New center at CWI helps students, staff learn to use AI as educational tool

When cameras were first invented in the 1800s, large portions of the populace feared the image-capturing technology thinking it would steal their souls.

Fast forward around 200 years later and cameras are a part of everyday life. As new technologies emerge, people can be slow to adopt them due to what some call “tech hysteria.” Artificial intelligence is not immune.

But a new partnership between a Treasure Valley school and business is aiming to change that.

The College of Western Idaho (CWI) opened the doors on its AI Literacy Center at the beginning of the semester in the Nampa Academic Building. The school teamed up with Meridian-based GuardRailz AI to provide students, faculty and staff with guidance on how to use the newer technology in an educational setting.

It’s part of the school’s goal to stay at the forefront of tools and technology that will only help create opportunities for students to achieve the most out of their education and careers.

“Artificial Intelligence is clearly a transformative advancement that will shape all our lives,” said Gordon Jones, the president of CWI, in a statement. “As a college dedicated to student learning, we strive to provide not only traditional knowledge but also the latest insights from emerging technologies like AI. We’re excited to lean into how Ai can inform, educate and advance the work of our students and faculty.”

Sitting on 100 acres in Nampa, the CWI Academic Building and the AI Literacy Center are examples of how the school is growing to serve a diverse population looking for a diversity of educational opportunities. Behind the building is the Health Science Building, adjacent to the Student Success Center that’s under construction. Nearby is the Ag Science Building.

The foray into AI came from the efforts of Gigi Smith, CWI’s director of the Writing Center and AI Literacy Center. Her work in the Writing Center and seeing the importance of AI as a tool inspired her to lobby for the new literacy center.

“We teach students to articulate, defend and critically reason, and that is why I had this idea not to long ago,” she said. “Something like widespread AI literacy could really dovetail into a writing center structure.”

Smith credits the leadership at CWI with creating an AI committee early on to see how it could benefit students. Along with Jones and others, she credits Courtney Colby Bond, dean of the Center for Teaching and Learning, for making the new center a reality.

“[Bond] also became a critical player in this and bought in and said, ‘We need to have an enterprise-level tool so that we can really mainstream teach faculty and students to work with this technology,” Smith said. “That’s how we got introduced to GuardRailz and piloted college-wide access to a safe, secure, advanced AI technology environment that all students and all faculty now have access to.”

GuardRailz AI, only a couple years old, is already making big strides in the educational AI market. It partners with schools in about seven districts in Idaho and is working with schools in California, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Utah, said co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Brian Jagger.

The company provides an AI platform to community colleges such as CWI and kindergarten through 12th grade school. Though Jagger said he had a previous connection with Jones, his company submitted a request for bid in the competitive process. Part of the reason he believes GuardRailz secured the partnership is due to its dedication to the educational market.

GuardRailz utilizes various AI models to help both students and faculty learn to use the technology.

“GuardRailz uses a combination of 12 different large language models and over 20 different media models, so it’s not just ChatGPT or Quad or some of the other large-name platforms, we use all of those in combination to give the best results,” Jagger said. “We use a different model for a math equation than we might for a writing prompt because they have different strengths, and it’s part of our job to help make sure that we’re always giving the students and educators the best responses based on what the most current models are.”

AI still requires human oversight and the GuardRailz platform has safeguards built in to make sure that students are held accountable for the work they submit. In what’s called assessment mode, students upload their work and the AI doesn’t necessarily grade the paper, but it asks the student questions to determine comprehension of the subject matter. Which also determines if the student wrote the paper him or herself.

Jagger said he believes that his company is also the only AI platform in the U.S. that has received the Federal Trade Commission’s Safe Harbor seal, the organization’s “most stringent student data safety regulations” stamp of approval.

Partnering with CWI is a big achievement for the tech company, but for Jagger, he’s thrilled that the school is using AI to benefit its staff and students.

“I’m really proud that CWI is taking a leadership role, not just in Idaho, but nationally,” he said.

For Smith, though she is ecstatic about the fruition of the school’s work to open the center, her work is about much more. She was a student of CWI herself, earning her associate’s degree through the school. She went on to study at Boise State University, earning her bachelor’s and then master’s degrees. Her goal is to provide students with as many opportunities possible to help them achieve their success.

Her work to reach students and provide them with opportunities has helped launch the AI Literacy Center and gained international exposure. In April, she will travel to an international conference to share the blueprint for how the center was developed in hopes that other schools, even those with limited resources, can develop their own programs.

“I want to be able to reach as many students as possible all the time, whatever it is they might be struggling with,” she said. “Even if they’re not struggling with something academically, but they don’t feel part of a community.”