Evaluation of an artificial intelligence literacy course for university students with diverse study backgrounds

A few limited efforts have been made to promote artificial intelligence (AI) literacy for citizens. The objective of this study was to design, implement and evaluate an AI literacy course for university students. One of the study's research questions was whether university students from a variety of disciplines could develop a conceptual understanding of AI through a literacy course. We promoted this course to 4000 students and recruited 120 volunteer participants to attend and complete the 7-h course. The results of our pre-course and post-course surveys indicated that the participants made significant progress in understanding AI concepts, felt empowered to work with AI. These findings indicated that the participants of diverse study backgrounds, and of both genders, could understand the concepts of machine learning, supervised learning, regression, classification, unsupervised learning, and clustering. Prior knowledge of programming was not necessary for AI concepts development, and the flipped classroom learning approach enabled more flexible learning by the participants. In the future, this AI literacy course could be extended to include AI application projects and discussions of related ethical issues regarding the wider use of AI in society. We are planning to introduce this literacy course to senior secondary school students. Copyright © 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.