Designing this course, we kept reminding ourselves: the future of education lies in designing learning experiences where AI is meaningfully integrated to support and enhance, rather than diminish, our capacity to think, create, and learn (Image generated with Gemini, April 2025)
By Minh Le - Principal Instructional Designer, Chris Moffett - Researcher, and Richard Jochum - Associate Professor of Art & Education
In Winter Session 2025 as part of the new TC Academy, DFI staff members and affiliate faculty launched a bold instructional experiment: AI-Lab for Educators, a hybrid-credit course designed to build AI literacy through collaborative inquiry and creative practice. Co-developed and co-taught by Dr. Chris Moffett and Dr. Richard Jochum, with instructional design support from Minh Le, the course invited both educators and educators-in-training into hands-on exploration of AI tools like ChatGPT, MidJourney, Runway, and others.
More than just introducing technical tools, the course sought to ask deeper pedagogical questions: What does it mean to collaborate with machines? How does AI reframe our relationships with each other as educators? And how can we teach not only with AI, but about it—ethically, critically, and playfully?
This course was more than an introduction to generative AI: It was a laboratory for reimagining teaching and learning in a time of rapid technological change.
A snapshot from the course introduction video, created using AI avatars of the two instructors. This use of generative AI in this case served as both a teaching tool and a conversation starter, inviting students to reflect on the possibilities and limitations of AI-mediated instructor presence in digital learning spaces.
A New Kind of Winter Course: Inclusive, Intensive, and Tiered
As part of the Winter Session Pilot Program, AI-Lab for Educators was designed as a three-week intensive deep dive into the practical applications of Generative AI for education. In a first-of-its-kind offering, the course was open not only to students seeking two or three credits, but also to the in-service teachers, professionals, and administrators, who enrolled in the class for no credit.
Designing a single course to meet the needs of these three groups was both a challenge and an opportunity. We introduced a tiered assessment model that aligned expectations and workload with credit level. All students completed foundational experiments; two-credit students participated in collaborative inquiry projects; and three-credit students added experiments with AI tools for research and a final reflection that connected course theory to personal and professional practice.
This approach created flexibility while preserving academic rigor and allowed learners to learn from each other across levels. As one student shared:
“I truly appreciate the 0-credit format. As a teacher still raising my own children, I would not be able to fit in more hours per week. However, I feel very privileged to be able to participate in this class, and I am incredibly grateful for the quality of the instruction I received over these past 3 weeks.”
Reframing Collaboration in the Age of AI
From the start, “collaboration” was the organizing theme of the course. We were curious not only about how AI might assist educators, but also how it might transform the very ways we work and learn together. The course invited students to reflect on both human-human and human-machine collaboration through three types of assignments:
- Experimentation: Individual, hands-on exploration of AI tools for creative and instructional purposes.
- Collaborative Inquiry: Group projects that examined how AI alters communication, co-creation, and teamwork.
- Reflection on Collaboration: Deeper theoretical and personal synthesis, required for three-credit students.
This structure reflected our belief that understanding AI means more than knowing how to use tools. It also requires asking what it means to collaborate with AI and how AI reshapes the ways we collaborate with each other.
One student captured the shift in mindset this way:
One of the most powerful takeaways from this course was how it positioned AI as an ally rather than a replacement for human skills and creativity... It demonstrated how AI can complement human ingenuity by lifting the veil on creativity, sparking new ideas, and enabling growth.
Playful Practice, Practical Outcomes
We knew that many students arrived with limited experience using AI tools and with a healthy amount of anxiety. So we made it a priority to design a course environment that encouraged play, experimentation, and curiosity.
As one participant reflected:
“This course has truly been an eye-opening experience. I started with very little knowledge about AI and finished feeling empowered and excited to incorporate it into my teaching.”
Each week, students tried out different AI platforms—text, image, sound, and video—guided by themed prompts and scaffolded activities. Alongside creation, they also learned to critically assess the ethical implications and pedagogical value of these AI-generated materials. They documented their process and insights in a portfolio that could be shared with employers or used as a personal artifact of growth.
Not all AI tools are created equal. In one course experiment, students compared outputs from different AI image generators, such as the prompt “a professional headshot of a doctor,” as shown here from ChatGPT and Gemini, and examined the racial, gender, and cultural biases embedded in these models.
Students also appreciated how the assignments stacked on one another to help them gradually develop new technological competencies without feeling overwhelmed:
“I appreciate how organized and well-thought-out this course was… Each assignment was carefully crafted and connected with one another and the larger projects.”
To ground course content in the realities of educational practice, we invited a series of guest speakers—artists, designers, educators, and researchers—who use AI in their work. These speakers offered real-world perspectives on creative workflows, classroom challenges, and ethical questions.
Students were asked to engage with speaker insights, reflect on their relevance, and in some cases take on special assignments that the speakers left them. These moments helped connect theory to practice and offered learners multiple models for what responsible, creative AI use can look like. Students consistently named the guest speakers as one of the most impactful features of the course:
“The guest speakers were a standout feature of the course. Their expertise in using cutting-edge AI tools and their ability to demonstrate the expansive ways they can be applied were informative and inspiring.”
Beyond tool use, we emphasized critical engagement. In the final live session, student groups presented collaborative inquiry projects that not only demonstrated creative use of AI, but reflected on its social, ethical, and pedagogical implications. Dr. Erik Voss, Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics, and Dr. Alex J. Bowers, Professor of Education Leadership—guest critics for the final presentations—offered constructive insights and encouraged students to continue to think more critically and deeply about the role of AI in education beyond the course.
Designing and Teaching With AI
Designing this course wasn’t just about teaching others; it was also a learning experience for us. As we collaborated to build the course, we also explored what it means to collaborate with AI. From generating lesson ideas to prototyping assessments, we used AI tools as part of our instructional design process, not just to save time, but to spark new possibilities.
This recursive process—teaching with and about AI—challenged us to think more deeply about what thoughtful AI integration can look like in real classrooms. Then, modeled for our students how AI might support creativity, without replacing human insight or connection. After teaching the course, through this meta-level reflection of teaching about AI while using it, we realized that AI can be a powerful collaborator in education, but only when used with intention, creativity, and care.
Looking Forward
We hope to offer AI-Lab for Educators again and to expand access to even more learners across disciplines and professional backgrounds. As interest in AI continues to grow across the field of education, we believe that this course offers a model for how to introduce educators to emerging tools without overwhelming them, and how to build AI literacy not just as technical skill, but as a mindset rooted in reflection, collaboration, and purpose.
Generative AI may be new, but the questions it raises about creativity, ethics, equity, and collaboration are deeply familiar to educators. In this course, we invited participants to face those questions together, guided by shared inquiry and creative practice. And based on what we saw in just three weeks, we’re confident that educators are more than ready—not just to respond to AI, but to shape its future in education.
As one student wrote:
“I certainly would highly recommend this course to others… I almost feel like this type of course must be mandatory for all TC students—to enhance general AI literacy for all educators.”
We couldn’t agree more.
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