‘It’s new, it’s fast and it’s here now’: Polytech joins AI worforce program
By Lethbridge Herald on October 31, 2025.
Nathan Reiter
Lethbridge Herald
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Lethbridge Polytechnic is looking to be on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence (AI).
The institution has joined the inaugural consortium for the AI Workforce Readiness (AIWR) program which is a national initiative that is being led by the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (AMII).
Brad Donaldson, the president and CEO of Lethbridge Polytechnic spoke to reporters on campus on Thursday afternoon. Donaldson says it was important to get ahead of the curve when it comes to AI.
“AI has come on really quickly, faster than any other technology in the history of mankind. It’s really working with institutions like Ami to understand from experts who are working on the solutions and the implementation. That’s the critical point for us is how do we work with institutions who understand this better than we are, because that’s what they do, and bring that in as quickly as we can for the benefit of students, but also for our instructor and faculty groups and for our other folks that are dealing with curriculum development.”
The AIWR program is made up of 29 Canadian polytechnics, colleges and universities with more than 500,000 students. The consortium allows for Lethbridge Polytechnic faculty to work directly with AMII to develop AI resources for their respective disciplines.
“It is radically changing the way in terms of how we teach, what we teach, and how we assess.” Donaldson explained. “Often heard stories of students writing essays through AI. So what does that mean for us in terms of how we change our assessments, we change our methodologies, that students are now looking towards criticizing from a critique perspective rather than creating the content, so they help to learn how to do content development.”
The result of the AIWR will lead to the development of Curriculum Resource Packages which will be specialized and open source to provide AI skills and knowledge into existing programs and courses.
The resources will give students reading and discussion materials, real-world use cases and case studies along with videos, activities and lab assessments.
Donaldson says AI is something that has advanced incredibly quickly and will be part of the future.
“Every post-secondary in Canada and probably around the world are grappling with this right now. We’re part of a national institute of institutions looking at best practices, seeing how others are doing it so we can bring it in here. So it’s really brought about a high level of collaboration because it’s new, it’s fast, and it’s here now.”
12-11
as the insidious ai movement grows and ushers in the final blows to what it is and means to be human, and further, to what it is to be a part of the natural world and to even have much of a natural world, people will choose to acquiesce rather than to preserve and to be.
heck, with ai doing all the creating for us, should not our great institutions of learning not just grade the quality of the ai a “student” chooses to present?