Ohio State AI Fluency Initiative raises promise, but also peril
WATCH: How Ohio State business school is embracing AI learning
How the Fisher College of Business teaches AI in logistics and supply chain management class.
In January 2023, a couple of months after OpenAI released its generative artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT to the public, Vince Castillo decided to start an experiment.
Castillo, an assistant professor of logistics at Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business, had already been using machine learning in his work and research for a while. But generative AI opened a new world of possibilities.
So Castillo dubbed his classroom “Amsterdam for AI.” He encouraged his students to use ChatGPT in their work. Students could use AI for anything if they were transparent about how they used it.
The experiment was a lightbulb moment, Castillo said, seeing how powerful this technology could be for students and professionals alike. He heavily invested in learning about generative AI and even created his own chatbot to use in his logistics courses.
It became clear to Castillo that professors shouldn’t be trying to fight AI in the classroom. Rather, he said, they should embrace it — not purely out of interest but also out of necessity.
“It’s like a rocket without fins. It will lead you if you let it,” he said. “Education here is more important than ever.”
That need for more AI education is what prompted Ohio State to launch the AI Fluency Initiative.
Starting this academic year, Ohio State faculty and staff are encouraged to integrate AI education into every undergraduate’s core curriculum, the university announced in June 2025. The goal is that every student, regardless of major, starting with the Class of 2029, will be comfortable and competent with AI tools by graduation.
Former Ohio State President Ted Carter launched AI Fluency as part of his 10-year strategic plan, saying at the time that he wanted the university to be a leader is AI education.
Ravi Bellamkonda — then-Ohio State’s provost and now the university’s president after Carter’s sudden resignation earlier this spring — said at the program’s launch that AI Fluency will boost students’ AI literacy and push them to be “bilingual” in both their major field of study and in how AI applies to that area.
“Grounded with a strong sense of responsibility and possibility, we will prepare Ohio State’s students to harness the power of AI and to lead in shaping its future of their area of study,” Bellamkonda said.
AI is rapidly changing the education landscape and quickly becoming a regular facet of student life. A majority of U.S. teens say they use AI chatbots in some way to do school work, according to a recent Pew Research Center report. About six in 10 teens said they use chatbots to cheat in school at least somewhat often.
Despite widespread use, few universities have settled on institutional AI policies. A September 2025 UNESCO report found that of 400 American and international universities, 19% of respondents said their institutions already have a formal AI policy, while 42% reported that a framework is under development.
“Through AI Fluency, Ohio State is setting a new standard for AI-infused education — one where students don’t just learn about AI, but live in an AI-first educational environment that maximizes learning, creativity and impact,” according to one description on the Office of Academic Affairs’s website.
The initiative garnered plenty of national attention when it launched, along with some skepticism, particularly from faculty members.
Most university administrators and faculty agree that there needs to be institutional guidance and education around AI use. But that’s where the consensus ends.
University leaders say AI Fluency is necessary for this generation to be prepared for the workforce and that the initiative puts Ohio State on the cutting edge of AI education. But some professors say the initiative is rushed and hasn’t dutifully considered potential pitfalls like how to handle academic misconduct, increased energy use and data privacy.
Even faculty members who are in favor of AI and the initiative say they have lingering questions about how to navigate this uncharted territory.
“I feel like I’m being asked to teach driver’s ed, but the students have already been off-roading for three years,” said Jared Gardner, an English professor and Ohio State’s University Senate secretary.
‘There’s really no other way to do it’
Typically, an initiative the size and scope of AI Fluency at Ohio State would take months of task forces, planning, meetings, feedback, revisions and more meetings before finally going public.
That isn’t what happened with AI Fluency.
Much of that was by design, Bellamkonda told faculty and staff at a Data & AI Day at Ohio Stadium last August. It’s partly because the speed at which generative AI is advancing means there’s no time to waste.
Megan LePere-Schloop was enthusiastic about the AI Fluency announcement. LePere-Schloop, an associate professor in the John Glenn College of Public Affairs, has been teaching about machine learning in the public sector and nonprofits for years.
LePere-Schloop said she thinks the university is approaching AI Fluency in “a holistic way” in trying to embed AI in every major, not just in STEM fields. She was “intrigued” by the idea that every academic unit would work together to consider the question: “What does this look like in our context?”
“There are plenty of uses for generative AI in higher education beyond just trying Gemini,” she said, referring to Google’s AI chatbot.
The university developed six learning outcomes for the initiative that include:
- Explain foundational concepts such as AI, large language models and machine learning;
- Explore the potential benefits and limitations of common AI applications in the context of a field of study;
- Evaluate the types of inputs and outputs foundational to AI systems and explain how input form and quality influence output quality, performance and reliability;
- Use AI tools to accomplish specific goals in the field of study, and critically assess outputs for accuracy and relevance;
- Design innovative applications of AI within a discipline;
- Explore the implications — such as ethical, societal and environmental — of AI use and develop reasoned recommendations for responsible implementation within a field of study.
Shereen Agrawal — executive director of Ohio State’s Center for Software Innovation and associate vice president for student innovation and entrepreneurship — said each of Ohio State’s more than 180 undergraduate programs has “thoughtfully considered and developed a plan to embed these learning outcomes in their major pathways in ways that are specific to the discipline.”
Some programs have developed new courses, while others are editing or updating their courses to support AI applications. Agrawal also said more than 1,300 instructors, from graduate teaching associates to tenured professors, have participated in AI Fluency training programs offered by the Drake Institute for Teaching and Learning.
Despite the supports, LePere-Schloop recognizes that it can be challenging to have these kinds of thoughtful conversations, like what tools to use and how to talk about them with students, under a tight timeline.
LePere-Schloop gets why some might feel hesitant about implementing so much so quickly. But “hesitancy is a positive thing,” she said.
“We should be engaging with the hesitancy and recognizing that it’s not going away,” she said. “It’s our new reality… This is disruptive, but also we have agency.”
‘Humanistic fields are in a tough spot’
The pace at which AI Fluency was announced and implemented, however, has given other faculty members and education experts pause. Some faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences question not just if AI can be used in their courses, but rather if it should.
“Humanistic fields are in a tough spot,” said Jill Galvan, an associate professor of English.
Galvan regularly teaches courses on Victorian literature and culture, as well as 20th and 21st century fiction. Most of her class discussions and assignments require reading comprehension and critical analysis, something Galvan said she’s seen significantly decline since ChatGPT came on the scene.
There have always been students who try to cheat. But Galvan said since introducing AI Fluency, she’s seen more brazen use of AI chatbots to cheat than ever before.
“I was more depressed than ever last semester,” she said.
Galvan has not authorized her students to use generative AI in class. It’s not because she doesn’t see value in the technology — she’s seen some of her colleagues use it for research and data collection. Rather, Galvan feels strongly that generative AI has no place in her field.
The humanities — such as history, philosophy, literature and the arts — have been unwillingly thrust to the center of a debate about AI in academics. Some have mused whether too much focus on emerging technologies and workforce development will hang humanities courses out to dry. Who needs to learn how to write compelling essays, for instance, if a chatbot can do it for you?
“AI produces bland, graceful slop. There are no relationships between the sentences,” Galvan said of the assignments she reads written by AI. “I just know the output will be inferior to what my students can produce.”
Though he’s a proponent of the initiative, Castillo said one of the most-overlooked issues with AI education right now is over-reliance on the technology. He wants students to understand that the “magic” of generative AI isn’t always that deep.
“It’s pretty obvious when students use AI to write something or create a spreadsheet on Excel,” he said. “Ninety times out of 100, it lacks context… Students need to see the shortcomings.”
Agrawal said Ohio State is not requiring that AI Fluency be part of every course or every faculty member incorporate AI into their teaching, though she said there have been positive examples of AI use in the humanities.
Education experts beyond Ohio State have also criticized AI Fluency’s pace and mission.
John Warner, an education writer and editor, published an essay in Inside Higher Ed shortly after AI Fluency’s launch, calling it and others like it “hasty lurches into an uncertain AI future.”
Warner took particular issue with the idea of becoming “fluent” in AI.
“There are two important questions that go betting in this statement: Is working with AI in a field of study equivalent to learning a new language? And, if it is like a new language, what does fluency look like?” Warner wrote. “We don’t have answers to either of these questions. We don’t even know if they’re the right questions to ask because we don’t know if treating AI competency through the lens of fluency even makes sense!”
Justin Reich found similar concerns in Ohio State’s approach. Reich, a former high school history teacher who now teaches comparative media studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has studied education technology trends for more than a decade.
He penned an op-ed in the Chronicle of Higher Education with the blunt demand: “Stop Pretending You Know How to Teach AI.”
Reich told The Dispatch he thinks it is disingenuous for institutions to push “fluency” of emerging technologies.
“We don’t know how to teach about or with AI and we might not for a long time,” Reich said.
That doesn’t mean that universities shouldn’t experiment with technology and students shouldn’t explore, he said. But they should be doing so “with a great deal of humility.”
“If we flood the system with bad instruction and bad advice,” Reich said, “it’s hard to remove those bad practices later.”
AI’s long game
Bellamkonda recognizes that AI Fluency will not be an overnight success. Rather, this is a long game – a three- or four-year rollout, he said – that Ohio State is investing in sooner than later.
Given the sheer size and scale of Ohio State, Agrawal said the university is facing the challenges of “not only rolling out a massive educational program in AI Fluency but also more generally in how AI is impacting learning, research and organizations overall.”
AI Fluency is “a massive lift,” she said, but one that has “also spurred more organic activity and exploration across the campus.”
That said, Agrawal said there is more work and development to be done leading into next academic year. While the initiative is designed to “strengthen critical thinking,” she said educators are “seeing AI being used in ways unintended for the learning outcomes.”
“This can lead to disconnects between students and faculty, academic misconduct cases, and critical thinking offloading. We are taking deliberate steps to support our students and faculty on this,” she said.
Working with faculty is the biggest area where Ohio State needs to do better, Bellamkonda said,
“At this surface, this sounds like a student effort,” Bellamkonda said. “It’s actually a faculty effort. The faculty have to be comfortable because students know more about AI sometimes than the faculty do.”
That means investing more time and resources into faculty training on AI, as well as making clearer expectations around AI use in the classroom.
“When is it allowed to used? When are you not allowed to use? How will a student not get into trouble for using it?” Bellamkonda said. “All of these things we are putting in place. I would like each course to be coded: No AI, AI-friendly, AI-limited only in certain sections. I would like clarity for the students so they don’t get in trouble because it’s confusing.”
Bellamkonda said that colleges are working on “academic roadmaps” that will show how undergraduates will build and use AI skills within each major. The university will also invest in more resources and training opportunities and, as they become available, explore other AI products.
As for faculty members, many are adapting and preparing for more change.
Last spring, Castillo noticed that more of his students were using AI to complete their classwork and “overrelying on cognitive offloading.” In response, he raised his expectations and became stricter on what he wants.
Castillo said he hopes more faculty come to accept AI’s presence in education and learn to work with it.
“AI can do the tasks that were once bedrocks of the classroom — take-home essays, discussion boards, these are out,” he said. “Faculty need to revisit how we teach and what we’re teaching while maintaining our mission of teaching students how to interact with the world.”
Others are looking to turn back time, with some resorting to old-school testing models like blue books to combat AI in the classroom.
Galvan said she’s developed assignments she believes are AI-proof, like focusing more on logic and critical analysis of a text rather than summarizing and sharing personal reflections. At the start of the semester, she also encouraged her students to purchase physical textbooks and take notes on paper instead of using their laptops. Try it for two weeks, she said, and see if you like it.
Almost all of her students kept up with the tech-free approach.
So far, she’s seen more engagement from her students, who she said also express feeling “demoralized by being in a tech-saturate world.”
“The humanities are the humanities for a reason,” she said.
Higher education reporter Sheridan Hendrix can be reached at shendrix@dispatch.com and on Signal at @sheridan.120. You can follow her on Instagram at @sheridanwrites.
