Generative AI COP Invites Curiosity, Insight, and Participation
Are you part of the Generative AI (Gen AI) Community of Practice (CoP)? Are you thinking about joining, or are you just trying to keep up with the evolution of Gen AI without getting overwhelmed? We checked in with Victoria Getis, senior director of Teaching and Learning Technologies and a leader of Northwestern IT’s Generative AI Community of Practice, to learn how the Gen AI CoP was established, what they’re currently working on, and how you can get involved.
What inspired you to create this community of practice, and how did it come together?
During several senior leadership team meetings in the fall of 2023, Sean Reynolds suggested that we start considering generative AI as a means to enable and improve services across the University. To gather more insights, Joe Paris, now the associate vice president for IT Services and Support, and I convened a group of Northwestern IT staff beginning in January 2024. We really wanted to share insights and information across IT, so we started with IT staff demonstrations of interesting things, presentations, and discussions of generative AI that gradually coalesced into a framework for evaluating AI tools, which we shared with Brandon Grill, senior director of technology planning and security. He recently noted that EDUCAUSE has included similar considerations in its latest HECVAT framework version. Now, with the benefit of staff leadership from individuals across Northwestern IT departments, we’re moving forward with brainstorming sessions centered on problems or opportunities we might address using generative AI.
What has surprised you about the group's outcomes over time?
The enthusiasm from the members has been wonderful. People are eager to learn, present, and work together. It’s been great to see the group grow, as well—we have more than 100 names on our mailing list!
What would you like to see next?
I’d like to see us start taking on some project planning. We have members from various areas of the University, and we could tackle many great ideas together. Collaborating on these plans will strengthen the community and may yield valuable results. I’m thinking of examples we’ve seen from the University of Notre Dame, which built a generative AI tool to help analyze other universities’ syllabi to aid in the student transfer process, or Arizona State and Ohio State together, who built a tool to improve the accessibility of PDFs using generative AI tools.
How do other Northwestern IT colleagues get involved?
Just drop a note to either Joe Paris or Victoria Getis and we’ll get you on the membership list. We share a Teams channel and meet about once every two months, alternating between fully online meetings and fully in-person meetings. Better yet, if you have an idea of something you’d like to see—a demo of a particular tool, say, or a discussion of generative AI in a particular area—just let us know, and we’ll get it on the agenda.