If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em? Ohio State University recently announced that each of its students must take an AI skills class starting in the Fall of 2025.

Micaiah Bilger of The College Fix reports,

Every undergraduate major at Ohio State will include classes that incorporate “AI Fluency,” NBC 4 WCMH reports. The public university’s leaders have developed a strategy that they believe will equip students to use the technology both creatively and responsibly.

As AI continues to shape and disrupt higher education, administrators and teachers have to grapple with how to deal with this powerful technology. Many reports, personal testimonies, and commentary illustrates how much students today depend on AI systems like ChatGPT to do their assignments. Professors, meanwhile, are split on the issue. Many are in line with Ohio State’s rationale: If we don’t train students to use AI in connection to their field, they won’t succeed in a rapidly evolving economic climate. Critics of AI in education point out that students are in college, at least partly, to learn how to think for themselves. AI undercuts that prerogative and offers them an easy shortcut that will harm their development, skillset, and even personal character in the long run.

Solutions?

Solutions to AI use in higher education involve going back to in-class assignments, phone-free and laptop-free classrooms, and a return to handwriting. However, the question is whether this will be enough to curb students using AI for their online classes, research projects and papers, and other work outside the class period. Particularly in the online course context, in which it’s nigh impossible to police potential AI use, educators will continue to have trouble.