Microsoft Copilot Evaluation Program: Application Extension

This project centers on the deployment of an AI chatbot to provide uninterrupted information assistance on campus, particularly during staff shortages due to vacations or illnesses. The initiative involves establishing kiosk stations that will serve as self-service points for students seeking immediate help. This AI-driven approach aims to facilitate access to essential information, with a special focus on financial aid, thereby enhancing the student experience and potentially boosting enrollment rates. Participants in this project will contribute to a technology that may address staffing challenges and foster self-help among students, ensuring that every inquiry is met with a prompt and accurate response.

Professional Area: Student Services
Evaluation Focus: Chatbot development
Copilots: Copilot Studio

This AI project will develop LEGO-style open educational resource (OER) components that ensure ease of use, high-quality content, and instructor customization. This approach is expected to significantly increase OER adoption and enhance Z-degree offerings. Resources aligned with culturally responsive pedagogies and learning science principles require substantial development time and labor. However, generative AI technologies like Microsoft Copilot can accelerate the creation of diverse educational materials, from images to interactive scenarios, ensuring they meet quality standards and are relevant to discipline-specific learning objectives. 

Professional Area: Open Educational Resources 
Evaluation Focus: OER educational content creation 
Copilots: M365 

The system office (Educational Development and Technology) and a few campuses rely on Brightspace data to inform administrative tasks, highlight student activity, and provide reporting information. This activity is to determine how Microsoft’s AI offerings can benefit or boost the effectiveness of data from Brightspace. Specifically, exploration will be focused on the ability to create PowerBI reports, leverage existing reports, or to analyze raw data to inform other processes (chatbots/search). Artificial intelligence will be used to find insights in a large amounts of data, or to assist report creators highlight relevant information. There is a large volume of Brightspace data for machine learning to use as the basis for a model. 

Professional Area: D2L Brightspace Administration 
Evaluation Focus: Data analysis 
Copilots: M365, Copilot for PowerBI 

This project enhances practical learning experiences and collaborative environments in physical education (PE) and graduate courses through technology augmentation. By integrating AI, this project aims to create more immersive and interactive assignments, such as detailed case scenarios in leadership education and video analysis tools in PE courses. This project seeks to maintain fundamental learning objectives while offering more engaging, collaborative, and data-driven experiences, preparing students for real-world challenges. 

Professional Area: Education, Teaching and Learning 
Evaluation Focus: Educational content creation 
Copilots: M365 

This project aims to bridge the institutional knowledge gap faced by nontraditional, low-income, and first-generation college students through an AI-assisted tool that provides personalized, just-in-time support. This tool will help students navigate their unique educational pathways by consolidating essential information such as registration deadlines, financial aid, scholarships, housing, counseling, and more. By leveraging data from previous students’ experiences and program-specific policies, the AI tool will offer real-time guidance and support for career development, enhancing the overall student experience. 

Professional Area: Guided Pathways 
Evaluation Focus: Chatbot development 
Copilots: Copilot Studio 

This project aims to enhance cultural competency among campus staff by developing a chatbot that suggests equity-minded professional development opportunities based on staff position descriptions. This AI-driven tool will help staff identify areas for growth, set SMART goals, and locate free, nationally-recognized resources or workshops, addressing the varied needs of different roles. 

Professional Area: Professional Development 
Evaluation Focus: Chatbot development 
Copilots: Copilot Studio 

This project will explore the use of AI tools to streamline degree planning and advising processes. By implementing AI to generate course schedules and degree plans, advisors can focus on meaningful conversations and career planning, improving the overall advising experience. This approach aims to provide students with a clear academic pathway early on, potentially increasing retention and graduation rates. 

Professional Area: Advising 
Evaluation Focus: Workflow productivity 
Copilots: M365 

This project will use Copilot for Microsoft 365 to streamline the creation of personalized, adaptive, and accessible learning materials for diverse student populations. This initiative aims to reduce the cognitive and time demands on instructors by leveraging AI to draft and transform content based on learner profiles into various formats, such as PowerPoint files. This approach will enhance student engagement and support by providing relevant and interactive materials, while allowing instructors to focus on the quality of learning experiences. 

Professional Area: Teaching and Learning 
Evaluation Focus: Educational content creation 
Copilots: M365 

This project will use AI to streamline the documentation of work-based learning for academic credit, addressing the time-intensive process faced by students and faculty. This AI-driven approach will provide scalable, personalized scaffolding for students, allowing faculty to focus on higher-level academic support and evaluation. By automating the documentation process, Copilot will enhance student self-directed learning and optimize faculty resources, aligning with goals of promoting student success, institutional efficiency, and educational equity. 

Professional Area: Work-based learning and assessment 
Evaluation Focus: Chatbot development 
Copilots: Copilot Studio 

We propose developing a virtual advising assistant using Copilot Studio and Power Automate Premium to enhance student-centered and equitable advising. This AI-driven tool will connect advisors to real-time information and processes, such as scholarship documentation, student housing, and deadlines, while automating tasks like updating advising records and drafting follow-up emails. By streamlining these processes, advisors can focus more on engaging with and supporting students. 

Professional Area: Advising 
Evaluation Focus: Chatbot development 
Copilots: Copilot Studio, Power Automate Premium  

This Science of Teaching and Learning (SOTL) project aims to enhance instructional effectiveness and student learning outcomes through evidence-based research. This initiative will leverage Microsoft CoPilot to expedite the qualitative analysis of approximately 270 narrative responses from licensure candidates, focusing on the use of generative AI in education. By comparing AI-driven analysis with traditional grounded theory methods, the project seeks to demonstrate the efficiency and potential of AI in educational research. Faculty not directly involved in the research will conduct the CoPilot analysis to ensure unbiased results. 

Professional Area: Science of Teaching and Learning (SOTL) 
Evaluation Focus: Qualitative textual analysis 
Copilots: M365 

This project aims to address the growing challenge of creating authentic and high-impact assessments in the wake of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, while also meeting the needs of underserved students and maintaining manageable instructor workflows. This project will evaluate the efficacy of Microsoft Copilot in designing instructional activities and assessment tools. By leveraging Copilot’s capabilities within OneDrive and other Microsoft tools, participants will enhance lesson plans, rubrics, and instructor evaluation processes. 

Professional Area: Teaching and Learning 
Evaluation Focus: Educational content creation 
Copilots: M365 

This project aims to enhance productivity by automating time-consuming administrative tasks through the use of AI tools like Microsoft Copilot. By automating routine activities such as scheduling meetings, drafting emails, developing marketing materials, writing grants, and generating reports, time can be freed up to focus on more strategic initiatives. This will enable us to improve program quality, enhance industry partnerships, and expand STEM education outreach. 

Professional Area: Industry 
Evaluation Focus: Workflow productivity 
Copilots: M365