How a Teaching-Focused Institution Approaches AI Literacy

University of Wales Trinity St. David (UWTSD) was founded in 1822, making it one of the oldest educational institutions in Wales. Today, UWTSD serves just under 15,000 students through four institutes on campuses in Swansea, Carmarthen, Cardiff, London, and Birmingham.

At the Institute of Inner-City Learning (IICL), comprising the London and Birmingham campuses, our students are at the center of all we do. We cater to nontraditional students, many of whom have been away from education for a significant amount of time, as well as students from some of the most disadvantaged areas and communities in our cities. With the aim of helping these students maximize their potential, we provide a friendly, supportive, and tailored learning environment, focused on courses in health and social care, business, and computing, at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. We equip our learners with the skills they need to thrive, both personally and professionally. In today’s world, those skills must include generative AI.

When it comes to the use of digital tools, particularly generative AI (GenAI), our library and digital skills team considers a variety of approaches to support and guide our students.

Using institution-wide guidance produced by our Academic Office, and with its support, our academic liaison librarian team has created two tutorials about the use of GenAI for our online infoskills (information literacy) program, with more planned. These tutorials are available to all students and staff, placing AI literacy—within the wider project of information literacy—at the heart of what we do.

We have a university-wide subscription to Microsoft Copilot, which we recommend to users as a strong GenAI tool for all knowledge levels and capabilities across our health and social care, business, and computing programs. We also highlight a number of other tools—such as Perplexity, Research Rabbit, and Elicit—though these are not officially endorsed by the university.

Alongside Microsoft Copilot, we introduce students to the GenAI tools that are included in our in-house systems and platforms we subscribe to—primarily, the Primo Research Assistant and the ProQuest eBook Central AI tool. Our students are sometimes surprised at how easy GenAI tools are to use, and shocked to learn that they are using similar tools on social media and everyday phone apps. The Birmingham library and digital skills team has also worked with the Student Union to run GenAI workshops as part of our termly Skills Week event, which focuses on preparing students for the world of work. In feedback on these workshops, students have highlighted an increase in confidence, a genuine curiosity to explore independent learning in the area, and the beginnings of ideas for how they might apply AI tools to their own subject areas.

One of the most important elements of what we do, outside of providing student support, is ensuring our staff feel fully supported in developing their own GenAI knowledge.

The university-wide guidance from our Academic Office provides the basis for all of our staff support. One of the main ways in which they share this guidance, as well as ongoing updates, is through our internal virtual learning environment, which features the guidance as a whole as well as information for lecturers to share with students and lists of GenAI tools they recommend and others to avoid. I’ve personally found this to be an invaluable resource for my work with both staff and students; the fact that this information is free to access for all staff is extremely useful.

We’ve also offered staff a range of training opportunities, many of which were run by our digital skills advisors—a group of trained specialists who are part of the wider library team. We’ve promoted LinkedIn Learning and Microsoft Learn (both subscriptions are paid for by the University) for independent self-study, alongside practical workshops and “online play days,” which offered staff the opportunity to participate in specialist-led workshops. These sessions have included an introduction Microsoft Co-Pilot for beginners, an intermediate level training on how GenAI can be used to support students in the classroom, and, for advanced users, a community of practice session focused on the university-wide guidance and case studies. One of the attendees at an online play day session shared in their feedback that the opportunity to “just try things out without an end goal/objective was extremely helpful” and made them “feel much more confident.” During these workshops, staff were directed to the library online infoskills program as a resource for ongoing support of their own and their students’ development.

Campus leaders in Birmingham have surveyed the use of GenAI across learning and teaching, showing how faculty and staff are building on the library’s work. For example, instructors are including checklists in assignment outlines that specify, as relevant, whether GenAI can be used for proofreading, research, structure, writing, creativity, and programming. Others are including GenAI in teaching materials. Professional services staff are using AI tools to streamline workflow processes and create visual content for social media and on-campus advertising.

A survey sent to all staff showed not just the possibilities of these tools but also their current limits: for example, some lecturers attempted to use GenAI tools for lesson planning. Although AI tools helped them develop lesson plans more quickly, the lesson plans the tools generated lacked the specific detail and subject knowledge that a teacher would be able to include, as well as the personalization necessary to meet learners’ needs. This is a useful lesson for the library as we continue to support staff in the developing skills in this area, as it shows both where staff are trying to use GenAI and areas we should consider for further training and research.

As we move forward, we face numerous challenges in our work with both students and staff.

Our students join our university with a range of digital skill levels. We must support not only absolute beginners but also those working at a more advanced level. While our current offerings do discuss the ethics and bigger picture issues raised by GenAI, it’s important that we continue to develop our students’ and staff’s awareness of these issues. We also need to figure out how to keep up with developments within GenAI—a dynamic and rapidly changing sector—to ensure our students are ready to enter the working world.

At the same time, we must continue to provide opportunities for our staff members to build their own knowledge and confidence. Many of them have expressed a keen interest in keeping up with GenAI news and developments; we can help by highlighting useful and timely resources. In the current financial climate, we’re paying particularly close attention to the question of whether those GenAI tools that are currently free or operate with a credit limit will end up behind paywalls.

Important discussions are unfolding across the education sector about how GenAI may affect learning. But our practical approach is proving effective for our student and staff community by giving them the opportunity to learn, try out, and apply GenAI skills with support from specialist staff, whatever their level of digital capability. This is particularly important for our nontraditional students, who understand GenAI skills as essential to their employability. GenAI is transforming academia and the world of work, but at UWTSD, we are simply doing what we’ve always done: meeting our students’ needs.