discussion on integrating undergraduate teaching with generative AI, sharing insights from Ithaka S+R projects exploring AI in…

Today, we are publishing a LibGuide focused on the Environmental Impacts of AI, as a part of our Incorporating Environmental Perspectives into AI Literacy project, funded by the Mellon Foundation. The LibGuide’s objective is to help users attain a baseline understanding of the varied environmental consequences behind AI technology. The LibGuide’s articles, reports, podcasts, videos, data trackers, and other types of resources address environmental impacts throughout the AI lifecycle.

I was in the room at the Frankfurt STM meeting in 2015 when my friend and now colleague Roger Schonfeld delivered a talk that changed how I understood the problem I thought I had been working on for most of my career. Roger mapped the researcher scholarly journal access experience in plain terms. Journals were online. DOIs worked. Link resolvers existed. The digitization problem had been substantially solved. But the access problem had not. Researchers with legitimate institutional access were…

The research enterprise is undergoing a period of rapid change, shaped by several converging forces. In our work with researchers, administrators, and senior leaders across the country, we see firsthand how advances in artificial intelligence are changing how research is conducted and supported, even as shifts in federal funding policies introduce new uncertainties. At the same time, increased scrutiny of research with national security implications—and a shifting policy environment influencing what research gets funded and pursued—are raising the stakes for…

We are pleased to welcome Todd Toler to Ithaka S+R as the inaugural practice lead for a new area of focused work on artificial intelligence in scholarly communication. The new practice area is grounded in a simple but powerful idea: that AI in research and publishing must be “scholar-ready," aligned with expectations for integrity, provenance, rights awareness, and transparency.

Across the past year, Ithaka S+R has worked with 58 institutions through our cohort projects to define and implement AI literacy. Following these successful engagements, we are launching an additional AI literacy cohort this summer, which will run on an accelerated timeline. Participants will collectively address two fundamental questions: What exactly is AI literacy? How can libraries, centers for teaching and learning, and other university units better support AI literacy for students and faculty?…

Higher education institutions and employers alike tout the priority they place on AI skills, but rarely do they describe what ‘AI skills’ actually mean. While there are many models of AI literacy in both educational and employment settings, there are remarkably few frameworks that identify the specific skills that make that literacy applicable in either setting. To help bridge that gap, Ithaka S+R is undertaking a new, national study to better understand what specific AI skills instructors think are important…

Research administration has grown increasingly complex over the past two decades, and the introduction of AI has only exacerbated this. Expanding regulatory requirements, shifting funding landscapes, rising numbers of proposals, and constrained staffing resources have made research administration more demanding. For emerging research institutions, these pressures compound existing structural challenges in building research operations capable of securing and sustaining funding. As generative AI tools have rapidly entered the market, accompanied by promises of increased efficiency, research offices at emerging research…

The energy and material demands behind artificial intelligence (AI) technology raise serious questions about the environmental impacts of widespread AI adoption. Understanding these environmental-related consequences is an important component of what it means to be AI literate. Within the sphere of higher education, colleges and universities are launching initiatives to help students, faculty, and staff attain higher levels of AI literacy. Many AI literacy frameworks already call for competency in the societal and environmental impacts of AI technologies. However, tracking…

Research administrators play an essential role in the research enterprise. Their work managing expenditures and monitoring compliance with rules related to the ethical conduct of research ensure that public money is spent and that research data is collected in ways that protect privacy, minimize risks to participants, and meet the complex legal and contractual obligations required by funders. At large research universities, these and other tasks associated with research administration are undertaken by trained specialists: at emerging research institutions (ERIs)…

In March 2024, Ithaka S+R released a tracker of generative AI products for higher education, along with an issue brief detailing our observations on the generative AI product landscape for postsecondary research, teaching, and learning activities. Since then, the list of products on the tracker has more than doubled in length and become more cumbersome for its many users. Today, we are launching a new version of our tracker that we believe will ensure its future value.

When we launched the third cohort for the Integrating AI Literacy into the Curricula project in September, we wanted to learn about the fast evolving AI literacy landscape in higher education. In our first workshop in October, we began to see a clear pattern: across institutions types and sizes, AI literacy development in higher education is happening almost always from the ground up.

Although generative AI literacy frameworks can be quite varied, all suggest that users bring a critical eye to what LLMs produce. Instructors must internalize this critical lens on AI outputs in order to convey that same inherent skepticism to their students. With this healthy skepticism in mind, it is key to understand when and how generative AI can enrich teaching and learning.

While the rapid evolution of generative AI is transforming teaching and learning in higher education, many instructors face this shift without clear frameworks or shared strategies, placing pressure on centers for teaching and learning to develop new programming. This challenge is at the heart of a new Ithaka S+R cohort project in collaboration with the California State University (CSU) system, “Teaching and Learning with AI.” The project kicked off in September, connecting CSU centers for teaching and learning interested in…

We recently convened the first workshop for the NSF-funded Advancing AI Implementation at Emerging Research Institutions, a project collaboratively led by Ithaka S+R, Montclair State University, and Chapman University. The workshop brought together 31 participants from 13 academic and medical institutions, as well as from an electronic research administration system provider to ask: how can research administrators at ERIs leverage AI to build more sustainable and equitable research capacity?…

Beneath the headlines of white collar lay-offs as companies explore the potential of generative AI to do entry-level office work, another change to the workforce is happening that may be of more immediate concern to current students and higher education institutions. The college internship is changing along with the rest of the American employment landscape. Students and administrators alike should prepare for what is happening now and begin thinking about what may happen over the next several years.

Earlier today, we launched the 2025 US Researcher Survey. Adapted from the US Faculty Survey, this new survey is designed to provide actionable insights about how academic libraries, research offices, academic publishers, and other stakeholders can best support researchers and ensure the health and vitality of the research enterprise.

In September 2025, we are convening a new Integrating AI Literacy into the Curricula cohort to help colleges and universities move from ad hoc experimentation to sustainable, curriculum-integrated practice. Building on the momentum of our spring activities with 45 participating institutions, we will apply the same cross-campus approach that centers collaboration between libraries and educators, helping translate research into practical, shareable models. Our reflections from the spring cohort meetings captured a landscape of both progress and fragmentation. Some…