2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In the last decade, there has been an increasing trend in higher education to collaborate with industry professionals on research, projects, curriculum development and teaching at universities [1]. One of many benefits of this collaboration is to bridge the gap between textbook theories and real-world practices. Studies have shown that courses taught by professors that come from an industry background received higher perceived career-readiness from students [2]; learning under the guidance of industry experts, who bring in pragmatic knowledge and tools that are immediately applicable in the workplace, gives students a competitive advantage for better employability [3].
While industry experts bring in their unique insights and relevant skill-sets that are highly in demand in the job market, challenges lie within many aspects when they enter the academic environment [4]. Their teaching strategy might lack appropriate pedagogy. Most of them do not have the opportunity to go through training/workshops that are tailored to full-time faculty. Additionally, due to the nature of their part-time teaching position, it is also difficult to keep up with administrative tasks and navigate the constantly changing university policies and processes. It is for the best interest of the students that universities and programs minimize or remove those obstacles by providing timely and quality support to help these industry professors transition into their teaching career, prevent feelings of frustration or disengagement, and to set them up for success.
The Master of Engineering Technical Management (METM) is an online graduate program designed for working professionals in the engineering technical management fields [5]. Among the current 34 faculty members, only two (~6%) are full-time university employees, and 94% are working outside of the university, most who “grew up” in a corporate environment before they started teaching in academia. Faculty onboarding consists of three main parts: a) course design onboarding that happens months before the upcoming semester; b) Human Resources (HR) onboarding for university employees; and c) learning management system (LMS) onboarding. As the program grows (larger enrollment, larger pool of industry talent), there comes a rising need to scale up and streamline faculty support.
This WIP paper aims at exploring the best approach to help industry experts transition to their instructor role in a university setting, using a case study methodology to look at the faculty onboarding & support mechanism in the METM program. The authors will leverage generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) tools to create an interactive virtual assistant that can help industry professors, especially those who just joined the university appointment, find their teaching-related answers accurately and quickly. This AI assistant will be trained with knowledge base documents that are originally in non-interactive format, that covers (but not limited to) the aforementioned three-part onboarding.
This study will describe the creation of the AI assistant, compare different options, conduct user (faculty) testing, and discuss their first-hand experience of the tailored support. The majority of current research has been focusing on student-use cases and instructional design aspect of teacher-use cases; little to none has been completed on the administrative aspect, which leaves a gap for this study to fill. The result of this study will shed new light on how Gen AI technology could potentially improve the existing faculty support mechanism to meet the growing demand, as well as share a path forward for other institutions and programs facing similar challenges.