Building Trust Through Training: Lessons From Developing a Faculty & Staff AI Resource Site in a Liberal Arts Context

Abstract

This narrative chronicles the development of a faculty and staff AI resources website at the School of Arts, Letters, and Sciences (SoALS) at National University, highlighting how this project attempted to mirror key principles from the technology adoption literature regarding trust-building and participatory implementation. Originally conceived as a feasibility study for AI-based student advisement tools, the project pivoted based on constituent feedback, revealing an urgent perceived need for foundational AI literacy resources. Drawing on organizational trust models (Mayer et al., 1995) and practitioner research on AI and technology adoption, this article demonstrates how one initial attempt to support a community-driven, human-centered approach to AI implementation aligns with research showing that technology adoption success depends more on organizational culture than technical sophistication. The site’s emphasis on presenting balanced perspectives through spaces for debate, curating discipline-relevant resources grounded in liberal arts values, and facilitating peer learning reflects empirical findings that frontline-driven initiatives outperform top-down mandates and that trust must be built through demonstrated respect for employee concerns. Even as more research is needed to determine the impacts of these efforts, this account contributes to the emerging literature on AI adoption in higher education by illustrating how one school attempted to operationalize research-based principles while navigating the challenges documented in meta-analyses showing that approximately 70% of digital transformations fail due to human rather than technical factors.

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