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

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.”