About this website
This is a practitioner's playbook for AI strategy and governance in higher education. It is not a product, a vendor pitch, or a research report. It's a working model, eight pillars, four application domains, and the tools to act on, built to help any institution move from scattered AI pilots to a coherent, mission-aligned approach.
A structured model for responding to AI across a campus: how to align it with mission, govern it, teach with it, coordinate it across divisions, and learn from what other institutions are doing. Free to use and adapt.
Not a mandate, not compliance advice, and not tied to any vendor or product. Nothing here is a substitute for your own legal counsel, governance bodies, and institutional judgment.
A guide, not a rulebook. Enter wherever you are, still assessing, drafting governance, rolling out, or refining, and adapt every part to your institution's context, size, and mission.
Why it exists
One connected model, drawn from a conversation happening at every level of higher education at once.
The same questions about AI kept surfacing in every room, in conference sessions and webinars, in ordinary discussions with colleagues, and they didn't stay in one place. They were being worked out at the department level, again at the campus-system level in the UC and California Community College systems, and again at EDUCAUSE and other higher-education industry organizations.
Across very different institutions and organizers, the sector had quietly converged on which questions matter, mission alignment, teaching and assessment, governance and ethics, cross-campus coordination, and practical lessons, without converging on the answers. Watching one conversation echo up and down those levels is what prompted a single, connected model instead of the same debate restarted from scratch in every office.
It's connected on purpose. AI doesn't respect the boundaries a campus organizes itself around: the same technology lands on public trust, student success and wellbeing, civic and democratic learning, teaching and pedagogy, and global engagement all at once. Governed one track or one office at a time, it fractures, a policy here, a pilot there, a literacy effort somewhere else, none of them aware of the others. A holistic framework is the only honest response to something that cuts across everything: it lets a campus align AI to mission once and carry that coherence into every corner where it shows up.
What's inside
Four ways into the same framework. Start wherever your question sits.
The eight pillars
The core operating model, from mission and principles through governance, engagement, readiness, roles, and operations.
OpenFour application domains
Where AI actually lands, teaching and learning, research, and administrative operations, with worked use cases.
OpenRole gateways
The same framework seen from each seat: cabinet and board, IT, legal, finance, student affairs, librarians, and more.
OpenWorking tools
A maturity assessment, strategic compass, tool-evaluation matrix, governance guide, and implementation playbook.
OpenHow it's built & your privacy
Built to be useful without asking anything of you in return.
This is a single-page application that runs entirely in your browser. Assessments, scores, and drafts you create are saved locally on your device, not sent to a server.
Every downloadable artifact, profile, or scorecard is produced in the browser from what you enter. You can use the whole site without an account.
Who made it
The framework's concept and content are the work of one practitioner, developed independently and offered to the field. This is personal work: the views expressed here are the author's own and do not represent, and are not associated with, his employer.
Using & sharing it
Free to use and adapt for non-commercial purposes under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). Please keep attribution and share adaptations under the same terms.