Breaking Down Academic Silos with AI Collaboration

The greatest innovations happen in organizations that manage to overcome their silos – just look at how 3M became one of the world’s leading innovators in everything from tape to teflon by deliberately removing silos in its workspace and letting its engineers talk their problems over with each other.

While the business world has been working on breaking down its silos for quite some time, academia has lagged behind. Humanities tend to stick together, while the STEM departments do their own thing. The detrimental effects of this niching are clear: STEM students often lose out on the kind of development that comes with a comprehensive humanities education, and vice versa.

It doesn’t have to be this way though – and an unexpected means of collaboration is starting to shake up the academic world.

Enter: Collaborative AI.

Most people up until this point have thought about AI as a primarily solo experience: you type some prompts into a platform, and it gives you an answer.

But this is just the very beginning of what AI can do. At BoodleBox, we’ve been working with AI in a whole new dimension, creating collaborative, chat-based AI platforms that let students and faculty work across groups, classes, and even disciplines with ease.

This means that students have the opportunity to:

• Develop interpersonal skills.
  
  Innovation only happens in spaces where people feel like they have psychological safety, and that comes with the development of interpersonal skills. Collaborative AI can help students develop these skills by putting them in groups with people they might not otherwise encounter, and requiring them to work together to meet a goal.

• Learn to communicate effectively.
  
  Collaborative AI is group-based and chat-based, which means that students have to learn to communicate effectively with their peers to accomplish a goal – all while working at a distance.
  
  The platform can both challenge them and help them communicate across disciplines, as bots can be used to “translate” between disciplines, or help students develop a common language around various topics.

• Build trust in remote teams.
  
  Remote work – or at least hybrid work – is here to stay, and it requires different kinds of skills than traditional classroom work. Collaborative AI platforms can help students become comfortable with this kind of work, and train them to work with their colleagues in other disciplines or even on other campuses without feeling hampered by the distance or technology.

• Learn critical thinking in groups.
  
  One of the most important things people can learn in general is critical thinking, especially in the context of group engagements, where everything can get so complicated so quickly.
  
  Collaborative AI platforms require students to learn how to think critically, since engaging with AI responsibly requires critical thinking and ongoing analysis. What’s more, they can do this work together, spotting each others’ blind spots and challenging each others’ thinking as needed.
  
  Instructors can also use the group dynamic of collaborative AI to teach students about some of the most common pitfalls of these settings, including biases, groupthink, and manipulation. Bringing different groups together that might not have otherwise interacted is a huge benefit for learning these kinds of skills, and can lead to fascinating academic development.

• Develop the skills needed to manage the unique challenges of human-AI work.
  
  AI tools are powerful, but like any technology, they come with their unique set of challenges. Collaborative AI platforms allow students to practice tackling these challenges in real-time, before the consequences of having to deal with them in the workplace emerge. What’s more, they can work on these issues collaboratively, learning from each other and developing the knowledge base of the group and contributing to a growing body of knowledge.

Long story short? Collaborative AI makes it possible for students to interact with other students from various disciplines with ease, and provides them with the scaffolding to learn how to interact and innovate with them to create truly unique learning developments.

What’s more, you’ll notice that all of these bullet points are the  “soft skills” that employers are screening so carefully for, and that are so hard to teach in the traditional lecture model of education are naturally built into collaborative AI, making it the perfect tool for creating innovative educational experiences.

Here’s one example of how it can work with BoodleBox:

Rather than working one on one with a platform like ChatGPT, BoodleBox gathers together literally thousands of AI tools using all the top models, and then lets instructors and students work with those models – and each other – together.

For instance, a teacher can onboard their class to BoodleBox and then assign students work within various channels. The students can collaborate with each other while using the various AI tools to complete their assignments, then present it all to the class, or turn it in for review. It’s kind of like an online lab kitted out with all the latest tools – and it lets participants work together with multiple people, multiple AI bots, and documents all in one chat experience.

The great part is, this can scale up to the organizational level, letting students from various disciplines interact with each other in a similar way, as long as everybody’s onboarded to the platform. What might it look like if the theater kids and the engineering kids got together to work on a project? Or if the chemistry majors and English majors shared an assignment? Boodle Box lets you find out.

Of course, there are other platforms that allow students to use collaborative AI, and the benefits remain across the board – BoodleBox just makes it easier to access them.

And this is just the start. Collaborative AI is developing by leaps and bounds, and is quickly becoming a core element of the future of work. The students who succeed going forward will be the ones who had the opportunity to practice these skills in their educational environment.

Ready to bring BoodleBox on board to increase collaboration in your institution? Let’s do it.
Find out how you can quickly and easily implement BoodleBox for the upcoming semester right here.