Adrian College Vice President delivers AI presentation
Posted Tuesday, December 09, 2025
Author: Mickey Alvarado
Adrian College Vice President and Dean of Academics Andrea Milner recently presented to over 1,000 faculty members representing more than 100 institutions within the Council of Independent Colleges’ (CIC) AI Ready Network.
The hour-long online meeting, “AI Ready Curriculum and Pedagogy,” focused on integrating AI into higher education curricula, with discussions covering various approaches to teaching and learning with AI tools. This was the second presentation in the CIC three-week series. It began with “Starting: When Do I Use AI,” moved to “Adopting: Where Do I Use AI,” and ended with “Playing: How Do I Use AI?”
Milner’s presentation shared how Adrian College has committed to preparing students for AI, including offering electives, minors and majors available to all students through RIZE, a shared consortium platform.
“We certainly are working with our partners and within our own institution to make sure that we are evolving with the needs of the students and the times of today,” Milner said.
She said Adrian College’s AI strategy has been guided by creating a great experience for its students, which means offering an AI solution that both teaches AI directly and integrates it across the curriculum.
“What’s been wonderful with our model is it is all about faculty buy-in,” Milner said. “The rate of change going on with technology and artificial intelligence is requiring us to move quickly and easily. We’ve been working with AI and our faculty for many years now, and many of our faculty brought their ideas to us to begin with.”
Milner said colleges and universities have to embrace AI. It is not going away.
“It is only going to be more integrated into all of our lives,” she said. “And it is our responsibility to provide opportunity and availability to learn to all of our students. That’s where we came in to start working with other partners, RIZE, Breakout Learning, and with our own faculty.”
The host of the forum, Adam Prior, said that while Adrian College was embracing AI, a lot of the mainstream media’s attention was focused on AI being used to cheat the system.
“If we’re thinking back to early 2023, 2024, the media was largely about ‘AI is cheating, AI is cheating,’” he said. “But you guys were really swimming against the stream of that pretty early on.”
Milner said Adrian College created a vision statement that focused on the use of AI. It noted that Adrian College is going to use AI as a tool to enhance teaching and empower both faculty and students.
“We developed an academic integrity policy based off AI as well,” Milner said. “To do everything we can to mitigate the potential for cheating with AI.”
Adrian College’s Center for Effective Teaching was relied on heavily to provide faculty workshops, speakers and hands-on opportunities in all areas of AI.
“I think being unfamiliar with something is what often creates the fear and hesitancy to embark on learning something new,” Milner said. “We have to embrace it as a tool so our students can be prepared out there. So, we had to learn it first.”
Every Adrian College student is encouraged to take at least one course involving AI. Milner said that regardless of what a student’s major is, AI will permeate aspects of everyone’s lives and there will not be a single profession that doesn’t use it.
Adrian College introduced elective courses that are available to the entire student body, including AI for Everyone, AI for Decision Making, AI for Creativity and Design, and AI Ethics.
Faculty have been charged with creating an AI minor and/or certificates that would be first integrated through RIZE and developed over time by faculty for unique content.
Examples of Adrian College’s AI minors include AI and Society, AI and Design, AI and Ethical Leadership, and AI and Digital Communication.
A Master of Business Administration in AI-Driven Management was recently introduced as well.
Adrian College is in the process of applying to the Higher Learning Commission (HLC) to add new AI majors.
“It is a longer, more detailed process to add new majors, but we expect to get approval from the HLC in the near future to add majors in artificial intelligence,” Milner said.
