Reimagining Higher Education: Navigating the Challenges of Generative AI Adoption

Abstract The proliferation of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has disrupted academic institutions across the world, presenting transformative challenges for decision makers, and leading to questions around existing methods and practices within higher education (HE). The widespread adoption of GenAI tools and processes highlights an ongoing change to existing perceptions of the role of humans and machines. Academics have expressed concerns relating to: academic integrity, undermining critical thinking, lowering of academic standards and the threat to existing academic models. This study presents a mixed methods approach to developing valuable insight to the key underlying challenges impacting GenAI adoption within HE. The results highlight many of the key challenges impacting decision makers in the formation of policy and strategic direction. The findings identify significant interdependencies between the key underlying challenges associated with GenAI adoption in HE. We further discuss the implications in the findings of the high levels of driving power of the factors: (i) perceived risks from Large Language Model training and learning; (ii) the reliability of GenAI outputs in the context of impact on creativity and decision making; (iii) the impact from poor levels of GenAI platform regulation. We posit this research as offering new insight and perspective on the changing landscape of HE through the widespread adoption of GenAI.