In Summer 2024, Fort Lewis College launched the groundbreaking AI Summer Institute to build AI capacity and knowledge, while putting new ideas and learning into action. This summer program, which laid the foundation for the FLC AI Institute, offered students the opportunity to work with faculty and staff mentors to build AI tools specifically for FLC.

One student-faculty team, made up of students Alma Alejandre (Studio Art) and Tim Fuchs (Sports Administration), and Assistant Professor of Health & Human Performance Mark Beattie, focused on leveraging AI to support the Student Life department and pilot custom-built Chat GPTs aimed at improving student services. The team decided to focus on key areas of student life and engagement, including housing, campus recreation, and the Student Union. By automating responses to frequently asked questions, the team hoped to reduce the time staff spent answering routine inquiries, while also providing students with immediate access to critical information.

The project kicked off with data collection, drawing from publicly available resources and interviews with FLC staff. With this data in hand, they built custom AI assistants for each area, uploading the data into the system and fine-tuning the AI’s responses.

Testing was a critical part of the process. The team developed a list of frequently asked questions (FAQs) for each service area, prompting the AI assistants with these questions and scoring their responses on a scale of 1 to 5 for accuracy. Two rounds of testing were conducted, with any responses that scored a mean below 4 being revised. The team also made iterative adjustments to the AI assistants to improve their performance and ensure the answers were clear, concise, and tailored to the student experience.

While the custom Chat GPTs have not yet been deployed campus-wide, the testing phase yielded promising results. The team sensed enthusiasm from stakeholders and collaborators for the utility of the AI assistants as a student engagement tool.

“It would have saved me a lot of time–looking for resources, looking for events, looking for who to get in touch with to answer whatever question I needed. It would have been interesting to have an interactive tool like this that I could use to look into my interests all in the same place without having to schedule a meeting with someone to ask all these questions. I think that if I had this it would have really made my freshman year a lot easier.”

— Tim Fuchs reflecting on how an AI assistant, like the team developed, would have improved his first-year student experience.

This pilot project is just the beginning of what promises to be an exciting new chapter in the use of AI for higher education. As AI technology evolves, the FLC AI Institute is committed to staying at the forefront of this transformation, using innovative solutions to improve the student experience and better support the campus community.

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