Dartmouth College this week revealed it has become one of the first higher education institutions to ally with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to develop artificial intelligence (AI) applications for academic environments.
The university will adopt a Claude for Education model, a version of the large language model (LLM) developed by Anthropic that will be made available campus-wide via the Amazon Bedrock service for accessing AI models.
Dartmouth and AWS will also collaboratively work to inject an AWS Skills to Jobs workforce initiative with Dartmouth’s Center for Career Design program to create the first AI-fluent class that will graduate in 2029.
The university also has a Faculty Leadership Group on AI that includes representation from a wide range of disciplines, including the arts, humanities, sciences, engineering, business, and medicine, that is working to define best practices for professors using AI in the classroom.
This effort is part of a larger AWS effort to work closely with universities to establish deeper relationships with graduates who now need to become lifelong learners, says Kim Majerus, vice president of global education and U.S. State and Local Government at AWS. Universities need to establish and maintain relationships with students throughout their careers, she adds. “Graduates are becoming lifelong learners,” says Majerus.
In some cases, for example, some universities have added “micro credential” programs that enable graduates to gain additional skills and expertise as their career evolves, she notes.
The Dartmouth College initiative comes at a time when many recent graduates are finding it more challenging to land a job in challenging economic times. Most organizations are not yet leveraging AI to eliminate positions, but they are looking to leverage AI to make existing employees more productive in a way that automates many of the tasks that might have been assigned to someone with an entry-level position. Longer term, however, many students that will be graduating in the years ahead may have deeper familiarity with AI tools and technologies that might enable them to take on higher level responsibilities earlier in their careers.
It’s not clear yet just how much more productive employees are likely to become. In some cases, there are already a handful of employees that have developed a level of proficiency that enables them to increase productivity by several orders of magnitude. The bulk, however, appears able to complete some tasks faster but not to the point where it is having a meaningful impact on the amount of revenue or profit being generated by an organization.
Regardless of the current level of proficiency, one thing that is clear is that as additional AI advances are made, the way individuals learn is also about to fundamentally change. There may need to be, for example, less emphasis on memorization in favor of relying on AI agents to democratize access to knowledge. In the meantime, leaders of higher education institutions would be well-advised to start transitioning curriculums today in advance of a new AI reality that is now all but inevitable.
