Colleges and Universities Offer Faculty Development for AI Use in the Classroom

Sampling AI Solutions Offers Insight Into Possible Uses

To prepare instructors to successfully integrate AI into their courses, schools are providing a number of resources.

In fall 2023, for instance, the University of Texas at Austin partnered with Grammarly for Education to investigate how to use generative AI ethically and effectively in the classroom.

Grammarly was willing to provide access to the generative AI capabilities embedded in its writing assistant platform for the data-driven evaluation without students’ intellectual property being digested into its large language model, says Assistant Vice Provost of Academic Technology and Director of the Office of Academic Technology Julie Schell.

EXPLORE: Google Gemini has practical applications in higher education.

“Two years ago, we knew there was a real need to have balance between encouraging use but also being responsible in the adoption of AI on campus and providing support for our faculty,” Schell says. “We were able to work through some testing on the implementation of it in an environment we felt reflected responsible adoption and protected our students’ data.”

Eighty-three percent of the university’s pilot program participants said they had a positive experience with Grammarly’s tool. Their input was used to create the “Faculty Guide to Getting Started with Generative AI,” a handbook that contains instructional activities and lesson plans — and templates so faculty members can create their own.

“For the lesson plans, we’re using a framework that is based on long-established principles of instructional design,” Schell says. “For example, we know people learn best when their instructors know the learning outcomes that they want students to achieve. This toolkit is meant to help people engage with generative AI in a way that’s based on the things we want to foster, like evaluating output for its alignment with the intention.”

Sharing Knowledge Can Strengthen AI Use

After the advent of generative AI raised questions about how the technology might impact teaching and learning, Wendy Howard, director of the Pegasus Innovation Lab at the University of Central Florida, and Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning Director Kevin Yee began conferring with colleagues from other universities about it.

“We said, ‘I'm sure everyone's grappling with this; we need to provide a venue to come together and share best practices,’” Howard says. “We quickly jumped into pulling together something we could host on the UCF campus.”

In September 2023, they held the first Teaching and Learning with AI Conference. Approximately 400 administrators, faculty members and other higher ed professionals attended the two-day event, which featured sessions on subjects such as using AI in instructional design and to support draft writing in class.

CHECK IT OUT: View the full “Faculty Guide to Getting Started with Generative AI” here.

In the conference’s second year, attendees came from more than 50 colleges and universities; in 2024, participants hailed from more than 100.

While a number of education-related AI conferences center on the technology’s technical development or back-end use to improve student outcomes, the Teaching and Learning with AI Conference focuses on how faculty members experience AI’s use in the classroom, according to Howard, who co-chairs the event with Yee.

Idea exchanges have occurred during informal discussions that spill out of the conference’s breakout sessions and continue over lunch; the topics attendees discuss, such as AI tools for video production, have become increasingly specialized, Howard says.

This year’s three-day conference, scheduled to be held in Orlando in May, will include hallway kiosks, operated by conference committee volunteers, where participants can view how some of the tools being discussed in sessions work.

Programming has also been added to accommodate the influx of presentation proposal submissions; conference organizers received nearly twice as many as in 2024.

“We are introducing 10-minute lightning sessions,” Howard says. “Because we couldn’t accept some really great submissions for the 25-minute sessions, we’re opening up the ballroom to have sessions that are TED Talk-style so we can get more ideas out there to generate conversations."

Written and Other Items May Help With AI Objectives

Faculty members at Vanderbilt University decide how they’ll handle using AI in instruction; there's no institutionwide policy on why or when it can be used, according to Jennifer Ogg Wilson, director of the Office of Education Design and Development.

To support educators’ efforts, the university’s Institute for the Advancement of Higher Education (AdvancED) offers an online hub that houses generative AI resources such as information about accuracy concerns when using generative AI programs in research to visualize data.

Other materials include strategies for employing generative AI in course design and development and a chart that lists the role AI can play in teaching, along with the potential pedagogical benefits and risks.

LEARN MORE: Institutions should craft generative artificial intelligence policies to regulate use.

“This has been a game changer for faculty in a lot of ways in their teaching, but also in their research,” Wilson says. “We wanted to equip faculty with the information they needed to think about how they wanted to craft their own expectations and policies for students.”

The university offers other generative AI support, including one-hour workshops, multimonth learning programs and teaching sessions on topics such as using AI for tutoring and academic integrity considerations.

Vanderbilt also recently launched a committee comprising about 25 interdisciplinary faculty members, which meets monthly to discuss the possibilities and challenges generative AI can present in the classroom, Wilson says.

“We are really trying to be responsive to where faculty are,” she says. “In a course design program in August 2024, roughly half of the participants had little to no existing knowledge of how to work with ChatGPT or another large language model. Now, the vast majority coming to our programming are working with it. They’re looking for more moderate or even advanced ways to lean into it in their teaching and research.”

Some Faculty Members May Need a Nudge to Adopt AI Tools

If instructors still haven’t begun to use AI, receiving hands-on training from someone who demonstrates how the technology is effective can go a long way toward encouraging them to start, according to Leger.

“It feels like a lot of faculty are scared to make the leap,” he says. “Starting with workshop-style training, then providing access to on-demand online trainings is important for ongoing support.”

Schools may be able to incentivize educators to take advantage of available opportunities by offering paid training and certifications, Leger says, or making them part of performance evaluations.

“There are professional development performance management requirements educators have to follow through on,” he says. “This can just be added as another one of those metrics.”

With new AI capabilities constantly being introduced, Leger suggests making whatever type of training higher education institutions choose to provide continuous.

“Because it’s not like you can just learn prompting skills exactly the way those skills are taught today and have it still work a year from now,” he says. “Who knows what generative AI is going to look like in 12, 18, 24 months? Good prompting skills now might not be as good then. You need to be continuously learning new capabilities that come out.”