These schools don’t fear artificial intelligence. They put it to work

A year and a half ago, in the wake of ChatGPT’s enormously popular release, instructors at every educational level rushed to understand how the coming onslaught of artificial intelligence might transform their field, even disrupt it. “Folks in higher education were absolutely scrambling,” says Andrew Maynard, professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University, in Phoenix (No. 40 on Ignition Schools ‘24). “It was almost like organized panic.”

But before long, at innovation-focused programs across the academic spectrum, panic gave way to experimentation and even optimism. With no playbook to follow, forward-thinking educators from across the country improvised—not just by replacing assignments that ChatGPT could solve with ones it could not but also by updating their curricula to teach practical uses for the technology in the classroom.

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It quickly dawned on ASU’s Maynard that we were entering a new era of work life in which workers in nearly every industry must possess radically new skills to survive—including effectively deploying AI and adapting alongside the technology. So he took to—where else?—ChatGPT and in a matter of hours developed the syllabus for an online course on the art and science of instructing large language models, known as prompt engineering.

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