Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Ai And Free Expression topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
UW Board hears free‑expression report and sees live VR/AI teacher‑training demonstration at Whitewater
Summary
Board members received the annual academic freedom and free‑expression report from the Wisconsin Institute for Citizenship and Civil Dialogue and witnessed a live virtual‑reality/AI avatar demo showing how trainee teachers practice responding to student misconceptions.
Board members at the Universities of Wisconsin meeting in Whitewater received the system’s 2025 annual report on academic freedom and free expression and saw a live demonstration of immersive VR and AI being used in teacher training.
Michael Ford, director of the Wisconsin Institute for Citizenship and Civil Dialogue (WICCID), said the institute collected campus self‑reports showing 264 activities tied to free‑expression programming and 51,541 total event attendances; he cautioned that the attendance number counts repeat attendance and the data are self‑reported by campuses. Ford also said campuses reported 17 student complaints and three complaints against employees related to free expression or related conduct; he pointed board members to a detailed attachment that lists each complaint and resolution.
Chris Patton, vice president for university relations, and Ford described WICCID’s grant program (approximately $180,000 annually) that funds civil‑dialogue trainings and related student and faculty activities across campuses, and highlighted online orientation modules used at multiple campuses for incoming students.
The meeting then turned to a live instructional demonstration hosted by UW–Whitewater. Interim Provost Robin Fox introduced Dr. John Spike (special assistant to the provost for AI), Dr. Azgul Kartel (associate professor of mathematics education) and student Jessica Patterson for a real‑time simulation with an AI avatar named Damien. The demonstration showed the avatar listening to a trainee, converting speech to text, applying a GPT model to reason about the response, and returning audio replies within seconds. Presenters said the system is not prerecorded: responses vary each time to provide authentic practice for pre‑service teachers.
Dr. Kartel described how VR and the avatar replicate classroom moments—misconception and confusion—and provide low‑risk, repeatable practice for novice teachers to improve questioning, scaffolding, and confidence. UW–Whitewater representatives said they have established a Center for Ethical AI Integration to pilot enterprise EDU licenses (which keep data in‑house), run pilot platforms that aim to show transparent AI usage and develop assessment approaches that compare student outputs with AI outputs to identify learning gaps.
Regents asked about barriers to campus adoption, faculty upskilling, the cost of compute resources and ethical considerations. Presenters said common barriers include resource constraints and faculty concerns about ethical use; they pointed to pilot programs, off‑the‑shelf programming, and shared use cases as ways to scale successful practices across campuses.
The public portion of the meeting closed after questions about the technology and plans to showcase additional campus AI work at the board’s February meeting.
