🇨🇵 French Version

IA4Sup is a collaborative intelligence and monitoring community dedicated to the uses of artificial intelligence in French higher education. It emerged in December 2023 at the initiative of Christophe Batier from Université Lyon 1, in response to a widespread question among universities: how can institutions harness the potential of AI while keeping control over legal, technical, pedagogical and ethical challenges.

Rapidly, a core group of several dozen stakeholders gathered and decided to structure this collective reflection through an open, evolving digital platform, which now brings together several hundred members from a wide range of university professions.

The originality of IA4Sup lies in its multidimensional approach, organised around five main axes. The pedagogical axis explores how AI transforms teaching and assessment practices, at a time when generative AI is disrupting traditional formats and raising issues of fairness between students. The IT axis brings together professionals in infrastructure, security, servers and APIs, ensuring that AI tools are deployed safely and integrated with existing systems. The functional axis focuses on concrete use cases: which AI for which task, which university services are concerned, and how to capitalise on prior experiments and pilots. The legal axis addresses key issues such as GDPR compliance, copyright, plagiarism and data confidentiality. Finally, the ethical, ecological and philosophical axis questions the values, principles and long‑term impacts that should guide the integration of AI into universities.

At the heart of the initiative is a set of interconnected databases that map AI tools, document their features and domains of application, and link them to identified use cases and relevant reference texts. The platform also offers a structured database of events (conferences, webinars) and a “project marketplace” that helps bring together skills and resources for joint initiatives, particularly inter‑institutional projects. A large part of this knowledge base is publicly accessible, turning IA4Sup into a shared monitoring and knowledge resource for the wider higher education community.

From an organisational standpoint, #IA4Sup is intentionally light and collaborative. It operates without a heavy formal structure and relies on the voluntary engagement of its members, which ensures flexibility and rapid adaptation to a fast‑moving technological landscape. The community maintains a strong rhythm of exchange through monthly thematic webinars, recorded and made available as replays, which present technological updates, emerging trends and practical case studies from institutions. Since 2025, these online activities have been complemented by in‑person events hosted by member universities, designed to delve deeper into sensitive or complex topics such as assessment in the age of AI or advanced usages, via talks, workshops and hands‑on sessions.

Beyond these events, IA4Sup plays a key role in connecting universities with the entrepreneurial and EdTech ecosystem, organising dedicated meetings with companies and start‑ups developing AI‑based solutions for higher education. This intermediation function helps institutions discover relevant tools and give structured feedback to providers, while allowing early adopters to share concrete benefits and limits observed in real contexts.

A central dimension of #IA4Sup is staff development through peer‑to‑peer learning and knowledge sharing. Within this network, university staff – teachers, instructional designers, IT specialists, legal experts, educational advisors and managers – learn from each other by exchanging resources, co‑analysing use cases and co‑constructing frameworks and guidelines. Pairwise exchanges, mentoring relationships and informal “buddy” configurations allow more experienced users of AI tools to support colleagues who are just starting, helping them to appropriate technologies in a secure, critical and pedagogically meaningful way. Competences circulate horizontally: a teacher may share assessment scenarios, an IT staff member may explain technical safeguards, while a legal or data protection officer clarifies compliance aspects.

These peer‑based interactions gradually build a genuine community of practice, where expertise is distributed rather than centralised. Staff gain confidence in using AI, develop a more nuanced understanding of its possibilities and limits, and can align their practices with institutional and regulatory requirements. In this sense, #IA4Sup does not only offer resources and events; it establishes a living knowledge network in which staff training is embedded in everyday collaboration. By combining structured resources, regular events, partnerships with external actors and intensive peer‑to‑peer exchange, #IA4Sup helps universities integrate AI more quickly, more safely and in a way that strengthens both professional competences and collective reflection on the future of higher education.