GOOGLE has recently launched a Higher Education Faculty Artificial Intelligence (AI) Fellowship. It created excitement amongst those associated with higher education in the country. It made the educators feel valued and they thought educators were being given due importance. Their role in higher education was being acknowledged by Google, they thought. But that was not to be.

I expected the fellowship to be well paid in line with academic fellowships. As it turned out, the Google programme, at best, is a commercial fellowship. It asks the educators to first solve an industry-related challenge, and then to cover the cost of fellowship on their own. To expect an overburdened and underpaid educator to cover the cost is regrettable.

Google, which is a multibillion-dollar organisation with unlimited funds, has, in fact, devalued the educators. By not paying the educators for their time, the organisation is actively removing the human and replacing it with the machine.

However, Google is not alone. Another famous learning platform based in the United States has an educator course, which trains the educators to use an AI-powered teaching assistant, but, like Google, it fails to provide any incentive for the time the aspirants are bound to give.

Amna Afzal
Islamabad

Published in Dawn, September 29th, 2026