The University of Notre Dame has been selected as an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Education Equity Initiative awardee, receiving AWS credits to help expand artificial intelligence access for students at low-income high schools enrolled in Notre Dame’s Responsible and Ethical AI course.
Specifically, the access to AWS cloud and AI technology through promotional credits will power Arnie, Notre Dame’s custom-built AI chatbot designed specifically for the course, allowing it to operate seamlessly through cloud computing without requiring expensive local hardware or software at participating schools. This ensures that hundreds of students can access the platform simultaneously with reliable performance and connection speeds.
The Responsible and Ethical AI course has been made possible by a collaboration between a group of campus units, led by Notre Dame Learning’s Office of Digital Learning (ODL), and the National Education Opportunity Network (NEON), which partners with top universities to deliver actual college credit-bearing courses and supports to scholars in low-income high school classrooms across the nation.
The course launched on a pilot basis this fall. There is no cost to students to take it, and they will earn college credits and receive a transcript from Notre Dame upon finishing it. The first cohort comprises approximately 190 students at Title I and Title I-eligible high schools.
Students who successfully complete this or any other NEON course can typically apply their credits to the pursuit of a degree at any college or university at which they are accepted and subsequently enroll.
“Learning how to be a responsible user of AI will be critical to students’ future success, but under-resourced schools face barriers in providing access to this type of technology,” said Sonia Howell, director of the ODL, who along with Brandon Rich, Notre Dame’s director of AI Enablement, crafted the proposal to AWS. “We wanted to remove some of those barriers by providing our NEON partner schools with a custom AI tool, one that would let students explore the technology in a secure, sandbox-type environment. This award from AWS allows us to give them that experience without sacrificing connection speeds and performance, even when hundreds of students are using Arnie at the same time.”
Designed and developed by learning professionals in the ODL with faculty in the University’s Lucy Family Institute for Data and Society, Responsible and Ethical AI is delivered in a hybrid fashion that blends learning modalities.
Valya Kuskova, a professor of the practice and associate director of the Lucy Family Institute, serves as the course’s instructor. Students complete modules built around lecture videos and knowledge checks she created with the ODL while current undergraduates in the Lucy Family Institute’s iTREDS (Interdisciplinary Training and Research in Ethical Data Science) Scholars Program work with the high school students weekly via live online sessions.
The instructional content from Notre Dame is facilitated by a high school co-teacher, who supports scholars directly in the classroom.
“It gives me peace of mind as a teacher to know that the chatbot they have access to has been trained to give high quality information and ensures only academic questions and answers are permitted,” said John Murphy, the co-teacher at NEON partner King College Prep in Chicago.
The Arnie chatbot was created by Rich and the AI Enablement team in Notre Dame’s Office of Information Technology. Going forward, it will be powered by Amazon’s Nova Lite foundation model on Amazon Bedrock.
“Rapid advancements in cloud and AI technology are creating powerful new ways to improve access to high-quality education, unlocking new opportunities for 9–12-grade students,” said Kim Majerus, Vice President of Global Education and U.S. State and Local Government at AWS. “AWS is proud to support the University of Notre Dame as they create innovative solutions that reach students who need it most. Notre Dame’s initiative to deliver the Responsible and Ethical AI course to high school students—complete with the custom-built Arnie chatbot—exemplifies how universities can leverage technology to break down barriers for underserved learners.”