Craig Clark – Director of Clark & Company Information Governance Services 

If you have visited any social media platform, news website or vendor website within the last 12 months, I’d be prepared to bet you seen dozens of hours of content talking about AI in one form or another. I’d also be happy to predict that if you are reading this blog, AI has been the topic of conversation in a fair number of your meetings. As an Information Governance consultant, AI has cropped up in pretty much every meeting I’ve attended in the last 6 months, whether that is as a DPO or offering consultancy services. 

Many of my education clients are at the very start of the AI journey and looking starry eyed at Chat-GPT, Co-Pilot et al and the possibilities which are significant particularly in terms of potential for enhancing teaching and learning but there is a problem – students of all ages are *way* ahead of the educators that are teaching them when it comes to figuring out how AI can help them. I recently worked in a primary school that have had issues with year 6 children using Snapchat to help with their written homework. 

This is not a new issue - every generation evolves and develops skills and adaptability to use technology quicker than the last. The problem is that students are coming into educational environments with a much greater grasp of technology that education institutions are now trying to harness for our own purposes. To close that gap, organisations need to work on improving staff awareness and understanding around what AI is, how it works and what the benefits and limitations are. In other words, there needs to be a drive to improve ‘AI literacy’ a term first seen in 2019 and being used evermore frequently to describe the ability to understand, use, and critically evaluate AI applications and systems.

A lack of AI literacy among staff expected to ‘embrace AI’ in teaching, assessment or general business as usual activities will quickly lead to a huge sense of overwhelm, a loss of confidence in abilities and poorer performance compared to individuals that actively embrace AI and explore its uses. That’s why I think it is crucial to build improving AI Literacy into all AI strategic programs of work. 

How to improve AI literacy 

There are a number of ways that you can improve AI literacy either on an individual basis or at an organizational level and we have produced a factsheet with some ideas which is free to download at the end of this blog but the core aspect of improving AI literacy revolves around providing people with training, encouraging them to explore AI and how it can work to help them and engaging peoples curiosity about what is possible now, and crucially what could be possible in the future. 

AI literacy programs for education environments should include

• Providing an overview of essential AI concepts
• Improving understanding about the different types of AI technologies.
• Providing examples of practical applications of AI to enhance teaching and learning, business operations and individual use cases.
• Exploring the potential impacts of AI on Academic Integrity and the ethical considerations relating to AI use.
• How to communicate successfully with AI including creating effective prompts.

How we can help

AI Literacy is a broad topic with staff requiring slightly different skills depending on their role. We have offer a range of AI Literacy courses for staff and students which are available in house. From August 2024, we will be launching our most popular course AI Literacy for Educators as an e-learning course. You can join our waiting list and receive a 15% discount here: https://www.ccinfogov.co.uk/ai-literacy-course