AI assistant helping to integrate career competencies into courses
"Faculty are already weaving these skills into their teaching. This tool helps make those connections more explicit, allowing students to recognize them too."
-Melissa Dadmun, Associate Director of Curriculm Design and Integration
Steve Lodmell, Associate Dean of Biological Sciences, faced the task of reviewing a botany course for natural sciences general education requirements. Under a new Faculty Senate policy passed in spring 2024, he also had to ensure the course included one to three approved career competencies. With the previous instructor retired and his own background outside botany, Lodmell got help from an artificial intelligence tool developed by UM's Experiential Learning and Career Success (ELCS) office, dubbed the Career Readiness Curricular Integration Assistant tool.
"I took the syllabus and popped it in, and it spit out reasonable sounding career competencies couched in the appropriate context," Lodmell says. "I was happy right there. But then it prompted me, 'would you Iike suggestions for assignment prompts or quiz questions?' It suggested four bullet points that were perfectly appropriate for the course. Then it asked me if I would like reflection prompts." After reading the prompts Lodmell observed dryly, "Well, that’s pretty useful. I could have done that work, but the tool spit it out in 15 seconds."
Context
ELCS director Andrea Vernon has been involved in strategic efforts over the past few years to help faculty and students better connect classroom learning with career competencies.
"There’s been a disconnect where students graduate and they're like, ‘Yeah, I have a great education, but I don’t have any skills,’" Vernon says. "In reality, they actually do have a whole lot of skills. We just need to help them identify those."
Beyond graduating with career competencies, Vernon wants students to graduate "career confident."
"That's really where I see the failure of higher education," Vernon says, "when students don't graduate career confident. How horrible to think that a student spends all this time here and when they graduate they don't feel confident that they can go for the jobs they want, or they're not able to articulate all of the great preparation they've had."
Aligned efforts
One of UM's strategic objectives is to "Increase students’ career readiness through intentionally designed curricular and co-curricular experiences." Progress requires numerous aligned efforts. Four years ago ELCS led the effort to establish ElevateU, an ecosystem that weaves together resources, experiences, and support to help students successfully embark on their career paths.
Last year ELCS worked with colleagues in the College of Business and College of Humanities and Social Sciences to develop and launch Career Champions, an initiative that equips faculty and staff to better support students’ career development by providing training, tools, and strategies to integrate career conversations into everyday interactions. Faculty and staff who volunteer to be a Career Champion gain access to the Career Readiness Canvas shell that provides guidance and resources, including access to tools like the Career Readiness Curricular Integration Assistant tool.
Also last year, Faculty Senate approved a policy establishing ten career-readiness competencies as official learning outcomes, requiring that general education courses integrate one to three of them so students can more clearly connect their coursework with career readiness skills.
Leveraging AI to enhance career readiness
The Career Readiness Curricular Integration Assistant AI tool was developed by Melissa Dadmun, Associate Director of Curriculum Design and Integration in ELCS. The tool runs on a closed version of ChatGPT, meaning what you enter into it stays private and is not incorporated into OpenAI's larger training data. Dadmun says the tool is part of an effort to give faculty multiple ways to engage with career readiness support.
"Faculty are already weaving these skills into their teaching," Dadmun says. "This tool helps make those connections more explicit, allowing students to recognize them too. We want to show faculty that integrating career readiness doesn’t have to be a heavy lift. It can be as simple as tweaking a syllabus statement, adding a reflection prompt, or encouraging students to think about how a classroom activity prepares them for their future”.
"It's a no-brainer for our field," Vernon says of leveraging AI. "Our team has taken a very proactive approach to incorporating AI into the career readiness space. We have staff who have become working experts, and once we realized the functionality of these closed systems it was like, we could do so many things."
Resources
To request a demonstration of the Career Readiness Curricular Integration Assistant AI tool, contact Melissa Dadmun