On 17 October 2025, our staff took part in the workshop Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Organizational Design and Learning at DISTED College. The session was conducted by Prof. Phanish Puranam, a scholar in organizational design, who shared valuable insights on how AI is reshaping education.
Prof. Puranam emphasised that AI is not here to replace educators. Instead, he emphasized that AI functioned as more of a personal assistant by automating routine tasks and enabling personalised learning experiences. This shift allows lecturers to focus more on mentoring, ethical guidance and helping students develop critical thinking skills.
During the workshop, participants explored how AI tools can be integrated into teaching. NotebookLM enables the creation of interactive learning materials such as flashcards and quizzes tailored to individual student needs. Mapify AI helps students visualise abstract concepts through dynamic mind maps, making learning more engaging and accessible.
Our college is actively embracing this transformation and is moving forward in line with the AIot(Artificial Intelligence of things) trend, capitalizing on the recent AI boom to allow us to stay ahead in the education sector. AI will gradually be embedded into classroom teaching across various subjects, giving students hands-on exposure to the tools shaping the future of education.
The role of lecturers in our college is evolving. Our lecturers are no longer just delivering content. They are now focused on shaping students to become thoughtful, ethical and future-ready learners in an AI-driven world.
Prof Phanish delved into how the AI tools of today worked, explaining how we can opt out of data collection when using Generative AI software such as Chat GPT, Gemini, Deepseek and Microsoft Copilot, which in turn allows us to protect our data. This allows us to prevent unauthorized access, misuse, leakage, or accidental exposure of confidential information that would be detrimental to an organization.
He mentions that each AI tool is better for a certain role, each with its varying drawbacks and advantages. For instance, ChatGPT specializes in handling a wide variety of tasks, ranging from brainstorming ideas and analyzing documents to reasoning and image generation. However, ChatGPT, like many AI tools, has a tendency to “hallucinate” or produce inaccurate information. Privacy is another critical factor—by default, user conversations are used to train OpenAI’s models, though opting out is possible. In comparison, Claude AI places more emphasis on ethical design and privacy, making it a unique option for users who prioritize data security.
To encourage an active learning session, participants were divided into groups according to their schools on how they could come up with an AI integration plan into their programmes. By the end of the session, participants were required to present their plan for integrating AI into their respective course subjects as well how they were going to guide their students in utilizing AI tools effectively in their respective courses.
Overall, the event had proved to be a stunning success. DISTED is moving in the direction of the AIot (Artificial Intelligence of things), which helps us stay in trend with the latest academic developments.
