Advancing AI at Marshall

At Marshall University, the question is no longer whether artificial intelligence (AI) should be used, but how it should be integrated efficiently, effectively, ethically and responsibly in a rapidly changing world.

Just three years ago under the direction of President Brad D. Smith, the university implemented an AI task force that examined the ins and outs of the burgeoning technology.  Since then, the task force recommended a diverse toolbox of offerings that apply across the institution. There have also been various courses offered including workshops for university leaders, created by Dr. Paul LeBlanc, an innovator in higher education and AI expert.

And now, Marshall has taken a new step with the appointment of a chief academic AI officer — a role designed to put academic leadership and artificial intelligence at the same table as Marshall considers how AI will influence teaching, learning, research and the student experience.

Dr. David Wiley was appointed as Marshall’s inaugural chief academic AI officer in August, and he is no stranger to immersing himself in new technology.

In 1997, fresh out of Marshall with a music degree, he served as Marshall’s first webmaster and inaugural chair of the Electronic Publishing Oversight Committee, which set intellectual property, course load, and other policies pertaining to online courses. Dr. Wiley said while music has always been his first love, as soon as the internet became available to the public in the 90s, he was hooked and online constantly.

“I was using the internet all the time — in labs on campus and with a dial up modem at home,” Dr. Wiley said. “I was learning everything I could about it. I started offering training sessions for local businesses and people who wanted to learn more about the internet. That turned into my first startup company, where we created the first websites for the city of Huntington and a number of local businesses. I also made house calls to set up people’s home computers to connect to the internet. When Marshall was ready to hire its first webmaster, I had already been doing that kind of work in and around Huntington for a few years.”

After a year at Marshall, he then moved on to Brigham Young University where he earned a doctorate in Instructional Psychology and Technology, followed by a National Science Foundation grant-funded postdoctoral fellowship at Utah State University from 2000 – 2001.  He rejoined Marshall as a professor in 2025 after a successful career in higher education and the private sector.

Dr. Wiley’s appointment comes as Marshall is moving beyond conversations about AI as a technology and toward a broader institutional strategy for using it as a tool for academic innovation.

“In many ways, there’s never been a better time to be a teacher or a learner,” Dr. Wiley said. “But in other ways, there’s never been a harder time. I’m excited about working with the incredible Marshall community to help chart a course that maximizes benefits and minimizes harms so that we can ‘inspire learning and creativity that ignites the mind, nurtures the spirit, and fulfills the promise of a better future’ more powerfully than ever before.”

President Smith, who in addition to serving the Marshall community also presides as co-chair of the Southern Regional Educational Board’s Committee on AI, is highly involved in the future of AI and academic integration. He says Dr. Wiley’s appointment comes as Marshall seizes a critical moment with both urgency and purpose.

President Smith, Dr. Wiley and others across campus and around the world are delving into the nuances of AI, which has been described as something that will evolve from task-oriented systems to broader, more flexible models capable of things not imaginable today.

“Generative AI dramatically increases your agency — you, personally, can now do things far beyond what you ever imagined possible,” Dr. Wiley said. “If you’re a learner, the learning opportunities you have access to today far surpass anything that has ever been available before. The same holds true for instructors and researchers. We all need to completely reset our expectations and beliefs about what is possible.”

As Marshall moves forward, Dr. Wiley says balancing innovation with academic integrity, privacy, cybersecurity, bias and misinformation will be a challenge that varies from discipline to discipline.

“A use of AI that might be critically important in one discipline might be completely inappropriate in another,” he said. “One of my first priorities is finding ways to support disciplinary and program communities to engage in deep conversations about what AI means for the future of their fields — both the good and the bad.”

That approach may come naturally to someone whose career has always existed at the intersection of seemingly different worlds.

While music was his first love, technology was the unexpected profession that followed. But perhaps the two aren’t as different as they first appear.

Music taught Dr. Wiley to listen, to recognize patterns, to understand how individual elements work together and, ultimately, to create something that is greater than the sum of its parts. Technology gave him another set of tools to do something similar.

Dr. Wiley’s appointment as chief academic AI officer represents the latest step in Marshall’s effort to understand not simply what AI can do, but what it should do — and how it can be used to expand learning and creativity without losing sight of the people at the center of both.

For more information on Dr. Wiley, visit his website.

And, just in case there was any doubt that the techie and the musician can coexist, Dr. Wiley recently returned to the stage, performing in Huntington’s production of 1776 at the Keith-Albee Performing Arts Center.