Abstract:

The higher education response to generative AI (GenAI) over its first year of widespread availability has been dominate by the problems faced in assessment on accredited undergraduate and graduate degree courses. Universities providing professional development to adults, primarily through short courses involve very different assessment regimes, generally unconstrained by accreditation. Unlike parts of the USA, there is ongoing growth in several European countries in initiatives around equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI), and these appear to be particularly well suited to being underpinned by GenAI (Taylor,2022; Forrester and Boothe, 2023). Three application streams form the heart of our deployment of GenAI to provide innovative pedagogy in EDI, specifically for the professional development of leaders.

1) The business school has authored and deployed online role playing simulations using GenAI. These are in the form of a soap opera with a setting (a large business), a cast of characters and weaknesses in expertise or other resources to be able to resolve wicked problems or even begin a change management process. This works well for mapping approaches to contested problems where there is not necessarily “one right answer”. Its first application using GenAI in the EDI field concerns microaggressions in a fictional university and involved a four way conversation between those with different perspectives. ChatGPT3.5 has coped very well indeed
2) An executive team of 6 decision makers can be faced with a realistic (or even real) in-house problem, potentially with high risk outcomes. For example, there is active hostility in the organisation in relation to unacceptable pay differentials between men and women, involving quite senior women managers.. A role play simulation using GenAI enables strong emotions on both sides to be explored.
3) There are already many applications of GenAI to address the administrative aspects of onboarding new staff. But what really matters in onboarding is not the content of policy documents, but how staff generally and managers in particular do and don't apply or even remember the core organisational values. This stream lends itself well to "ordinary" employees being seconded to the content development team, who can deploy fictional (but authentic) dialogues to express underlying real feelings of themselves and others.

One key benefit of the above approach deploying GenAI within professional development is that managers and leaders can engage with applications of AI in learning about EDI which are about far more than replacing administrative work, but rather are used to underpin high-level learning and change.

References:
[1] Forrester, C. and Boothe, K. (2023) Generative AI in Academic Writing, Ethical Recommendations. Waterloo, Canada, https://doi.org/DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.14085.52966.
[2] Global Learning (2023) Ready for Anything: 2023 Global Leadership Development Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Publishing.
[3] Mollick, E. (2023) Reshaping the tree: rebuilding organizations for AI, One Useful Blog Thing, 27 November. .
[4] Sabzalieva, E. and Valentini, A. (2023) ChatGPT and artificial intelligence in higher education: quick start guide. Paris: UNESCO
[5] Taylor, C. (2022). UI offers new voluntary online training for faculty and staff to cultivate a more inclusive campus community. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion - The University of Iowa, 20 September 2022

Keywords:

GenAI, Executive Education, Professional Development, Role-play, collaborative ecosystem.