School of Information (iSchool) professor Paul Marty is working with FSU’s Information Technology Services (ITS), Office of Digital Learning (ODL), and faculty across campus to partner with Microsoft on a pilot test of Microsoft Copilot in the Classroom.
“We are excited about the potential of this pilot test to improve our understanding of the role of AI in higher education and look forward to sharing our experiences about what worked, what didn’t, and how we can improve the software to make it more useful for our faculty and our students in the future,” Marty said.
Microsoft Copilot is an AI that is available to every faculty, staff, and student at FSU. In this pilot test, participating faculty from the Colleges of Communication and Information, Arts and Sciences, Business, and Education, Health, and Human Sciences are using Microsoft Copilot Studio to train a custom AI on their course materials including syllabi, readings, assignments, lectures, and more. That AI will then be available to their students during the semester.
The goal is to learn how easily AI can be trained on the course materials and how effectively AI can answer student questions based on those materials as a kind of interactive classroom resource. The AI is embedded directly into Canvas, so the students do not need to go somewhere else to interact with the AI.
Marty is experimenting with the project this semester through the online graduate course that he instructs on Museum Informatics (LIS 559
0). He trained the AI over the summer on his course materials and is continuing to train the AI on his lecture materials each week this fall, so the AI can learn along with his students.
“Overall, the reaction so far has been pretty positive! The students are looking forward to trying out the AI over the course of the semester,” Marty said. “Of course this is an emerging technology, and there will be a lot of bugs to work out, but everyone seems excited to be participating in a pilot test of this software.”
The feedback provided for the technology will be able to influence future development and use of AI in the classroom.