Faculty AI Use Cases

Faculty are encouraging students to experiment with building things using AI, from interactive games and web-based essays to databases and timelines. When we design these activities with faculty, we preserve a desirable difficulty, so that creating with AI deepens students' understanding of course material and brings their ideas to full articulation.

Many courses study AI directly or examine its relationship to their field. We work with faculty to design experiences that help students think critically about AI, look beneath the hood of familiar tools, and investigate AI using the questions and methods of their fields.

Faculty can work with us to design AI assistants for their courses: chatbots that draw on course materials and follow instructions that guide their responses toward the teaching team's goals, offering support better suited to the course than a general-purpose chatbot alone. We also work with faculty to help students use generative AI in ways that support their learning.

As faculty grow concerned about inappropriate AI use in asynchronous, take-home assignments, the Bok Center works with them to design and support other modes of assessment. These typically include an in-person component or work completed without AI.

In some courses, faculty are prototyping ways for students to use AI at different stages of the academic research and writing process: annotating texts, transcribing, finding and working with sources, and drafting and revising papers and presentations.

We work with language instructors to create materials and tools for their students and to help students use AI in ways that support language learning. Students might build their own learning apps or practice with models that communicate in multiple languages, investigating what the models do well and where they fall short.