Rice partners with Google to launch Gemini for Education campuswide

Rice adopts Google's generative AI to enhance student learning and faculty support

Rice University has partnered with Google for Education to bring Gemini for Education and NotebookLM to students, faculty and staff. The goal is straightforward: personalize learning, boost creativity and make day-to-day academic work more efficient.

All faculty and staff now have access to FERPA-compliant Gemini and NotebookLM through their Rice accounts. Both tools are managed within Rice's secure Google Workspace for Education domain, with data controls kept by the university.

What's available now

• Gemini for Education: An AI assistant that summarizes content, sparks ideas, speeds up writing, and supports research. It can quickly distill academic papers and produce insight-focused summaries.
• NotebookLM: Works with your own sources - PDFs, documents, links, and transcripts - to synthesize information, surface connections, and help you draft material grounded in your references.

How Rice is rolling it out

Google for Education visited campus on Sept. 10 for hands-on sessions. Hundreds of students attended Gemini Academy, a training led by Google product experts.

At the same time, a six-hour pop-up in the Academic Quad delivered live demos and practical tips to more than 1,000 students. Faculty joined a lunch-and-learn focused on applying these tools to course design and instruction.

Why this matters for educators

• Lesson planning and materials: Draft outlines, adapt reading levels, and generate examples or checks for understanding in minutes.
• Differentiation: Create alternate explanations, scaffolds, or practice sets for mixed-ability classrooms.
• Research support: Summarize articles, compare viewpoints across sources, and pull key citations for literature reviews.
• Student learning: Guide brainstorming, structure projects, and turn notes into study plans while keeping academic integrity front and center.
• Time savings: Automate routine writing and feedback so you can spend more time on instruction and mentoring.

Responsible use, privacy and security

Gemini for Education use at Rice is FERPA-compliant, and conversations are not used to train Google's models. Administrators retain control over data and settings within Rice's Workspace for Education domain.

For context on student privacy, see the U.S. Department of Education's FERPA resources: studentprivacy.ed.gov. For Google for Education's trust and privacy overview, visit edu.google.com/trust.

What the campus is saying

Leadership notes that this effort supports collaboration across teaching, research, and administrative work, with a clear emphasis on responsible AI and practical impact in the classroom.

Students echoed the value of learning how to use AI well. "Responsible AI is such a big, new tool that a lot of students might not understand the best way to use it in a way that's most beneficial to them," said Grace Andrews, a fifth-year architecture student. "Everyone is using AI anyway, so to learn more about it and be more informed sounds like a good initiative."

First-year student Molly Wladis added, "This is going to be a useful tool, especially as I enter the next few years of my education and career … I'm excited to see how these stronger, high quality AI platforms make their way into my academic life."

"I'm glad Rice is proactive about this learning tool," said sophomore Owen McCulloch. "It is important that students know how to use it as a tool and not as a crutch, because then that just limits learning."

How to put this into practice this semester

• Use Gemini to draft lesson outlines, rubrics, and exemplar responses; then refine with your subject expertise.
• Upload course readings to NotebookLM to generate study guides, question banks, and cross-source syntheses for seminars.
• Model academic integrity by showing students when and how AI assistance is allowed in your course, with clear policies.
• Start small: pick one unit or assignment to redesign with AI-assisted workflows and measure the time you save.

Next steps

Faculty and staff can sign in with their Rice accounts to access Gemini and NotebookLM. Training and guidance will continue as the university builds digital citizenship and AI fluency across campus.

If you're planning professional development in this area, explore curated AI course options by role at Complete AI Training.