Ten years ago, I submitted my first Nieman Lab prediction, in which I made the provocation that product management would be the new model for journalism. I am encouraged by the thriving news product community that has emerged over the past decade. However, journalism education, with few exceptions, has not comprehensively responded to support this digital product shift. But I predict that journalism education will experience a new era of innovation due to the continued adoption of and experimentation with artificial intelligence applications. While many lament the possibilities for AI to replace both journalists and educators, I feel that there are approaches to AI that can achieve improved outcomes for both teachers and learners.

Curriculum modifications

Adding the newest technology into curriculum takes motivation, commitment, and time. Many recognize the deficiencies in traditional journalism curriculum but feel overwhelmed by or not empowered to embark on innovation. AI can reduce the effort it takes to assess, learn, and apply new technologies and emerging concepts, from adding modules to an existing course, to developing new courses based on current programming languages or applications, to undertaking full-scale curriculum redesign. Not only can it provide customized code samples for programming exercises or step-by-step descriptions of new software features, it can assist with syllabi and course development, contextualize explanations of difficult concepts and organize them into course modules and presentations. And it can suggest recommendations for degree plans and curriculum modifications that could result in more adaptable programs that are more responsive to student career outcomes (you are on your own with getting changes approved by your curriculum committees, though).

Helping students through their own learning process, particularly for technology training, takes more time and heavy doses of patience. AI can provide support for students in their own learning process. For example, in my Mobile App Development course, I used ChatGPT to learn and update examples using the newest version of the Swift programming language. Then I added lessons encouraging students to use AI in developing their own projects. The quality of the code created, as well as the explanations provided by the AI platform, greatly reduced students’ apprehension and stress. Students were better able to achieve their project visions, and I enjoyed the support of an AI teaching assistant that could help students with troubleshooting and coding errors. Students also exercised judgment with the post-exercise reflections discussing their approaches to prompting and the quality of the work they created with the assistance of AI.

Inspiring confidence

In addition to learning new technologies, AI can increase students’ confidence in traditional skills. In my graduate Digital Issues course, students are assigned readings and weekly posts on digital media theory, cyberculture research, data journalism, social media, immersive media, and law and policy issues. Toward the end of the semester, I became aware of the Google product NotebookLM, uploaded my last nine years of Nieman Lab predictions and had it generate a podcast with two realistically human sounding “hosts” talking about my articles. I was blown away by what it produced and more than a bit impressed by how it engaged with my work. I couldn’t wait to give students a chance to try it. I had them upload links to each of their posts and generate their own AI podcasts. Student reflections indicated that hearing the “hosts” engage with their writing and ideas gave them more confidence in what they had created. They were also able to critique what did and did not work well in the AI-generated conversations.

Augmenting creativity

One of the exercises in my undergraduate Digital Media Innovation Capstone course involved guiding students through a lean canvas exercise. The lean canvas is a tool that explores an innovative concept or idea, providing a format for identifying the problem statement, customer segments, value proposition, distribution channels, and financial considerations. After we completed the exercise, I introduced them to ZigZag, a web-based, AI tool that creates a lean canvas based on a single prompt. I asked students to compare the AI-created canvas to what they had created. Their comments included that the AI version was more comprehensive and gave them more creative ways to consider the problem they were addressing. They also indicated limitations, including the often non-specific nature and impersonal tone of AI-generated output. In addition to the canvas, ZigZag also provided sample questions for empathy interviews, elevator pitch suggestions, potential startup names, and even sample code for a simple landing page (which happens to be our final project). When used effectively, students found that this tool could help validate a concept and recommend new directions and ideas, all part of the innovation process.

Some may wonder if we’ll actually need teachers in the future, with AI providing such high-quality instruction, constant availability, and seemingly limitless patience. But with the fast pace of change and the volume of potential topics and concepts to be learned, the role of educator will shift to become more that of curator and coach, guiding students toward the topics and approaches that will be most useful to them in the future and inspiring confidence in their ability to learn and apply them to the problems they wish to solve. The educator will also model and encourage the critical thinking and ethical considerations necessary to judge the quality of AI output and how to best integrate it with the human element.

In these examples, which are but a few of the ways in which AI can be integrated into journalism curricula, the AI tools pushed students outside their comfort zones to achieve project goals, gain confidence in their work, validate ideas, and critique their output. And it provided an agency for them to do so on their own, a self-sufficiency that should serve them well as they navigate careers in which lifelong learning will be required. It will be the educators’ job to direct students in the most effective ways to use AI to extend their capabilities, not replace them. We are just at the beginning of understanding the application of AI in educational environments. The tools will get better, the outputs will become more realistic and the shifting nature of the human emphasis will need to be continuously reevaluated and appreciated. But I, for one, welcome our AI overlords in inspiring a new era of innovation in journalism education.