Champlain College Collaborates with Anthropic to Advance AI in Higher Ed

Champlain College and Anthropic, a leader in artificial intelligence (AI) safety and research, today announced a strategic collaboration to leverage Claude, Anthropic’s state-of-the-art assistant, to advance AI in higher education and workforce development. This collaboration will support classroom innovations so Champlain College students develop the AI skills they need to thrive in the workforce.

As part of this collaboration:

• Champlain students, faculty and staff—on-campus and online—will have access to Claude Pro, Anthropic’s AI assistant.
• Anthropic and Champlain faculty will collaborate on classroom projects that give students hands-on experience using AI to solve real-world problems.
• Anthropic and Champlain will collaborate on research as it relates to education, workforce development and economic prosperity.

“AI is changing what it means to be Ready for Work and, as a future-focused college, Champlain is giving students opportunities to use AI so they can hit the ground running when they graduate,” says Champlain College President Alex Hernandez. “The Anthropic collaboration is fueling a new wave of innovations at Champlain College, giving us an opportunity to learn lessons that can benefit all higher education.”

AI impacts nearly every college major and early collaboration projects range from business entrepreneurship to digital forensics and cybersecurity to the humanities. A digital forensics class is using Claude to document cybercrime investigations. A Champlain student research team is using AI to detect changes in the natural environment by analyzing sounds.

As one of Anthropic’s first higher education collaborators, Champlain College will explore AI’s implications for workforce development, including the human skills that set graduates apart in a technology-driven world. “Even if we can sometimes explain the whole context to an AI assistant, it doesn’t mean we can still blindly trust the system. I think if we can use it to speed up our work, we’ll see where it could begin to fail and where it could really speed up our work,” says Ali Hadi, program director of the Digital Forensics major. “Since we are a college, the goal is to learn and then also compare it with our real work and see whether the system did a good job or not.”

Faculty, staff, and students will receive access to Claude Pro later this month. Anthropic will host “Claude 101” at Champlain College on Friday, March 28, in celebration of AI Literacy Day. This interactive workshop will introduce the Champlain community to Claude and equip attendees with essential skills to effectively leverage AI.