University of Nebraska campuses are taking a human-centered approach to artificial intelligence as the technology reshapes classrooms and the workforce across the state. The University of Nebraska Artificial Intelligence Institute, launched following recommendations from a system-wide task force, is designed to coordinate AI efforts across the university's four campuses while addressing the ethical and practical challenges the technology presents.
About 90% of college students use AI occasionally in class, according to an Instructure survey, and roughly 60% of educators report using the technology. The Nebraska system responded to this rapid adoption by forming a task force that recommended creating the AI Institute to provide centralized leadership on the topic.
"The genie called AI is out of the bottle, so we've got to figure out how to work with it now," said Santosh Pitla, co-director of the institute and a professor of biological and agricultural engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. "There are a lot of gaps in knowledge across communities, whether it's the university community or our industry partners, community colleges, or other entities."
Different disciplines, common ground
The institute's two co-directors represent the range of AI's uses. Pitla works in engineering and agriculture, while Adrian Wisnicki is an English professor focused on digital humanities. Their partnership is deliberate - the university's executive vice president wanted leadership that could "engage with and speak to and support" the diversity of the campus, Wisnicki said.
Jude Fogarty, the new assistant director, has joined the co-directors in visiting each campus to document how faculty are using AI already. At the University of Nebraska at Omaha, for instance, students can interact with a life-sized avatar of Chancellor Li, handle various robots, and explore exhibits on the ethical dimensions of AI.
At UNL, the College of Engineering hosted workshops with Google, Nelnet, and The Prairie Initiative focused on AI. "It was just like two weeks of intense AI discussions, but also hands-on workshops," Pitla said. "These are some tangible things, hopefully, we can support and co-sponsor in the future."
Classroom decisions vary by institution
Creighton University in Omaha took nine months to change AI policies for its Magier Core Curriculum, followed by a year of implementation. Some classes now use AI in coursework - a history professor had students generate a hoax and then prove it false using historical methods, and nursing professors created a chatbot to help students practice difficult patient conversations.
George McHendry Jr., director of the Magier Core Curriculum, said Creighton leaves AI policies to individual professors. He uses AI-generated images in his own courses to discuss misinformation. "Some are really embracing it. They're excited about the potential. Others hate it and get mad when I tell them I want you to try and use it, and most students are in between," he said.
The College of Saint Mary has taken a more centralized approach. Chief AI Officer Jeff Keit confirmed the CLEAR framework - Critical, Literacy, Equipped, Active, Responsible - and uses Open Web UI, a chatbot that routes to a private Microsoft system rather than a public model, to protect student and faculty data.
Keite said faculty use the tool to adapt lectures for different learning styles, like checking how content works for visual learners or students who speak English as a second language. "Could they do that themselves? Sure. It's a three-month project," he said. "AI can knock it out in an hour."
A survey of College of Saint Mary students showed that students were critical of professors using AI - even skeptical - and wanted to know they were being evaluated by a person. "They would come to the campus their freshmen year wired to think that any AI use was cheating," Keit said.
A human-first approach remains the goal
All four Nebraska campuses already have policies banning AI use for cheating or plagiarism. Pitla said some institutions are focused on ensuring students still use critical thinking skills. "If students are using just AI and not using their critical thinking skills, that's a big problem," he said.
The institute team is creating a directory of all AI researchers, teachers, and outreach workers across the campuses to connect people working on similar challenges. "Where we have multiple perspectives, multiple forms of expertise, multiple frameworks of reference, we create knowledge and solutions that are better and more innovative than we would on our own," Fogarty said.
Why this matters for educators
Educators across Nebraska and beyond are wrestling with the pace of change the technology demands. Fogarty said AI requires everyone - faculty, administrators, students - to reconsider what they're trying to accomplish and how they teach. For educators trying to keep up, AI for Secondary School Teachers courses offer concrete strategies for adapting classroom practices and assessments in the age of AI. The starting point, as Fogarty puts it, is the same for every institution: "It does require all of us to rethink how we're approaching our work, what our real goals are for what we're doing, and how we're doing it."
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