Trend AnalysisEducation
AI Literacy for Faculty: The Competence Framework That Higher Education Still Lacks
AI is transforming every discipline, but most faculty members have no formal AI training. Higher education needs an AI literacy competence framework for facultyโnot just technical skills, but pedagogical judgment about when AI helps and when it harms learning.
By Sean K.S. Shin
This blog summarizes research trends based on published paper abstracts. Specific numbers or findings may contain inaccuracies. For scholarly rigor, always consult the original papers cited in each post.
Every major discipline is being reshaped by AI. Medical education must prepare students to work with AI diagnostic tools. Legal education must address AI contract analysis and automated legal research. Business education must cover AI-driven analytics and algorithmic decision-making. Engineering education must integrate AI design tools and autonomous systems. And every discipline must grapple with the ethical implications of AI in professional practice.
Yet most faculty members teaching in these disciplines have no formal AI training. They learned their disciplines before AI tools became prevalent, and their professional development has not kept pace with the technology. The result is a competence gap: students need to learn about AI from faculty who do not yet understand it themselves.
Filiz, Kaya, and Adiguzel (2025) document that teacher AI readiness depends on perceived competence, pedagogical beliefs, and institutional supportโfactors that can be addressed through structured professional development. Fernรกndez Cerero et al. (2026) show that engineering faculty who use AI in research are more likely to integrate it into teachingโsuggesting that research-active faculty may be natural early adopters. And Anisah, Masripah, and Juanda Putri (2025) argue that traditional professional development models are inadequate for the pace of AI changeโrequiring continuous, embedded, peer-supported learning approaches.
What a Faculty AI Literacy Framework Needs
Based on the research reviewed across this series, a faculty AI literacy framework should address four dimensions:
Technical literacy: Understanding what AI is, how it works at a conceptual level, what it can and cannot do, and how to evaluate AI tools critically. This does not require programming skill but does require enough understanding to distinguish hype from capability.
Pedagogical literacy: Knowing when AI helps learning and when it hinders itโwhen to use AI tools in teaching, when to restrict them, and how to design assessments that remain meaningful in an AI-augmented environment.
Ethical literacy: Understanding the implications of AI for fairness, privacy, accessibility, and academic integrityโand having the judgment to navigate trade-offs that do not have clear answers.
Disciplinary literacy: Understanding how AI is transforming one's specific disciplineโwhat tools are available, what professional practices are changing, and what competencies students will need to practice in AI-augmented professional environments.
Claims and Evidence
<
| Claim | Evidence | Verdict |
|---|
| Most faculty members have adequate AI training | All papers: significant gaps in AI knowledge and integration readiness | โ Refuted |
| Traditional professional development can address AI literacy | Anisah et al. (2025): traditional models are too slow and rigid for AI change | โ Refuted |
| Faculty AI literacy requires only technical skills | Filiz et al. (2025): pedagogical beliefs and institutional support matter as much as technical competence | โ Refuted |
Implications
Higher education needs a comprehensive faculty AI literacy initiative that is: discipline-specific (AI in medicine differs from AI in law), multi-dimensional (technical + pedagogical + ethical + disciplinary), continuous (not one-time workshops), peer-supported (faculty learning from each other), and institutionally resourced (time, funding, infrastructure).
Without such an initiative, the gap between AI's impact on professional practice and faculty's ability to prepare students for AI-augmented work will continue to widenโleaving graduates unprepared for the professional environments they will enter.
๋ฉด์ฑ
์กฐํญ: ์ด ๊ฒ์๋ฌผ์ ์ ๋ณด ์ ๊ณต์ ๋ชฉ์ ์ผ๋ก ํ ์ฐ๊ตฌ ๋ํฅ ๊ฐ์์ด๋ค. ํ์ ์ ์๋ฌผ์์ ์ธ์ฉํ๊ธฐ ์ ์ ํน์ ์ฐ๊ตฌ ๊ฒฐ๊ณผ, ํต๊ณ ๋ฐ ์ฃผ์ฅ์ ์๋ฌธ ๋
ผ๋ฌธ๊ณผ ๋์กฐํ์ฌ ๊ฒ์ฆํด์ผ ํ๋ค.
๊ต์์ง์ ์ํ AI ๋ฆฌํฐ๋ฌ์: ๊ณ ๋ฑ๊ต์ก์ด ์์ง ๊ฐ์ถ์ง ๋ชปํ ์ญ๋ ํ๋ ์์ํฌ
๋ชจ๋ ์ฃผ์ ํ๋ฌธ ๋ถ์ผ๊ฐ AI์ ์ํด ์ฌํธ๋๊ณ ์๋ค. ์ํ ๊ต์ก์ ํ์๋ค์ด AI ์ง๋จ ๋๊ตฌ๋ฅผ ํ์ฉํ ์ ์๋๋ก ์ค๋น์์ผ์ผ ํ๋ค. ๋ฒํ ๊ต์ก์ AI ๊ณ์ฝ ๋ถ์ ๋ฐ ์๋ํ๋ ๋ฒ๋ฅ ์กฐ์ฌ๋ฅผ ๋ค๋ฃจ์ด์ผ ํ๋ค. ๊ฒฝ์ํ ๊ต์ก์ AI ๊ธฐ๋ฐ ๋ถ์๊ณผ ์๊ณ ๋ฆฌ์ฆ ์์ฌ๊ฒฐ์ ์ ํฌ๊ดํด์ผ ํ๋ค. ๊ณตํ ๊ต์ก์ AI ์ค๊ณ ๋๊ตฌ์ ์์จ ์์คํ
์ ํตํฉํด์ผ ํ๋ค. ๊ทธ๋ฆฌ๊ณ ๋ชจ๋ ํ๋ฌธ ๋ถ์ผ๋ ์ ๋ฌธ์ ์ค์ฒ์์ AI๊ฐ ๊ฐ๋ ์ค๋ฆฌ์ ํจ์์ ์จ๋ฆํด์ผ ํ๋ค.
๊ทธ๋ฌ๋ ์ด๋ฌํ ํ๋ฌธ ๋ถ์ผ์์ ๊ฐ๋ฅด์น๋ ๋๋ถ๋ถ์ ๊ต์์ง์ ๊ณต์์ ์ธ AI ๊ต์ก์ ๋ฐ์ง ์์๋ค. ์ด๋ค์ AI ๋๊ตฌ๊ฐ ๋ณดํธํ๋๊ธฐ ์ด์ ์ ์์ ์ ํ๋ฌธ ๋ถ์ผ๋ฅผ ํ์ตํ์์ผ๋ฉฐ, ์ ๋ฌธ์ฑ ๊ฐ๋ฐ์ด ๊ธฐ์ ์ ๋ฐ์ ์๋๋ฅผ ๋ฐ๋ผ๊ฐ์ง ๋ชปํ๊ณ ์๋ค. ๊ทธ ๊ฒฐ๊ณผ ์ญ๋ ๊ฒฉ์ฐจ๊ฐ ๋ฐ์ํ๋ค. ํ์๋ค์ AI๋ฅผ ์์ง ์ค์ค๋ก ์ดํดํ์ง ๋ชปํ ๊ต์์ง์ผ๋ก๋ถํฐ AI์ ๋ํด ๋ฐฐ์์ผ ํ๋ ์ํฉ์ ๋์ฌ ์๋ค.
Filiz, Kaya, Adiguzel(2025)์ ๊ต์ฌ์ AI ์ค๋น๋๊ฐ ์ธ์ง๋ ์ญ๋, ๊ต์๋ฒ์ ์ ๋
, ๊ธฐ๊ด์ ์ง์์ ๋ฌ๋ ค ์์์ ๊ธฐ๋กํ๊ณ ์์ผ๋ฉฐ, ์ด๋ฌํ ์์ธ๋ค์ ์ฒด๊ณ์ ์ธ ์ ๋ฌธ์ฑ ๊ฐ๋ฐ์ ํตํด ํด๊ฒฐ๋ ์ ์๋ค. Fernรกndez Cerero ์ธ(2026)๋ ์ฐ๊ตฌ์์ AI๋ฅผ ํ์ฉํ๋ ๊ณตํ ๋ถ์ผ ๊ต์์ง์ด ๊ต์ก์๋ AI๋ฅผ ํตํฉํ ๊ฐ๋ฅ์ฑ์ด ๋๋ค๋ ์ ์ ๋ณด์ฌ์ฃผ๋ฉฐ, ์ด๋ ์ฐ๊ตฌ ํ๋์ด ํ๋ฐํ ๊ต์์ง์ด ์์ฐ์ค๋ฌ์ด ์กฐ๊ธฐ ์์ฉ์๊ฐ ๋ ์ ์์์ ์์ฌํ๋ค. Anisah, Masripah, Juanda Putri(2025)๋ ์ ํต์ ์ธ ์ ๋ฌธ์ฑ ๊ฐ๋ฐ ๋ชจ๋ธ์ด AI ๋ณํ์ ์๋์ ๋์ํ๊ธฐ์ ๋ถ์ ์ ํ๋ฉฐ, ์ง์์ ์ด๊ณ ๋ด์ฌํ๋ ๋๋ฃ ์ง์ ํ์ต ๋ฐฉ์์ด ํ์ํ๋ค๊ณ ์ฃผ์ฅํ๋ค.
๊ต์์ง AI ๋ฆฌํฐ๋ฌ์ ํ๋ ์์ํฌ์ ํ์ํ ๊ฒ
์ด ์๋ฆฌ์ฆ์์ ๊ฒํ ๋ ์ฐ๊ตฌ๋ฅผ ๋ฐํ์ผ๋ก, ๊ต์์ง AI ๋ฆฌํฐ๋ฌ์ ํ๋ ์์ํฌ๋ ๋ค ๊ฐ์ง ์ฐจ์์ ๋ค๋ฃจ์ด์ผ ํ๋ค.
๊ธฐ์ ์ ๋ฆฌํฐ๋ฌ์: AI๊ฐ ๋ฌด์์ธ์ง, ๊ฐ๋
์ ์์ค์์ ์ด๋ป๊ฒ ์๋ํ๋์ง, ๋ฌด์์ ํ ์ ์๊ณ ํ ์ ์๋์ง, ๊ทธ๋ฆฌ๊ณ AI ๋๊ตฌ๋ฅผ ๋นํ์ ์ผ๋ก ํ๊ฐํ๋ ๋ฐฉ๋ฒ์ ์ดํดํ๋ ๊ฒ์ด๋ค. ํ๋ก๊ทธ๋๋ฐ ๋ฅ๋ ฅ์ ์๊ตฌํ์ง๋ ์์ง๋ง, ๊ณผ์ฅ๋ ์ฃผ์ฅ๊ณผ ์ค์ ๋ฅ๋ ฅ์ ๊ตฌ๋ณํ ์ ์๋ ์ถฉ๋ถํ ์ดํด๊ฐ ํ์ํ๋ค.
๊ต์๋ฒ์ ๋ฆฌํฐ๋ฌ์: AI๊ฐ ํ์ต์ ๋์์ด ๋๋ ๊ฒฝ์ฐ์ ๋ฐฉํด๊ฐ ๋๋ ๊ฒฝ์ฐ๋ฅผ ํ์
ํ๋ ๊ฒ, ์ฆ ๊ต์ก์์ AI ๋๊ตฌ๋ฅผ ์ธ์ ํ์ฉํ๊ณ ์ธ์ ์ ํํด์ผ ํ๋์ง, ๊ทธ๋ฆฌ๊ณ AI๊ฐ ๋ณด์๋ ํ๊ฒฝ์์๋ ์๋ฏธ๋ฅผ ์ ์งํ๋ ํ๊ฐ๋ฅผ ์ด๋ป๊ฒ ์ค๊ณํ ์ง ์๋ ๊ฒ์ด๋ค.
์ค๋ฆฌ์ ๋ฆฌํฐ๋ฌ์: ๊ณต์ ์ฑ, ๊ฐ์ธ์ ๋ณด ๋ณดํธ, ์ ๊ทผ์ฑ, ํ๋ฌธ์ ์ง์ค์ฑ์ ๋ํ AI์ ํจ์๋ฅผ ์ดํดํ๊ณ , ๋ช
ํํ ๋ต์ด ์๋ ์์ถฉ ๊ด๊ณ๋ฅผ ํค์ณ ๋๊ฐ๋ ํ๋จ๋ ฅ์ ๊ฐ์ถ๋ ๊ฒ์ด๋ค.
ํ๋ฌธ ๋ถ์ผ๋ณ ๋ฆฌํฐ๋ฌ์: AI๊ฐ ์์ ์ ํน์ ํ๋ฌธ ๋ถ์ผ๋ฅผ ์ด๋ป๊ฒ ๋ณํ์ํค๊ณ ์๋์ง, ์ด๋ค ๋๊ตฌ๋ค์ด ์ฌ์ฉ ๊ฐ๋ฅํ์ง, ์ ๋ฌธ์ ์ค์ฒ์ด ์ด๋ป๊ฒ ๋ณํํ๊ณ ์๋์ง, ๊ทธ๋ฆฌ๊ณ ํ์๋ค์ด AI๊ฐ ๋ณด์๋ ์ ๋ฌธ์ ํ๊ฒฝ์์ ์ค่ทตํ๋ ๋ฐ ํ์ํ ์ญ๋์ด ๋ฌด์์ธ์ง ์ดํดํ๋ ๊ฒ์ด๋ค.
์ฃผ์ฅ๊ณผ ๊ทผ๊ฑฐ
<
| ์ฃผ์ฅ | ๊ทผ๊ฑฐ | ํ์ |
|---|
| ๋๋ถ๋ถ์ ๊ต์์ง์ ์ถฉ๋ถํ AI ๊ต์ก์ ๋ฐ๊ณ ์๋ค | ๋ชจ๋ ๋
ผ๋ฌธ: AI ์ง์ ๋ฐ ํตํฉ ์ค๋น๋์์ ์๋นํ ๊ฒฉ์ฐจ ์กด์ฌ | โ ๋ฐ๋ฐ๋จ |
| ์ ํต์ ์ธ ์ ๋ฌธ์ฑ ๊ฐ๋ฐ์ด AI ๋ฆฌํฐ๋ฌ์ ๋ฌธ์ ๋ฅผ ํด๊ฒฐํ ์ ์๋ค | Anisah ์ธ(2025): ์ ํต์ ๋ชจ๋ธ์ AI ๋ณํ์ ๋์ํ๊ธฐ์ ๋๋ฌด ๋๋ฆฌ๊ณ ๊ฒฝ์ง๋์ด ์์ | โ ๋ฐ๋ฐ๋จ |
| ๊ต์์ง AI ๋ฆฌํฐ๋ฌ์๋ ๊ธฐ์ ์ ์ญ๋๋ง์ ํ์๋ก ํ๋ค | Filiz ์ธ(2025): ๊ต์๋ฒ์ ์ ๋
๊ณผ ๊ธฐ๊ด์ ์ง์์ด ๊ธฐ์ ์ ์ญ๋๋งํผ ์ค์ํจ | โ ๋ฐ๋ฐ๋จ |
์์ฌ์
๊ณ ๋ฑ๊ต์ก์ ํฌ๊ด์ ์ธ ๊ต์์ง AI ๋ฆฌํฐ๋ฌ์ ์ด๋์
ํฐ๋ธ๋ฅผ ํ์๋ก ํ๋ค. ์ด ์ด๋์
ํฐ๋ธ๋ ํ๋ฌธ ๋ถ์ผ๋ณ๋ก ํนํ๋๊ณ (์ํ์์์ AI์ ๋ฒํ์์์ AI๋ ๋ค๋ฅด๋ค), ๋ค์ฐจ์์ ์ด๋ฉฐ(๊ธฐ์ ์ + ๊ต์๋ฒ์ + ์ค๋ฆฌ์ + ํ๋ฌธ ๋ถ์ผ๋ณ), ์ง์์ ์ด๊ณ (์ผํ์ฑ ์ํฌ์์ด ์๋), ๋๋ฃ ์ง์ ๋ฐฉ์์ผ๋ก ์ด์๋๋ฉฐ(๊ต์์ง์ด ์๋ก์๊ฒ์ ๋ฐฐ์ฐ๋), ๊ธฐ๊ด์ ์์์ ๊ฐ์ถ์ด์ผ ํ๋ค(์๊ฐ, ์ฌ์, ์ธํ๋ผ).
์ด๋ฌํ ์ด๋์
ํฐ๋ธ๊ฐ ์๋ค๋ฉด, AI๊ฐ ์ ๋ฌธ์ ์ค์ฒ์ ๋ฏธ์น๋ ์ํฅ๊ณผ ๊ต์์ง์ด AI ์ฆ๊ฐ ์
๋ฌด๋ฅผ ์ํด ํ์๋ค์ ์ค๋น์ํค๋ ๋ฅ๋ ฅ ์ฌ์ด์ ๊ฒฉ์ฐจ๋ ๊ณ์ํด์ ๋ฒ์ด์ง ๊ฒ์ด๋ฉฐโ์ด๋ ์กธ์
์๋ค์ด ์ง์
ํ๊ฒ ๋ ์ ๋ฌธ์ ํ๊ฒฝ์ ๋ํ ์ค๋น ๋ถ์กฑ์ผ๋ก ์ด์ด์ง ๊ฒ์ด๋ค.
References (5)
[1] Filiz, O., Kaya, M.H., & Adiguzel, T. (2025). Teachers and AI: Factors Influencing AI Integration in K-12 Education. Education and Information Technologies, 30, 17931โ17967.
[2] Fernรกndez Cerero, J. et al. (2026). Adoption of AI in Higher Education: Engineering Faculty Perceptions. Computers, 15(3), 173.
[3] Anisah, A., Masripah, & Juanda Putri, M. (2025). Rethinking Teacher Professional Development for the Digital Era: A Narrative Review. Eduscape, 3(4), 935.
Filiz, O., Kaya, M. H., & Adiguzel, T. (2025). Teachers and AI: Understanding the factors influencing AI integration in K-12 education. Education and Information Technologies, 30(13), 17931-17967.