UIC Associate Director of Academic Technology and Learning Innovation Contributes to AI-Themed Book

The chapter examines how AI technologies, chatbots, AI assistants, and AI agents, are transforming student support and academic advising in higher education. It frames this progression with an original taxonomy and concludes by calling for a campus-wide culture of technological optimism balanced with ethical guardrails, aligned with the U.S. Department of Education’s 2025 vision for AI-supported student advising.

Key topics include:

• UIC’s early AI work: The chapter highlights UIC’s development of “Socrates,” an AI chatbot built on Google’s Dialogflow platform with LMS integrations in 2019, one of the early institutional AI implementations in higher education.
• Mental health and student wellness: Addresses how AI tools like Woebot can provide 24/7 first-response support using cognitive behavioral therapy techniques, while emphasizing that professional oversight and human connection remain essential.
• Ethical considerations: Outlines five guiding standards, autonomy, fairness, transparency, accountability, and human-centered design with cautionary cases on AI surveillance in educational settings.
• Case studies: University of Sydney’s Cogniti platform, Staffordshire University’s Beacon Digital Coach, and the Gates Foundation-funded Hybrid Advising Co-Op, each offering models relevant to UIC’s evolving approach to student support technology.

The chapter concludes by calling for a campus-wide culture of technological optimism balanced with ethical guardrails, aligned with the U.S. Department of Education’s 2025 vision for AI-supported student advising.

Book details:

• Publisher: Routledge (Taylor & Francis), 2026
• ISBN: 978-1-032-95756-2 (hardback) / 978-1-032-95480-6 (paperback)
• DOI: 10.4324/9781003586388

In your role at UIC, how have AI tools practically shaped student advising and support?

At UIC, we’ve been on this journey for a while. Back in 2019, we built an AI chatbot called Socrates using Google’s Dialogflow platform with Learning Management System integrations, one of the early institutional AI implementations in higher education. We ultimately discontinued it due to high costs and the complexity of rule-based NLP systems, but it was a critical building block: it introduced AI to our campus community and taught us important lessons about what works and what doesn’t. The landscape has matured dramatically since our Socrates experiment, and the generative AI capabilities that emerged in 2022 have changed what’s possible at a fundamentally different cost structure.

Today, tools like Ally, which uses machine learning to address Title II accessibility requirements and is deployed at over 1,500 institutions globally, are embedded in our infrastructure. Beyond Ally, UIC Technology Solutions has been actively piloting and deploying AI across the ecosystem: YuJa Panorama for accessible media, Grammarly for writing support, Zoom AI Assistant for meeting productivity, Box AI for content intelligence, and Microsoft Copilot for campus productivity. This breadth reflects a coordinated institutional posture, not isolated experiments, and it’s the operational context in which the questions raised in the chapter become concrete.

Your chapter traces the evolution from chatbots to AI agents. What is the most transformative shift for institutions?

The most transformative shift is the move from reactive to proactive student support. Early chatbots could only answer questions students already knew to ask. AI agents can now orchestrate multiple AI models, break down complex problems into steps, and act autonomously, think of them as virtual team members rather than FAQ machines. The chapter introduces a taxonomy mapping this progression: chatbots handle scripted conversations from a knowledge base, AI assistants engage in lifelike dialogue with context awareness, and AI agents can autonomously review degree requirements, monitor coursework, and connect students with career opportunities. Major players like Salesforce, Oracle, and Microsoft are building these agentic systems now, and their educational applications are emerging rapidly.

How do you strike the right balance between AI-driven efficiency and preserving meaningful human connection in advising?

 The Gates Foundation-funded Hybrid Advising Co-Op brought together six organizations to develop models that use AI to augment, not replace, human advising with human relationships kept at the center across every approach. High caseloads and frequent advisor turnover are two of the most pressing challenges in higher education; AI can automate transactional tasks like course registration and routine questions, freeing advisors for complex, high-impact interactions. But institutions need to ensure AI genuinely improves workload distribution rather than simply filling freed capacity with more cases. The goal is better advising, not just more efficient processing.

Looking ahead, what emerging AI capabilities are you most excited about for the future of online higher education, and what should institutions be preparing for now?

AI agents represent the next frontier. What UIC and peer institutions should prepare for is cultivating a campus-wide culture of technological optimism not as an abstract aspiration, but through concrete investments: robust professional development for advisors, systematically connecting advising with broader institutional support systems, and creating an environment where staff feel empowered to explore emerging tools. Institutions that build this foundation now will be best positioned to unlock what’s coming next.

Available through Routledge and Amazon. Individual chapters can be accessed through academic libraries subscribing to Taylor & Francis. UIC community members can access it through UIC Library’s database subscriptions. The foreword is by Rovy F. Branon III; the book is co-edited by leaders from UPCEA (Kathleen Ives), University of the People (Marie Cini), and UI Springfield (Ray Schroeder).

• NVIDIA — Vrinda Nandan, Senior Technology Manager
• Stanford University — Candace Thille (Associate Professor, Graduate School of Education; former Amazon Director of Learning Science) and Yunsung Kim (Postdoctoral Researcher, Stanford Accelerator for Learning)
• Harvard Graduate School of Education — Patrice Torcivia Prusko, Director of Learning Design, Technology and Media
• Georgia Institute of Technology — Ashok K. Goel (AAAI Fellow, Chief Scientist at Georgia Tech’s Center for 21st Century Universities), Spencer Rugaber, and Ploy Thajchayapong
• University of Illinois System — Ray Schroeder (co-editor, Professor Emeritus at UI Springfield, UPCEA Senior Fellow), Vickie S. Cook (Vice Chancellor at UI Springfield), and Anthony A. Piña (Chief Online Learning Officer at Illinois State University)
• Northeastern University — Lance Eaton, Senior Associate Director of AI in Teaching and Learning
• Brown University — Xiaorui Sun, Learning Technologist at the Sheridan Center
• Ithaka S+R — Claire Baytaş and Martin Kurzweil (VP, Educational Transformation)
• Adobe alumni / WICHE — Ellen D. Wagner, former Adobe Systems senior executive