Barton Community College has been chosen to be part of a national consortium that looks at best practices for Artificial Intelligence (AI) at community colleges.
Barton President Dr. Marcus Garstecki and staff provided an overview to the BCC Board of Trustees this week. He was joined by Dr. Kathy Kottas, dean of Workforce Training and Community Education, and Renee Demel, chief information officer.
The American Association of Community Colleges created the AI Skills for All initiative, which is intended to be a support of community practice. Its member institutions will look at ways to use AI and develop AI policies for both students and staff.
“This journey started almost nine months ago,” Garstecki said. The AACC launched the initiative and Barton applied.
“We were not selected initially,” he said. “Miami Dade, Houston Community College and Maricopa were the drivers that launched it.”
However, perhaps because of its earlier application, Barton was one of 30 community colleges that were later invited to join. Garstecki said Vice President of Instruction Elaine Simmons was “very involved. We signed an agreement and are now part of the consortium.”
Representatives from the community colleges met in July and will continue to share their AI practices through December of 2026, Dr. Kottas said. They’ll be looking at industry relevance and student empowerment as they teach ethical and responsible use of AI by students, faculty and staff.
Demel said training sessions will start on Sept. 25. There will be an introduction to generative AI – the type of artificial intelligence that creates new, original content such as text, images, music and code. They’ll also look at Microsoft Copilot. Staff will learn how to use AI in their day-to-day work.
“It’s a neat opportunity for us,” Garstecki said. “It’s pretty neat that we were one of the ones selected.”
Staff agreed that artificial intelligence is a tool that can be misused but there are good uses for it. Dr. Narren Brown, Barton’s director of Institutional Effectiveness, said they use it for coding. It is also useful for creating neutral survey questions that use simple language and avoid leading words or phrases.
Editor’s note: The Great Bend Tribune used Microsoft Copilot to create the image of pennies on today’s Opinion page and on this story.
