Events and Support

Lead by Shaun Foster, CTL Strategic Priority Fellow for Generative AI, Academic Affairs; School of Design, CAD

Generative AI is changing fast! This synchronous online teaching circle will explore how generative AI tools can streamline administrative tasks, personalize learning experiences, and enhance instructional quality and learner engagement. In our explorations we will:

• Investigate adaptive learning technologies that tailor educational content to individual student needs and learning styles
• Utilize generative AI to create interactive and immersive learning experiences that keep students engaged
• Leverage generative AI tools to aid in the creation of educational materials, such as lecture notes, presentations, and multimedia content
• Streamline administrative tasks such as scheduling, student tracking, and communication using generative AI
• Use generative AI to analyze student performance data and provide insights to enhance teaching methods and course design
• Incorporate generative AI into curriculum design to ensure that courses are up to date with current technological advancements and industry needs

Each meeting will involve a mixture of group activities, including:

• A run-down of recently released generative AI tools, articles, and other contemporary developments
• Virtual “hands-on workshops” for participants to explore generative AI tools and share their experiences
• Discussions of a specific subtopic, starting with a short introduction to seed the conversation
• Opportunities for participants to provide examples from their own teaching practices and share resources

Our circle will meet via Zoom (approximately) every other Friday, 11:00am-12:00pm over the Spring semester starting January 24, 2025. (The other dates are February 7 and 21, March 7 and 21, and April 4 and 18.) If you are interested in joining this circle, fill out this AI Teaching Circle Google form. 

Lead by Greg Babbitt, School of Life Sciences, COS; and Ernest Fokoue, School of Mathematics and Statistics, COS

The invention of AI software tools is continuing to change the landscape of what students want and need from the classroom experience. Chatbots can easily replace a traditional human instructor, and in many ways, can offer a more tailored, more direct, more convenient, more affordable, and more personal learning experience. They can also be employed by everyone on the planet to achieve a high level of language proficiency (be it English or computer programming). So, what do students actually need from the traditional classroom? We will meet and discuss ways we are refocusing our classrooms to better build skill sets that students might still need in a world of AI-driven applications.

We work extensively in both the theory and practice of many machine-learning algorithms that exist beyond the Large Language Models that inform generative AI, and have a lot of interest in philosophy, religion, epistemology, and the behavioral sciences as well. Due in part to these diverse perspectives, our approach to facilitating this circle is organic: rather than planning everything in advance, we are prepared to facilitate discussions and activities depending on the initial interests of the assembled group and as those interests evolve over the semester.

We will poll participants on their availability and preferred meeting frequency and mode (on campus and/or via Zoom). If you are interested in joining this circle, email Greg Babbitt by January 21, 2025.

Leading RIT faculty will offer short practical demonstrations on how AI tools have been used to enhance their teaching practices.  This showcase is a great opportunity for RIT faculty to sharpen their skills or learn something new through hands-on demos and live Q&A. 

Presenters are listed below, along with an introduction video on their demonstration topic.

AI Tools: Low Hanging Fruit Shaun Foster, CAD
Text-based AI tools for Research and Writing Processes Phil Shaw, SOIS 
ChatGPT in Higher Ed: Boosting Teaching Efficiency Garret Arcoraci, GCCIS
A Formula For Ethical AI Concepting Application Ihab Mardini, CAD
Fast formative feedback for your students using Gen AI Clark Hochgraf, CET

Event Recording