Dordt University launches generative AI pilot program for tools access, community conversations

Dordt University students, faculty and staff this fall began participation in an artificial intelligence pilot program aimed at providing campuswide access to high-quality tools and together explore how AI can be used responsibly inside and outside of the classroom.

Officials with the private, Christian university said that as AI and large language models (LLMs) bleed into different areas of people’s lives, it’s important to help students understand how to interact with it rather than leave them without guidance.

“As we’ve seen throughout history, different technologies are created, invented, and people can use them to do beautiful things, and people can use them to do destructive things,” said Dordt Chief of Staff Rev. Aaron Baart. “And so, pretending like AI or LLMs (don’t) exist in our world today or in our future would not be equipping our students to be effective kingdom citizens in the world that they’ll be working and living in.”

The Sioux Center institution has partnered with AI platform BoodleBox for this yearlong pilot, Baart said. As many as 1,300 higher education institutions use BoodleBox products, he said, and Dordt has both received recommendations for it from other university leaders and a better negotiated price for the program through the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities.

BoodleBox provides Dordt with premium versions of AI tools including Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, programs which some students and faculty were already using on their own time. Baart said the university’s AI policy boils down to “you can use AI to the extent in which your faculty tell you that you can,” and BoodleBox will also house assignments and course resources created with AI.

“We saw around campus students already using a lot of AI,” Baart said. “We saw faculty using it in some classes, and so you’ve got subscriptions all over the place to different different LLMs, and providing equal access for everybody on one single subscription seemed like a fair educational access move.”

Asking community questions of ethical AI use

Dordt is “really leaning into” faculty expertise as part of this pilot, Baart said, by including faculty like education professor Dave Mulder in the decision to run the program and to supplement it with discussions of AI through different lenses that can be more deeply explored in students’ classes.

Mulder, a self-described “techy teacher,” said AI has been “just over the horizon” in the education technology field for more than a decade. In an emerging technology graduate course he teaches every other summer, Mulder has watched as students started bringing up AI in 2021, ChatGPT becoming a focus of the class in 2023 then AI discussions being “almost a given” in 2025.

Mulder and Dean of Chapel Rev. Justin Bailey are working together to put on monthly campuswide discussions of AI, Mulder said, through lenses of both education technology and theology. Talks will focus on the ethical and responsible use of AI, with one hope of Mulder being that a common language around what “ethical” means in this context is created at Dordt.

“We’ve got a great set of tools here with the opportunities that Bluebox affords for us,” Mulder said. “Let’s talk about what are ethical and responsible ways we can use tools like that.”

Baart said he’s heard from faculty that the more fluent they are in AI programs, the easier it is to catch AI-aided academic dishonesty from students. Mulder, who has published a book titled “Teach Like a Human: Playful Practice and Serious Faith in the Age of AI,” said he likes to remind people that cheating wasn’t invented with ChatGPT, but offloading work to a machine in this way is relatively new, and AI fluency can help faculty spot ideas output by a chatbot rather than a student.

Teaching when to use powerful tools

Baart has his own, personal concerns about how AI can infringe upon people’s creativity, saying his son told Baart that if he had used AI to do the assignments that prepared him for the LSAT, “there’s no way” he would have done as well as he did.

“There’s a lot of questions about ethics within it,” Baart said. “What does it mean to be human? How do humans appropriately interact with technology without it replacing them, understanding the difference and the biases that exist within different LLMs, these are all things that we can do when we’re working campuswide to explore it together.”

Many students are already personally exploring questions like those Baart posed, Mulder said, and he’s had the opportunity to work with students in different classes to try to pick through potential answers.

For the one-year pilot, Mulder said he hopes that the availability of these tools and the discussions surrounding them will “demystify” AI and make students and faculty “more critical consumers of technology.”

Humans have always used tools to their advantage, but sometimes with new technologies people can end up using the wrong tool for the job, which Mulder likened to using an excavator to plant radish seeds in his garden. He also wants the Dordt community to “reclaim a sense of the goodness of work,” saying he wants to push back against the idea that work is bad and should be avoided with tools like AI.

“I hope that, students, staff, faculty, that we’re encouraged to think about how we can use tools to the best way that we can to do the work that we’re expected to do really well, and to not try to avoid work, but to reclaim the sense of the the goodness of the work that we get to do,” Mulder said.