The College's 'AI Academy' integrates artificial intelligence in school operations, classrooms

This academic year, The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences introduced a new program focused on improving artificial intelligence literacy in faculty, administrators and staff. 

Dubbed “The College AI Academy,” the program features Kyle Jensen, assistant dean of artificial intelligence and emerging digital technologies, leading sessions on how to create sustainable AI-related initiatives that aim to improve the quality of research, teaching and operations.

“Consistently, faculty described feeling disconnected from one another with regard to AI development and expressed a desire to learn more about AI integration,” Jensen said. “We created the AI Academy to address those concerns.”

The academy meets once a month to collaborate on ways to implement AI technology throughout schools and departments within The College. Jensen’s goal with the academy is to foster a culture of communication that leads to high-impact initiatives across Arizona State University.

“What makes our academy unique is that we have drawn together a wide range of faculty consistently over an academic year so that our plans for development are considered at length and sourced from many different frames of expertise,” Jensen said. “We want them to come up with innovative solutions that are rooted in their expertise and to feel supported in that innovation now and in the future.”

Jonathan McMichael is The College’s AI specialist and has been helping faculty develop frameworks for thinking about AI as a whole and not just a collection of individual tools. His background as a librarian and instructional designer has given him the resources and skills to approach integrating AI-powered systems into teaching and research.

“The pace of change made a traditional ‘write a plan and execute it' approach insufficient. We needed an adaptive structure with thoughtful people who could make sense of things together as they unfolded,” McMichael said. 

Each monthly session is designed to inform the next one and build on resources. McMichael hopes that the academy will build a model for replicable frameworks and establish a grounded way of understanding what AI means for work across different fields.

“The College spans the humanities, natural sciences and social sciences, and that breadth is an asset. You start to see patterns across disciplines, places where an approach that works in one context could unlock something in another,” McMichael said. 

“The things we build from the action plans aren't necessarily product ideas. They're ways of showing what might be possible, framed around what it could mean for the ASU community, and creating the on-ramps for others to engage.”

Éva Szeli is a teaching professor in the Department of Psychology and has spent the past two years taking advantage of any opportunity that came her way to learn about AI and its pedagogical applications, including being a member of the ASU Generative AI Community of Practice.

She's working on a project to address the challenge of scientific writing in the age of generative AI within the department’s core research methods course.

“I am looking to build a bot with which students could partner in their lab work, featuring built-in resources and appropriate guardrails,” Szeli said. “In doing so, I am learning a lot about the process of building an effective AI-powered pedagogical tool. It is simultaneously simple — anyone can do it — and fraught with nuanced complexities.”

From her perspective as an educator, she looks forward to AI’s potential as a teaching and learning tool while ensuring that both faculty and students have the resources and training to use these tools effectively and ethically.

“I think the real power of AI isn't simply in saving time for faculty with course development and students in completing assignments, but in the ways in which it allows us to reimagine what education can look like,” Szeli said. “This includes personalized and adaptive learning for students, enhanced content creation and pedagogical approaches for faculty, and the accessibility and scalability of learning for all.”

Jen Eden, an associate teaching professor and director of online learning in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication, has been figuring out ways to integrate AI into the school’s online programs while teaching students how to use it as an effective tool.

Through the AI Academy, Eden has been working on a learning intervention designed as a structured interview experience for students in the COM 100: Introduction to Human Communication course.

“One of the challenges in COM 100 is that students are often new to college, the discipline, the course material and college-level writing. I worked with our AI specialist, Jonathan McMichael, to develop a simple AI tool that will turn a hidden process like brainstorming and project decision making into an explicit process,” she said. 

Eden believes that AI-related initiatives have the greatest potential when framed as skill-amplifying tools rather than productivity shortcuts. She hopes to model and introduce ethical and responsible AI use within more Hugh Downs courses while fostering interdisciplinary curiosity and exploration among students.

“In research, AI can accelerate literature discovery, support interdisciplinary synthesis and help scholars identify connections that may not have been immediately visible. In the realm of teaching, AI can shift the focus from product to process,” Eden said. “When integrated intentionally, AI can scaffold student thinking, make invisible cognitive processes more explicit  and provide feedback that helps students engage deeply with course concepts.”

David McElhoes, an instructor for the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies,  has been approaching AI with a philosophical perspective. He began to use it to design assignments and advance his research.

“I’ve built quite a few custom GPTs, or generative pre-trained transformers, for my students: tutors, mock debaters, interactive study guides, paper-writing tools and even gamified lecture simulations with a pseudo ‘treasure hunt,’” McElhoes said. “I’m preparing a repository for such things so my colleagues can easily copy them and modify them for deployment in their own courses.”

His goal for the platform is to help with different aspects of being a professor, from delivering course content to serving as the basis of unproctored assignments. Beyond the classroom, he hopes to use it for his research.

“I have a project which aims to develop a new workflow for philosophy that bleeds together the distinction between AI and humans. I call it synthetic philosophy,” McElhoes said. “One of my aims for the platform is to speed up this process, so I can have a bespoke philosopher-AI help me to get all of my ideas out there. I would like to give other philosophers the same chance. We are entering the age of fast philosophy.”

The College AI Academy will host its second cohort at the start of the next school year, adding new initiatives to keep up with the evolving world of AI.