The Emerging Technologies Institute (ETI) at Foothill College originated in summer 2022 as a way for virtual reality (VR) to be integrated into education. ETI’s mission is to give all staff, faculty, students, and administrators a chance to engage with emerging technologies that have the potential to shape change in society and education. Opportunities include interacting in physical lab settings such as Foothill’s VR lab, where faculty and students can explore how technology can provide more immersive learning experiences, and participating in research projects, where they engage with industry experts and explore the concept of experiential learning. Other topics of focus include artificial intelligence (AI), renewable energy, space sciences, cymatics, blockchain technologies, quantum technologies, and life sciences. These topics evolve as new technologies emerge. 

Foothill College’s ETI aims to give students alternative ways of exploring STEM-related topics through experiential learning. The institute is interdisciplinary and strives to get students and faculty involved with exploring STEM fields as they relate to non-STEM fields. This effort has helped to break down silos across typically isolated divisions on campus; it has also brought faculty and students from STEM and non-STEM fields into a common space to explore how all fields of study are affected by emerging technologies.

ETI promotes equity, diversity, and inclusion. For example, we partner with the college’s Tools for Transition and Work (TTW) program, which supports neurodivergent students as they experience college life and transition to their next goals. During winter 2023, ETI piloted an effort in which four TTW students spent the quarter building autonomous robots and learning engineering skills accompanied by introductory coding in Arduino and Python. The next year, we increased this effort to include six TTW students, and in the spring 2024 quarter, that number increased to nine. Additionally, a collaboration between the STEM division, ETI, and TTW program resulted in the creation of a course titled Career Path Exploration: STEM Careers for Students with Learning Differences, which will be available for credit starting in winter 2025. 

Through various ETI efforts at Foothill College—in collaboration with other campus divisions, industry partners such as NASA and AWS, and, most recently, through expansion to our sister school, De Anza College—students, faculty, staff, and administrators contribute to our official STEM interdisciplinary magazine, Principia, by writing about their projects, research, and experiences with emerging technologies within their disciplines. Principia was created in winter 2023 by a group of Foothill College students and has become a space for showcasing students’ work and highlighting what goes into the ETI program. 

ETI has also evolved our STEM student clubs. As of this writing, the number of clubs has increased from a handful to over 20, all with various focused interests which then feed into projects in ETI. These clubs have expanded to include joint clubs across the district, with students from both Foothill College and De Anza College collaborating with ETI in partnerships with industry experts and visiting scholars. 

During the 2023-2024 academic year, ETI piloted a small ad hoc group of faculty to discuss how AI is impacting education. The group, which started with three people in summer 2023, has grown to a group of more than 100 students, faculty, staff, and administrators from both De Anza and Foothill as well as community members, industry experts, and educators at other academic institutions. This AI learning community has blossomed into a space for cross collaboration between the sister colleges and has enabled genuine engagement in leveraging AI as a tool for learning across the district. 

Just as Foothill’s ETI was facilitating its first series of workshops in the currently identified emerging technologies during the 2023-2024 academic year, the AI learning community realized that a similar effort was taking place at De Anza, with a focus on AI. This gave rise to expanding the AI workshops districtwide, and a series of workshops aimed at providing faculty professional development in AI took place in the spring 2024 quarter.

AI Professional Development at De Anza College and the District 

The four-part professional development series on Generative AI in Teaching and Learning focuses on four major topics: 

• What Is Generative AI (GenAI)? 
• Best Practices for Teaching With GenAI 
• Ethical Considerations With AI 
• AI and the Future of Work 

The series was first piloted during winter 2024 at De Anza College through the Office of Professional Development. Given positive feedback, we decided to offer it again to the entire Foothill-De Anza Community College District with the help of the Chancellor’s Office and each campus’s Office of Professional Development. 

These workshops offer timely content on the power and peril of emerging AI tools while also providing a space for faculty to discuss questions and concerns related to the impact of the tools on their own teaching. Participants are primarily faculty, but  some classified professionals and division deans are also involved. Participants also represent disciplinary backgrounds from all academic divisions and a variety of campus centers, such as online education and the library. 

Those who have little to no experience with AI are eager to learn how these emerging technologies work while those who were already using AI were excited to share their experiences and practical applications. Almost all participants are interested in discussing some of the larger issues related to AI in teaching, such as academic integrity, algorithmic bias, and general AI ethics. 

A major benefit of this series is its ability to bring together educators from diverse academic backgrounds with a variety of roles on campus. Much like the districtwide AI learning community, these interdisciplinary collaborations provide vital opportunities to break institutional silos and share insights across campuses. 

A recurring theme throughout the series is how to uphold academic integrity standards in response to AI. Each course, and, to be sure, each instructor, has different curriculum and assessment requirements. Therefore, standards can vary when it comes to regulating AI usage in the classroom. It is important to note that each instructor has legitimate reasons for their own level of AI adoption and regulation. In addition, students have a variety of reasons for adopting AI in their own work. While conversations around academic integrity and AI detection can become heated, they point to larger questions of how to build and maintain trust in the classroom given the current AI landscape. As GenAI, such as Google search summaries or Microsoft Copilot writing coaches, is integrated into our everyday activities, our policies around authorship and plagiarism will need to evolve. 

A key takeaway from the workshop series is that educators need more space in which to openly discuss questions, concerns, and best practices around integrating AI into teaching and learning. There is real excitement as well as real anxiety about what emerging AI technologies can do. There is also uncertainty about how these tools will shape the future of education. Promoting more dialogue and resource sharing through a districtwide learning community or professional development series, or through spaces like ETI, can empower educators to make informed decisions regarding AI adoption and regulation. 

Moving forward will require a delicate balance between shared standards and individual autonomy. The workshop facilitator noted that many educators would like more policy guidance around integrating AI into their work while maintaining freedom about whether, why, and how they integrate it. Crafting such guidelines will require genuinely listening to the needs of students, faculty, classified professionals, and administrators and honoring the diversity of experiences and opinions.

As technology rapidly evolves, it is increasingly necessary to have these kinds of high-level, districtwide conversations about the values we share as an institution when testing and adopting new AI tools or activities. Many companies are riding the wave of generative AI hype, and there seems to be a shiny new AI education tool released every five minutes. To combat the exhaustion of trying to keep up with trends, it may be better to ground ourselves by reaffirming the mission of higher education and using our shared mission as a framework for AI adoption.

Zachary Cembellin is Interim Division Dean, STEM, at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, California, and Francesca Caparas is Faculty, English, at De Anza College in Cupertino, California.

Opinions expressed in Innovation Showcase are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the Leage for Innovation in the Community College.