Rogers State University’s fall semester began Monday with several new degrees for students to attain.

RSU now offers bachelor’s degrees in elementary education and artificial intelligence, as well as more options for pursuing emergency teacher certifications. It also added a master’s degree option to its cybersecurity and nursing programs.

Susan Willis, the university’s vice president for academic affairs, said students who want to teach elementary school have been able to train for this career at RSU for years through its 2+2 partnership with Cameron University. Students earn an associate’s degree in education from RSU and then their bachelor’s from Cameron, all the while staying in Claremore.

But Willis said the 2+2 model likely prevented students from pursuing an education degree, especially students who rely on scholarships to study.

“The problem was they had to do the associate’s first, and a lot of scholarships require that they’re enrolled in bachelor’s programs,” Willis said. “None of our athletes could have been an education major because we only had an associate’s. … Honors Program, President’s Leadership Class, some of those scholarships require they’re a bachelor student.”

Willis said Eileen Richardson and Janet Valencia, the RSU professors who’ve been teaching the associate’s courses, largely developed the curriculum for RSU’s bachelor’s program. She said RSU also plans to add a secondary education degree next year.

She said the curriculum won’t materially differ from the education curriculum at bigger schools like the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University, as RSU has to follow the same accreditation and licensure requirements. But getting the same degree at RSU would likely cost less, Willis said.

Willis said that when Mark Rasor, RSU’s chief financial officer, was the university’s interim president, he came to her with the idea of equipping RSU to train future educators on its own. She said getting the program approved took a while because it’s been a long time since an Oklahoma college founded an education program.

“I think it’s very big,” Willis said. “I think there’s a lot of students who would have come to us before, and we couldn’t accommodate them. I think there’s interest, and I think it’s going to help our local schools. … It can really change the trajectory here.”

The artificial intelligence degree, offered as an option to the existing bachelor’s in information technology degree, is more novel. RSU is the third school in Oklahoma and the first regional school in the state to develop an AI program, said professor Sai Samineni. She will lead the degree program with professors Abhilash Minukuri and Nitindra Chowdary.

Minukuri developed most of the curriculum with Curtis Sparling, head of the Department of Technology and Justice Studies, after the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education requested RSU look into an AI program.

Minukuri said the bulk of the AI program is tailored toward students already fluent in programming. They will learn how large language models like ChatGPT function and explore more specialized and powerful systems. Students will also get to build their own artificial intelligences through long-term projects.

“It’s gonna be a bit challenging,” Minukuri said. “It’s not an easy degree to get in. But every company right now is looking into building some sort of chat bots. They are trying to bring the AI element into a company, even small things, so this degree can help them gain those basic skills.”

Students who don’t want or need to learn complicated programming may opt to take lower level introduction course and a course on ethics.

Samineni said it’s unwise for anyone, especially those pursuing a tech career, to turn a blind eye to AI. She said it is no longer a buzzword — as AI technologies become more advanced and commonplace in everyday life, she said, it serves students to at least get a grip on the basic mechanics and ethical implications.

Before RSU hired Samineni last year, she was building an LLM chat bot for Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in California. She said her job required her to use AI to process sensitive medical data.

“I speak a lot about AI ethics because I’ve come from a place seeing it, how it will affect a person, like an actual person, in real time,” Samineni said. “You could lose your job. You could do one mistake, one typing mistake, and you can lose your job. You can’t just send people’s X-rays through GPT and stuff like that.”

Samineni and Minukuri earned their degrees before AI became a widely-used commercial product.

Minukuri said that while artificial intelligence is always changing, so is technology at large. Minukuri primarily taught game design courses prior to this school year.

“Every year, I try to bring something new which is in the industry, so they learn what’s out there, so they’ll have that opportunities when they graduate,” Minukuri said. “That’s the same thing we’re gonna do for AI. We’ll try to update it as much as possible, so that we’ll offer the cutting-edge technology every year.”