College Students Learn Artificial Intelligence and Workforce Skills
CCNY
Students collaborate on academic work in a photograph published by the City College of New York. The image accompanies CCNY's announcement of a $3.5 million U.S. Department of Education grant supporting ai4CCNY, a five-year initiative to expand artif
The City College of New York has received a $3.5 million U.S. Department of Education grant to expand artificial intelligence education and workforce preparation over five years. The initiative, called ai4CCNY, will integrate AI literacy across academic disciplines, including engineering, humanities, education and the arts. Plans include a three-credit general education course, free introductory bridge courses for students and professional development workshops for faculty. Led by senior university administrators and faculty, the program aims to strengthen academic outcomes, improve career readiness and establish a model that could eventually be adopted across other City University of New York campuses.
$3.5M U.S. DOE grant to boost AI education at CCNY
The new 'ai4CCNY' program will advance AI education and workforce preparedness for students at CCNY.
The City College of New York is the recipient of a $3.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education for a five-year program to advance AI education and workforce preparedness for students entering an AI-infused economy, and for faculty in their teaching and research activities.
Dubbed ‘ai4CCNY,’ the program will support the integration of AI literacy skills and concepts into teaching and learning practices in both STEM and non-STEM divisions of CCNY, including science, humanities and arts, engineering, social sciences, education, architecture, and interdisciplinary studies.
“We believe that implementing a general education AI essentials course as part of curricula will improve educational outcomes for students, including understanding operations of AI tools, applications of AI in different disciplines, and prepare them to adapt to overall AI literacy and competence effort,” said Dee Dee Mozeleski, CCNY’s Senior Vice President of the Office of Institutional Advancement, Communications and External Relations, who leads the project.
A general education AI [GenEd-AI] essentials course will be offered as part of the CCNY curricula to improve educational outcomes and deepen workforce readiness for the students. The three-credit course will focus on demystifying underlying AI mechanisms through a set of hands-on examples from real-life applications in different disciplines, far beyond simply interacting with existing AI tools.
The ai4CCNY initiative is organized around three mutually reinforcing institutional goals:
- To strengthen academic programs;
- Improve institutional management capacity; and
- To support long-term fiscal stability and self-sufficiency.
The program will measure impact by the development of student bridge pathways, the launch of the GenEd-AI, and the number of students who enroll following the implementation of the program.
Gaps in computational backgrounds will be alleviated by a set of free-of-charge non-credit self-paced bridge courses. For CCNY faculty, a set of asynchronous professional development workshops will be developed for AI fundamentals, ethics and compliance.
Expected project outcomes include measurable improvements in institutional retention, graduation rates, and workforce placement, said M. Ümit Uyar, professor in CCNY’s Grove School of Engineering with expertise in AI and a co-leader of the project. “Crucially, CCNY will spearhead this effort system-wide by utilizing ai4CCNY as a scalable template across CUNY campuses,” he added.
CCNY Provost Tony M. Liss is ai4CCNY’s other co-leader.
Source: The City College of New York
