Jim Nelson, the new Math Department chair, pulls up a screen on his office computer. A grid showing all the math faculty names appears. Class schedules and office hours give him a quick look at who’s teaching what. 

With another click, he can build out future semester schedules with a feature that updates and flags conflicts as he plugs in faculty names. Another feature links to a schedule change form, autofilling information that goes to central scheduling, a big timesaver for office manager Bobbi Garner.

Basically, all the useful Banner information from the math department is loaded into a faculty-accessible website that is easy to search and prompt. But rather than an expensive Banner add-on, the website is Jim’s own creation. He built it himself using Google AI Studio, one of the tools available through NMC’s longstanding Google contract.

“As the new math department head, I realized that making the schedule is the hardest part of the job,” Jim said. “Banner and self-service are not easy to use, so I made a department head app specifically for me.”

Because he was accessing college data, Jim cleared his project with IT and removed any off-limits information. Most of the data he used is already public, so that wasn’t a problem, but the app does require users to authenticate to log in. 

 “Jim put in a lot of time this summer building the app,” said Science and Math Area chair Deb Pharo, who is amazed by the app’s capabilities. Not only has it been a huge time saver in scheduling, Deb said, it also generates data on course efficiencies that isn’t current in other college databases. Jim continues to add new features, such as a discussion board where faculty can share assignments for peer review. 

Not surprisingly, other department and area chairs were impressed and interested when Jim demonstrated the tool at a recent ESIMT meeting. “We will need to explore where the college can find capacity to expand Jim’s work to other areas of the college,” wrote Stephen Sciliano, VP of Educational Service. (For our new folks, ESIMT is the Educational Services Instructional Management Team.)

Creating the department app was not Jim’s first experience with AI. He had already been using it to develop apps for teaching his calculus and differential equations classes, both for prep and for helping students learn. He used it to develop Quantitative Reasoning assessments for Gen Ed outcomes assessments, and he has used Gemini to convert written math problems into an accessible format for visually impaired students. 

Jim shared his AI skills with math and science faculty at a departmental PD workshop before the Fall semester. Each participant developed an app for their class with a web address they can use to make it accessible. 

Jim’s contribution to the department has been substantial, Deb said. “He’s shown the department what can be done. Now it’s up to us to use it.”

For the rest of us, Jim will offer a session at October Conference called From Idea to Web App in Minutes. Here’s the description: “We will build a customized, interactive online classroom tool from scratch. You do not need to know how to code. We will use artificial intelligence to build the web page, and then publish it to the internet so you can share it via a URL.” 

Thanks, Jim!