How is California’s flagship online community college applying Artificial Intelligence to improve support for adult learners?
According to Calbright College’s President Ajita Talwalker Menon, “The opportunities for AI are not just about the application of technology to make an experience more efficient, it’s much more about being able to customize and personalize what a student needs.”
By using AI to personalize student support, colleges can better utilize their staff’s time and resources to “maximize their time and engagement with the learner in the way that’s most meaningful and impactful,” Menon said. “How do we create opportunities for more meaningful human connection with frontline student support staff and counselors that are an essential part of a student’s academic journey and success?”
Calbright’s president made those remarks at the recent ASU+GSV AI Show in San Diego, a summit for all things AI in education, where Menon was named one of 2025’s “leading women in AI.”Calbright leaders hosted a panel discussion called “Leveraging AI Tools, Governance Frameworks, and Partnerships for Student Success.”
Calbright’s Vice President of Learning and Instruction Shannon McCarty, a panel speaker, emphasized AI in education is “really about individualization and meeting students where they are. We serve adult learners and they’re time challenged, and we want to make sure we are providing access to resources 24/7, and instructors aren’t able to do that. We also want to be able to provide them with the right resources at the right time, and we think there’s a lot of promise in these AI tools.”
Panelist Don Orth, Calbright’s Vice President of Student Services and Success, emphasized that AI has the potential to offer students with different backgrounds and from all areas of California the unique kinds of support that they need, when they need it.
“We have such a diverse population that one size never fits all. So it’s really important for us to understand every single student, their goals, their needs, and their strengths, and then serving up supports that are just in time, that are very relevant,” Orth said. “So that’s what we’re focused on. Understanding the student well, leveraging AI to start gathering and building the student profiles, and also delivering solutions and relevant supports exactly at the time our students need them.”
Calbright, California’s only statewide online community college, is focused on serving the needs of working-age adults and caregiving adults who are not well served by the traditional higher education system. Calbrigt has recently taken a leading role in the development of AI higher education programs, sponsoring a track in the annual Learning Engineering Tools Competition to develop new technologies to support working adults and other non-traditional students in higher education. It is also working directly with some of the winners to develop and implement their new tools.
“These opportunities for collaboration have a direct impact for our learners at Calbright and learners like them across California and the nation, and in turn means our student’s voices and experiences are shaping the design of these cutting edge tools,” said Marisa Bold, Calbright’s Vice President of Sustainable Growth and District Development.
Vivek Vyas, Calbright’s Chief Product Officer, also a speaker at the ASU+GSV AI conference, cautioned that the implementation of AI doesn’t just involve launching new software – it requires whole new forms of governance to make sure AI is used effectively, appropriately, and safely.
An AI governance framework “should help us create a streamlined and repeatable process so that we can be intentional about what tools and platforms we’re bringing into our learning ecosystem,” Vyas said. “It should give us a process to raise important questions up front around model biases, explainability of the results, and then data collection and use, and also ensure compliance with our own ethical and regulatory standards.”
“The long term vision,” Vyas said, “is that we want to have this really high quality data that we can use for testing AI models to position us for the long term to innovate in learning and support and create outcomes.”
The technology is constantly changing, but the mission of supporting adult learners to reach their career and economic goals remains constant.
