2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The pervasive and rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) necessitates a fundamental AI understanding for all individuals. AI’s dynamic nature often makes it challenging even for technical people to stay continuously updated on AI, making it especially essential for professionals in leading positions, regardless of their technical background. Understanding AI equips leaders to make knowledgeable decisions about AI’s responsible adoption in their workplace, address its ethical implications, and enable better communication about AI initiatives within the organization. It also demystifies the technology, and ensures leaders can responsibly navigate AI-driven changes.

Most AI-related courses mainly focus on teaching programming languages and handling big data. A closer look at AI adult education reveals gaps and limitations in content suitable for professional adults – e.g in leadership, decision-making, ethics, governance and cultural aspects of organizational change. Furthermore, AI education pedagogy for adult learners,is still understudied. Literature suggests that adults are self-directed, experience-based learners. Therefore, their learning should involve self-planning, experiential learning, collaborative environments, and real-world applications. Notably, current AI education platforms lack sufficient focus on these areas. While efforts are being taken to address these issues, more adult education programs need to be specifically designed for the training needs of leadership in AI.

This research investigates the efficacy and outcomes of an AI education workshop, uniquely designed for large scale organization leaders, employing hands-on projects, collaborative learning, and problem-solving scenarios grounded in real-world applications, that considers technical, ethical, policy and organizational culture dimensions. The workshop incorporates experiential learning methods, case studies, problem-based learning, and group projects. This research also analyzes how adult learners interactively learn, reflect, and apply their AI knowledge to examples drawn from their workplace, while improving their understanding and readiness to implement AI technologies effectively.

Our three-day workshop centered around enriching and engaging learning about AI technologies, ethics, and leadership, featuring topics like supervised learning and bias, AI strategy, and generative AI. Apart from discussions, the workshops incorporated hands-on learning with digital tools, robots, problem-solving scenarios, and a capstone project. Participants were 44 leaders from a large government organization. Their learning was measured through pre- and post-questionnaires on AI leadership, knowledge checks on workshop content, and group interviews post-event.

Results indicated a substantial increase in the participants’ AI knowledge, emphasizing the workshop’s efficacy in enhancing AI literacy, expanding human-AI collaboration, and ethical understanding. The satisfaction survey showed the workshop was enjoyable and substantially improved learners’ understanding of AI and its applications. Learners praised the emphasis on people and ethics in AI and how it inspired them to drive change. They, however, wanted more preparation time and support for understanding content. The capstone project offered an effective hands-on experience that fostered learning and teamwork. Some technical problems were reported, negatively impacting engagement levels. Current research findings are guiding future workshop iterations.