AUSTIN, Texas — The wave of artificial intelligence is coming, whether or not people are ready for it. Many are pushing back against it, but there are institutions choosing to embrace it. The Austin Community College District (ACC) is on that list, and a partnership with a Texas-based nonprofit is pushing it forward into the AI realm.
College can be overwhelming, from the application process to enrolling in classes to figuring out the path to take in a career and keeping grades up. ACC hopes to ease some of those challenges for students by using AI.
Shilda Fresch is a college relations assistant at ACC. Prior to graduating, she was a student there herself but faced some challenges.
“I had a lot of unexpected circumstances when I was going to ACC back 19 years ago,” Fresch said. “I dropped out of Austin Community College four times.”
Between dealing with family emergencies and being a mother, it was difficult to navigate being a student on top of her other duties.
“Juggling time management and trying to find the time to get back into school and, ‘Who do you go to? Who do you talk to?’ And being led into the school to different departments and not finding actually where to go and get the help,” Fresch said.
To help alleviate struggles like hers, ACC recently announced a partnership with the Trellis Foundation that includes proactively supporting students using AI, called the Digital Twin Initiative. An $875,000 grant from the foundation will be used for this initiative.
“Take all of the data points that we have on our students and to make them immediately actionable so that instead of waiting for the student to identify a need and then try to find a place to get that need fulfilled, we could know when they have the need in real time and connect them to the supports in real time,” said ACC Chancellor Russell Lowery-Hart.
Leveraging AI to connect students to services like advising, tutoring and mental health is something Fresch says would have been helpful when she was a student.
“I think it’s a wonderful thing and just bringing AI into the college, I think, is going to be great,” Fresch said.
Small business owners will also be able to tap into the Digital Twin Initiative through training that teaches them how to use AI to expand their businesses.
Additionally, to meet the demands of the growing data center industry in Texas, there will be an electrical technician certification.
“We’re wanting to create an AI technician certification that could feed into the larger electrical platforms so that when the data center build-outs are complete, those students still have a career path waiting on them,” Lowery-Hart said.
ACC staff, like Fresch, are looking forward to implementing AI into student services to better support them.
“It will also help me and Austin Community College to do our goal, which is love our students to success,” Fresch said.