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When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, ASU turned the crisis into a catalyst for digital transformation. Gonick recounts how the sudden shift to remote learning rapidly upskilled faculty, forced creative problem-solving, and unlocked a new level of digital confidence across the institution. What began as a survival effort became a foundation for long-term innovation, paving the way for future advances in teaching and technology.
The opportunity to drive online education starts with the mission of the organization and the design aspirations. It's not the answer for every institution, at a moment in time or in a context that might be local. At ASU, coming through COVID, we realize that as dramatic and disruptive a moment in time as it was that we could not only find a way to survive that moment in terms of delivering education, we could actually take advantage of that moment, what we call here at ASU, an antifragile approach not only to try to survive, but thrive through and to take this as a moment to disrupt. So at ASU, what we did is make available all the supports that faculty would need to essentially flip their instructional delivery for an unknown period of time, and saw that as an opportunity to actually introduce well over half of the faculty who had no interest in, or perhaps were even resistant to, the use of technology in their face-to-face experience.
And what evolved very quickly was faculty having an experience —most of it constructive — in terms of how to use technology to help students when there was no choice but to leverage it, and to work with all of the tools and all of the support services that our team, and the team that's responsible for online education at EdPlus, and all of the local supports that are at the college level to gain familiarity, to gain insight into sort of a literacy or on how the tools themselves can function, and to experiment, because we had no choice but to experiment in that moment in time.
And coming out of COVID, we now have a very technologically literate faculty who are demonstrably not only interested in technology, but are leaning in. So, specifically, we supported 100% of the faculty through COVID in being able to learn how to use our set of technologies based on Zoom, but with all kinds of other technology augmentation along the way.
When we introduced the opportunity to explore and to experiment with AI, we thought that there would be probably 50 to 100 faculty who would be our champions. That was, after all, our tried and true formula: find the 50 or 100 champions, invest in them, and actually then we would see our ability to drive in diffuse technology into the faculty experience.
That's not what happened. What happened was a carryover from COVID. We were overwhelmed. Over 3,000 faculty on their own with no compensation, with no incentive, put their hands up to actually have experience in a set of instructional materials that ourselves and the team from EdPlus, our online team and the Provost Office here put together to actually familiarize themselves, drawing on their own experience, I think during COVID that this was a way of staying up with what the technology was doing and to begin to explore and to experiment and to discover themselves what opportunities there might be associated with AI. We ran an internal grant program challenging our faculty to come up with ideas that could impact their teaching, their research activities, and their engagement with the students. And over 700 projects were funded. We had thousands of submissions, which speaks to the idea of how to actually engage the faculty in a program in a campaign, in an ongoing effort to overcome some of the inhibition, some of the concerns around the role of the faculty going forward in a way that is self-reinforcing and actually peer driven faculty to faculty.