{"id":703523,"date":"2026-05-30T10:11:27","date_gmt":"2026-05-30T10:11:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/703523\/"},"modified":"2026-05-30T10:11:27","modified_gmt":"2026-05-30T10:11:27","slug":"ontario-universities-urged-to-co-ordinate-ai-approach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/703523\/","title":{"rendered":"Ontario universities urged to co-ordinate AI approach"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Vivek Goel, president of the University of Waterloo and member of the Council of Ontario Universities. ‘We\u2019re all trying to grapple with what the right principles should be,’ Dr. Goel says.Fred Lum\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n

A task force has sketched a road map for universities navigating rapid change brought on by the rise of artificial intelligence, not only to better prepare students for a shifting job market, but also to accelerate research and build digital sovereignty.<\/p>\n

In a report to be released Friday, the Council of Ontario Universities is calling on its 20 member schools to embrace AI\u2019s transformative potential and collaborate to solve challenges raised by the technology, rather than try to do so as individual schools. It also recognizes the risks AI presents, particularly for assessing the work of students and faculty.<\/p>\n

The report, which was itself produced with the assistance of generative AI tools, makes a dozen recommendations for universities, and a handful for provincial and federal governments. <\/p>\n

Vivek Goel, president of the University of Waterloo and chair of the council\u2019s seven-person task force, said AI offers tremendous opportunity, but is also prompting anxiety in many corners of society, including academia. <\/p>\n

\u201cAcross the sector we were seeing everyone is just trying to keep up,\u201d Dr. Goel said. \u201cWe\u2019re all trying to grapple with what the right principles should be, how we deal with academic integrity issues, how we think about assessments going forward.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The report lays out a framework for a sector trying to cope with the pace of change, he said. A co-ordinated approach will allow universities to benefit from shared wisdom, rather than each school trying to \u201cduplicate the wheel,\u201d Dr. Goel added.<\/p>\n

University assessments have been largely based on written work for decades, but generative AI models that can produce volumes of text at the click of a button have prompted widespread worry about cheating.<\/p>\n

Dr. Goel said it may be that written work won\u2019t be the primary tool for assessing student learning in the future. The same goes for assessing academic research, he added. Instead, oral examinations, which have been used to assess PhD students and medical students for years, are gaining traction. <\/p>\n

In the United States, recent convocation ceremonies have been disrupted by students booing the mention of AI. Dr. Goel said he thinks the boos are a reflection of the anxiety that surrounds the technology at present, but said it\u2019s also clear from university internet traffic that students are visiting the sites of the big AI companies in large numbers. <\/p>\n

\u201cOur students are using these tools in all sorts of ways,\u201d Dr. Goel said. \u201cIf we look at our utilization last fall, we had the classic hockey stick curve. The previous year was running [steady] and then it just took off.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dr. Goel said in his own life he has been using AI to help write correspondence and to summarize reports, and has found it to be a very effective digital search tool.<\/p>\n

Opinion: AI and the death of the university essay<\/a><\/p>\n

Steve Orsini, president of the Council of Ontario Universities, said universities see four major tasks to address: preparing students for a work world in a state of flux; helping Ontario industries adopt AI\u2019s benefits to improve their competitiveness; addressing changes to instruction and assessment; and protecting digital sovereignty by ensuring that control of sensitive data remains in Canada.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a call to action to leverage something that we think is going to be very transformative,\u201d Mr. Orsini said. \u201cStanding on the sideline would be a missed opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Orsini said Canadian universities have played an important role in the development of artificial intelligence, noting the prominent work of Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto as one example. He said the goal is for institutions to leverage their various strengths in different aspects of AI for the benefit of the system as a whole.<\/p>\n

The report calls on the federal government to invest in research by funding additional computing capacity that would make it possible to host data on servers located in Canada, rather than in the U.S.<\/p>\n

It also asks the provincial government to provide more support for co-op placements and work-integrated learning opportunities. As the world of work changes, particularly the entry-level tasks often given to students, early attachment to the work force will become even more important, Mr. Orsini said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Vivek Goel, president of the University of Waterloo and member of the Council…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":703524,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,901,276,277,888,902,879,877,903,49,48,876,895,896,891,878,875,46,549,295,894,887,914,880,881,893,889,890,884,904,885,909,910,912,907,911,905,908,882,898,899,714,897,906,865,61,900,892,886,883,913],"class_list":["post-703523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-alberta","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-arts-news","tag-bc","tag-breaking-news","tag-breaking-news-video","tag-british-columbia","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-canada-news","tag-canada-sports","tag-canada-sports-news","tag-canada-trafficcanada-weather","tag-canadian-breaking-news","tag-canadian-news","tag-economy","tag-education","tag-environment","tag-federal-government","tag-foreign-news","tag-globe-and-mail","tag-globe-and-mail-breaking-news","tag-globe-and-mail-canada-news","tag-government","tag-life-news","tag-lifestyle","tag-local-news","tag-manitoba","tag-national-news","tag-new-brunswick","tag-newfoundland-and-labrador","tag-northwest-territories","tag-nova-scotia","tag-nunavut","tag-ontario","tag-pei","tag-photos","tag-political-news","tag-political-opinion","tag-politics","tag-politics-news","tag-quebec","tag-sports-news","tag-technology","tag-travel","tag-trudeau","tag-us-news","tag-world-news","tag-yukon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/703523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=703523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/703523\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/703524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=703523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=703523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=703523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}