Lingnan University was well represented at a recent prestigious conference that brought together leading academics and policymakers from around the region. The focus of the Times Higher Education’s Digital Universities Asia 2024, which took place in Bali from 1 to 3 July, was the transformation now being seen in two important areas.
One involved the steps academic institutions are taking to become more accessible and inclusive environments. The other centred on groundbreaking developments in the zone where education and technology intersect, in particular how innovative tools like generative AI will reshape diverse aspects of university life.
In a keynote speech, Lingnan’s President S. Joe Qin addressed the topic of “Reimagining Higher Education in the Age of AI”. He assessed the evolving impact of the digital revolution and what it means for curriculum content, teaching methodologies, research projects, and the overall concept of education in arts and sciences.
He noted that AI can already work on cognitive tasks, if not physical ones like cooking or cleaning. However, the rate of advances in autonomous driving, large language models (LLMs), and GPTs (generative pre-trained transformers) indicate the possibilities of using knowledge gained from data.
In May last year, ChatGPT was asked what it can bring to the field of higher education. The answers included easy access and enabling individuals or groups to generate content such as essays, poems, summaries, lyrics and code based on user input and preferences. Also mentioned were the feedback and suggestions given to improve content. ChatGPT claimed too that it can be integrated into liberal arts and AI courses and projects to enhance learning outcomes and engagement.
For universities, the key question is whether this will lead to some majors being discontinued and others being created or expanded. There are also implications for how students are taught, what skills are expected of them, and what is left to learn.
“We still want our students to build critical thinking skills, especially high-order thinking,” said Professor Qin, who is also Wai Kee Kau Chair Professor of Data Science at Lingnan. “And we need to instil our value system, so that we control AI, not the other way round.”
In July 2023, the university committed to making ChatGPT and subsequent releases available for everyone on campus. It also encouraged proposals for several new undergraduate programmes in arts and social sciences with more digitally relevant content. Starting in September 2024, all freshmen will take a common core course on generative AI to ensure they have the basic know-how and apply it.
Similarly important is a plan to promote the concept of digital humanities. The aim is to study the meaning and making of human culture, finding new insights through geographical information systems, data visualisation, network analysis, and text mining.
“History, for example, will become a lot more interesting and accessible,” Professor Qin said. “My message is that humans are at the centre of the post-AI world. In higher education, we have to adapt; we cannot expect to teach things that AI will replace effectively and efficiently.”