AI literacy is becoming increasingly important and most educational centres are still considering how to best equip their teachers and their students with the necessary skills to address changes in their field and in the labour market in general.

The University of Florida’s AI Across the Curriculum Program aims to revolutionize higher education by offering a comprehensive and interdisciplinary approach to AI literacy for every undergraduate student (Southworth et al., 2023). The initiative involves collaboration across all 16 UF colleges, with additional AI faculty hires, and a focus on preparing students for the real-world workplace environment. The program focuses on fostering AI skills, knowledge, societal awareness, and improved communication about AI, aiming to cultivate successful digital citizens and global collaborators. The intellectual output of the program is envisioned to provide a model for innovative pedagogy that can be adapted to various campus-wide initiatives beyond AI.

The AI literacy framework comprises five categories the first four of which reflect courses with more than 50% AI-related content while the fifth which have a lower AI-related content but allow the development of skills that enable AI use (Figure 1). More specifically the categories are the following:

1. Knowing and Understanding AI: understanding the basics of AI, knowledge of machine learning algorithms, awareness of the data used to train AI systems, recognizing limitations and biases in AI systems.
2. Using and Applying AI: ability to use AI tools and platforms, problem-solving and task accomplishment with AI, coding and programming skills, working with large datasets.
3. Evaluating and Creating AI: assessing the quality and reliability of AI systems, designing and building ethical and fair AI systems, deep understanding of technical aspects of AI, consideration of social and ethical implications.
4. AI Ethics: understanding the moral and ethical implications of AI, making informed decisions about AI use, considering fairness, transparency, and accountability, reflecting on potential impacts of AI on society and individuals.
5. Enabling AI: academic courses supporting AI through related knowledge and skill development, programming, and statistics.

This comprehensive framework provides a structured approach to developing a broad range of AI skills and knowledge for students. These categories are an adaptation of those presented by Ng et al. (2021).

Figure 1.

The five categories of the  AI Literacy Framework

Source: Southworth et al. (2023), adapted from Ng et al. (2021).

 

Disclaimer: ChatGPT 3.5 was used to revise/improve the text.

Southworth, J., Migliaccio, K., Glover, J., Reed, D., McCarty, C., Brendemuhl, J., & Thomas, A. (2023). Developing a model for AI Across the curriculum: Transforming the higher education landscape via innovation in AI literacy. Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence, 4, 100127. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.caeai.2023.100127

Ng, D. T. K., Leung, J. K. L., Chu, S. K. W., & Qiao, M. S. (2021). Conceptualizing AI literacy: An exploratory review. Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence, 2, 100041. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.caeai.2021.100041