Faculty recently took part in a daylong AI professional development conference designed to help instructors understand, critically assess, and select tools that align with their teaching values. SNC faculty and staff members leading the college’s involvement with the institute facilitated the full-day event. 

Faculty listened to speakers and participated in various activities, including scenarios they could face or are already facing in the classroom. Time was also set aside for group discussion, which generated thoughtful conversation. 

During those discussions, faculty emphasized the limitations of AI, ways the technology can be used positively, ethically and effectively, and how St. Norbert College provides students with a foundation in critical and ethical thinking, preparing them to use AI responsibly. 

By the end of the day faculty were able to: 

1. Understand what AI is and isn’t in the context of higher education.
 

2. Recognize common faculty concerns about AI (equity, ethics, plagiarism, academic integrity).
 

3. Explore practical, low-barrier ways AI can support teaching and learning.
 

4. Develop a personal stance and teaching strategy regarding AI in their courses. 

“As we consider the ethics of AI as both a process and a practice, we are also asking how it affects our local community and how it can be used for the greater good,” said dean of arts and sciences and institute member Jamie Lynch. “That focus reflects our Norbertine commitment to community, responsibility, and ethical engagement.”

SNC is also participating in AI Ready, a national initiative of the Council of Independent Colleges that brings together faculty and staff across the country for monthly webinars on the role of AI in higher education. The webinars take place throughout the year. 

These new AI initiatives build on SNC’s Digital Fellows program, which has been in place for more than a decade. The program offers faculty the opportunity to adapt their pedagogy to elevate learning at the college. 

Fellows propose, plan, and lead a cohort that meets regularly throughout the academic year, with instructional design and technology support provided. This year’s program focuses on AI literacy, fluency, and agility. Each fellow is currently implementing an AI-inclusive activity in a spring 2026 course and will contribute resources to SNC’s AI initiatives while sharing outcomes through a public blog post and campus conversations to support AI-informed teaching. 

“These digital fellows will serve as catalysts for a continued AI Learning Community and a call will be extended for additional AI Digital Fellows for the fall,” said Lukens and Lucareli. “Students reap the benefits of their faculty using AI in a structured and supported environment with continuous feedback.”

A number of courses at St. Norbert College already instruct students on the proper use of AI, both now and in the future. In these courses, students use natural language processing systems to predict stock market prices, explore the power and limitations of AI coding agents, and examine other real-world applications. 

Eric Hagedorn (Philosophy, Computer Science) co-teaches a unit on AI ethics in the computer science and data analytics capstone courses each spring. Students reflect on ethical issues raised by AI systems, including how machine learning algorithms can exacerbate and codify existing human biases embedded in the data used to train them. 

“Likewise, there are innumerable legal and moral difficulties involved in trying to establish transparency and accountability when AI systems give false or even harmful results (as they frequently do),” Hagedorn said. “When it’s discovered that an AI agent used by an HR department has been silently ignoring resumes from minority applicants, who is to be held responsible? Can we trust AI-based systems to be used in critical fields such as the criminal justice system or health care, when no one (not even their designers) are able to understand the precise criteria by which these systems make decisions?” 

And in the fall, computer science majors are also offered the advanced elective course “Artificial Intelligence.” Students learn about traditional AI systems, gain deeper understandings for the inner workings of machine learning systems, including the current set of large language models (LLMs) such as chatGPT and Claude, among others. 

Software engineering companies are increasingly asking for graduates to have proficiency with AI coding tools, which prompted Seth Meyer (Computer Science, Mathematics) to shape the course so students can use LLMs to write code in multiple ways. 

“The course finished with them making computer programs to play the board game Othello (Reversi) and we had a mini tournament where I played their programs against each other,” said Meyer. “The best programs submitted could easily beat any of us as well as the hardest versions of computer players we found online, so that was super fun.”