Technology, governance go hand in hand in ‘university of the future’

MANILA, Philippines — With its glistening presence on the skyline of the business district at the outskirts of Madrid, IE University stands a cut above the rest.

The highly diversified academic institution, ranked among the top 500 universities and in the top 10 business schools worldwide, has more than 8,000 students from over 140 countries and is among the pioneers of the e-learning system.

Today, it is at the forefront of utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) and the metaverse in the classroom, said Manuel Muñiz, the provost of IE University in Madrid and dean of IE School of Politics, Economics and Global Affairs.

Muñiz told The STAR they are the first higher education institution to adopt new programs based on trends and current needs in the working world.

“We’re big believers in the role of technology and innovation. So we know we need to both leverage technology as much as we can for research and for learning. We have in particular the metaverse, we build the campus on the metaverse and teaching courses there, trying to assess whether learning in the metaverse, in virtual reality, is good or not,” Muñiz said.

He added that another big project is on AI and its use  in the classroom.

“We’re now building an AI tutor, for example, that our students can interact with 24/7 and that can provide like a chatbot but you feed it a particular purpose of knowledge. Imagine, you have a course and you feed it all of the materials that the professor provides, all of the readings the slides, and then it’s ready for the students to interact with and it provides answers from that,” he said.

Mindful of the risks of over-relying on AI, Muñiz said they are leveraging technology by investing in its governance, emphasizing the need for a balance between technology and governance to ensure responsible innovation.

“One cannot overtake the other. So if you’re just advocating for technology, then you become like an evangelist, everything is good, there’s no need for governance, which is clearly insufficient. But then if you become sort of exclusively focused on governance, you’re sort of saying almost innovation is not good. It’s risky. Let’s stop it. And that’s also a mistake.”