With the arrival of March, we find ourselves at the beginning of spring conference season! For those lucky enough to attend, I hope you find good takeaways to bring back and share with your teams. Speaking of learning, this week's issue starts with a discussion from EDUCAUSE about how to incorporate professional development into your team no matter your budget. From there, we look at a preliminary study about AI cheating in in-person classes.
After reading today’s issue, share your institutional strategies for professional development in the comments!
The Importance of Professional Development
By adopting practical, cost-effective strategies, higher education IT leaders can support continuous learning and career development for staff, even during budget-constrained times.
Our Thoughts
If there is one thing the past three years have made clear, it is that standing still professionally carries real consequences. The pace of change in higher education technology, and specifically in AI, means that skills that were current in 2022 are already showing their age. For IT staff especially, the gap between what they were hired to know and what the job now requires is widening faster than most professional development budgets were designed to address.
This piece from EDUCAUSE is worth reading carefully, because it does something a lot of professional development writing does not. It takes the budget constraint seriously rather than mentioning it and moving on. The strategies here range from genuinely free, like leveraging association webinars, mentoring circles, and vendor training programs, to modest investments like lunch-and-learns and local technology council memberships. Not every institution is in the same place financially, and advice that only works with a healthy PD budget is not actually advice for most of higher education right now.
For me, the most important takeaway from this piece is the thread running through the sections on allocating time. The 2025 EDUCAUSE Technology Leadership Workforce in Higher Education report found that 75% of technology leaders reported workloads that were excessive, and 72% said their departmental staffing needs were insufficient, contributing to these feelings. That is the context in which we are asking people to add professional development to their plates. If we are not intentional about creating genuine space for learning, the best-designed PD program in the world becomes just another item on an already unmanageable to-do list. People will check the box because checking the box is expected, and nothing will actually transfer back to the work.
This is the part of professional development leadership that does not show up in a list of strategies, but determines whether any of them work. It is the manager who actively protects a team member's learning time when a competing deadline appears. It is the director who attends the lunch-and-learn themselves rather than just scheduling it. It is the explicit message, communicated more than once, that growth is not a personal indulgence to be pursued after the real work is done. The LinkedIn 2024 Workplace Learning Report found that companies with strong learning cultures see higher retention, more internal mobility, and healthier leadership pipelines than peers with lower learning investment, outcomes that are significantly more likely when learning is woven into daily work rather than treated as a separate obligation.
The recent advances in AI add particular urgency to staff development. Too often, the staff most in need of professional development around emerging tools are the ones with the least time to pursue it. Think front-line staff at the IT help desk or instructional designers who suddenly find themselves inundated with requests from faculty for assistance to make their assignments "AI proof." Getting ahead of these challenges requires the kind of deliberate, sustained investment in people that this piece advocates for, even when budgets are constrained and the timelines feel impossible.
At their core, higher education institutions are learning organizations. That is not just a mission statement. It is supposed to be a lived value. We owe our faculty and staff the same intentionality, the same investment, and the same genuine commitment to growth that we ask them to bring to their students every day. The strategies in this piece make that possible even when budgets are tight. What is required is not money. It is the will to treat staff development as a priority rather than a perk.
AI Cheating in the Classroom
From In-Person Classes Aren’t Safe From the AI Cheating Boom | Inside Higher Ed
Inside Higher Ed looks at how students are using AI to cheat even in the classroom.
Our Thoughts
Yes, 21 courses at one institution is a small sample, and Brownell herself describes the study as preliminary. Even so, the finding that nearly half of course points in in-person biology classes could be captured through digital cheating methods warrants some initial attention, especially because it challenges an assumption many faculty have been operating on—showing up in person solves the problem. Unfortunately, it doesn’t any longer. If we care about higher education producing graduates who have actually learned something rather than simply accumulated enough points to clear a credential threshold, these initial conversations cannot wait for a larger dataset.
In my twenty years at institutions, I watched students find some genuinely creative ways to cheat. We've all seen notes on arms or strategically placed notecards. The one time I was actually surprised was when a student changed the date dial on their analog watch to display the answers on a multiple-choice test. Academic dishonesty is as old as academic assessment, but something about the current moment feels categorically different, and I have been trying to articulate why. I think it comes down to scale and invisibility. That student who modified their watch had to put in real effort to make it work, and it still carried the risk of being caught. Plus, there was a limit on how much help that watch trick could provide.
Feeding a question into an AI at 9:45 p.m. when you are exhausted from a work shift requires almost no effort, carries very little immediate risk, and can complete entire assignments in seconds. Brownell captures this well when she notes that students are not just cheating because they want to. Some feel they have to, because they assume their peers are already doing it. That is a structural problem, not a character problem, and it deserves a better response than I think we have at the moment.
What makes this harder is that there are no clean answers. Returning to proctored pencil-and-paper exams solves one problem while reintroducing others. Redesigning assessments around authentic, AI-resistant tasks requires time and expertise most instructors are not resourced to develop on their own. And doing nothing is not actually an option. We built higher education on the belief that the process of learning changes people. If we let the process become optional, we are not left with education. We are left with a very expensive certificate.
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