Today@Sam Article

AI in Action: Shaping Tomorrow's Higher Ed Leaders

June 2, 2025
SHSU Media Contact: Campbell Atkins

With Sam Houston State University’s forward-thinking faculty at the helm, Bearkats are not only learning about critical scenarios necessary for success in the professional world — they are experiencing them firsthand.

“Whether it is new data or creative ideas, I am always focused on getting my students hands-on experience,” said Peggy Holzweiss, a professor in the Department of Educational Leadership. “Sam started out as a teachers’ college. Education and instruction are built into the fabric of what we do here, and I have always felt encouraged to experiment and be innovative.”

Through a series of artificial intelligence-driven, role-playing scenarios, Holzweiss transformed her administrative master’s course into an immersive experience where future higher education leaders face the very challenges they will encounter in their careers. It’s a new kind of learning that blends the power of technology with the nuanced complexities of academia, preparing students for a future that has already arrived.

“One of the things we’ve noticed in higher education programs across the country is that we are not necessarily teaching supervision very well,” Holzweiss said. “How can we teach supervision in a collegiate environment, because that can be very different than the business industry.”

In response to these quandaries, Holzweiss collaborated with Meredith Conrey, the director of Student Involvement Leadership Initiatives. When developing the curriculum, Holzweiss and Conrey simply asked one another what they wished they would have known when they were new college administrators entering their first positions as supervisors.

“Since all of these students are online and already hold positions at various colleges, they are all going to think about different policies from their own campuses,” Holzweiss said. “I needed to get them to come together and start thinking about the same thing. So I created my own college.”

This fictitious college, dubbed Gunder Rifflin University (a nod to Dunder Mifflin from the television series “The Office”), included an office and characters created through AI. The virtual setup allowed each student to create an avatar of a potential new employee within the world. Once they onboarded this new hire, they focused on managing others within their office.

“Something we find very tough to replicate in a traditional classroom setting is having a difficult conversation with someone,” Holzweiss said. “That’s not an easy task when you’ve never had experience, but how do you get that experience? It was kind of a catch-22.”

Holzweiss’ virtual world prompted AI to assume the role of a defensive or belligerent employee and allowed the supervisors-in-training to practice navigating those conversations.

“The goal was to give them that real experience interacting with someone who had that personality quirk or behavioral issue that is not going to change, but still needs to be dealt with,” Holzweiss said.

One of the students, Janae Bethea, is earning her master’s degree in higher education and currently works in the Office of Undergraduate Research at Rice University. Since she has taken classes with Holzweiss in the past, she was familiar with her interactive methods.

“I knew she had a fresh approach to her coursework and knew a lot of the assignments would be innovative. I was not expecting the AI component, and didn’t have much experience with that,” Bethea said. “Going into the course, I wasn’t familiar with its capabilities. But one of the great things about Dr. Holzweiss is that she provides very detailed instructions for those of us who were less technologically-inclined.”

Bethea hailed the assignments’ ability to centralize instruction despite the many nuances in her classmates’ experiences. She also benefited from the trial-and-error nature of the process, which allowed her to explore various approaches.

“It was very insightful and incredibly productive,” she said. “At the end of the experiment, you had a chance to ask how you performed, and the simulation would respond with suggestions and a general summary of how things went. It felt like looking through an objective lens.”

Holzweiss was initially surprised by the fact that the students were apprehensive when first told to use AI, seeing it as a “forbidden tool.” One student likened it to the website Wikipedia, which students are typically told to avoid in academic settings.

“We often hear in the news about students using AI to cheat. Maybe some are, but most are just trying to learn something, not game the system,” Holzweiss said. “They really seemed to enjoy the permission to play with it and see what it could do.”

While she stressed the need for responsibility from educators and learners alike, Holzweiss believes these emerging technologies are already playing a critical role in the future of higher education.

“We are at a point in time where our students have all the information they need at their fingertips. It’s not about memorization, they can look it up at any moment,” Holzweiss said. “We are asking a higher level of learning out of them today. What they really need to do is create. They need to be the creators and evaluators of information.”

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