Rethinking Professional Development in our AI Era
Marc Watkins
What Does it Mean to Be AI Aware?
I don’t think that all of our courses need to engage with AI. But all courses need to consider AI’s now ubiquitous presence in our writing and reading environments. Consideration of AI could include active refusal, minimal engagement, or embracing AI. With a mix of these approaches, the curriculum as a whole can support AI literacy—along with a host of other established learning outcomes like critical reading and thinking.
An AI Wave
AI Guides or Champions | AI Communitas of Practice | AI Institutes |
University of Virginia's AI Guides The Faculty AI Guides participated in a two-day institute on AI and teaching in August, and then met monthly in small teams to learn from and with each other. CTE faculty and staff supported the AI Guides with resources and advice as the Guides navigated this rapidly changing landscape. For a small window into the work of the Faculty AI Guides, see this collection of AI-integrated assignments on the UVA Teaching Hub. | University of North Texas – Generative AI Institute for Teaching (GAIT) Newman University– AI Awareness A semester-long community of practice that helps instructors integrate generative AI into teaching ethically and responsibly. It combines asynchronous Canvas modules with bi-weekly virtual meetings, covering topics such as chatbots, AI’s impact on student and instructor skill development, instructional design, multimodal teaching, and issues like deepfakes and misinformation. Participants complete deliverables, reflections, and comprehension checks; those who pass receive a certificate, digital badge, and a PD stipend. | University of Mississippi’s AI Institute for Teachers In-person twice a year for 2-3 days. Open to all faculty. Up-to-date information about AI, hands on activities, practical strategies to bring AI awareness into the courses. Expanding to:
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Types of Professional Development
National Leadership in AI Training
“There is no better place to see the promise and the peril of generative artificial intelligence playing out than in academia. And there’s no better place to see how academia is handling the explosion in ChatGPT and its ilk than at Ole Miss”
-Molly Roberts Washington Post
1. Navigating the AI Already on Your Campus
2023
2024
2025
Blackboard’s AI Design Assistant
Blackboard’s AI-powered Summarize
The new AI-powered Summarize option in Flexible Grading lets instructors generate high-quality overall feedback for student submissions evaluated using a rubric. This tool uses generative AI to analyze and suggest overall feedback on the submission based on the rubric criteria, the selected performance levels and their descriptions, and any criterion feedback provided.
Some Faculty are Using AI to Grade in Higher Education
48.9% of grading-related conversations being identified as automation-heavy remains concerning. Although surveyed professors thought this was the single task that AI was least effective at, it was seen in the Claude.ai data. And even if this represents only 7% of the Claude.ai conversations we studied, it emerged as the second most automation-heavy task. This includes sub-tasks like providing feedback on student assignments and grading their work using rubrics. While it’s not clear to what degree these AI-generated responses factor into the final grades and feedback, the interactions surfaced by our research do show some amount of delegation to Claude.
BOX’s AI Integration
Library Databases Integrating AI
In March 2025, Ex Libris unveiled their AI-powered Research Assistant tool for institutions using Summon. Within a week, Summon users reported error messages with specific search terms and topics.
How to Practice AI Awareness With the AI Already on Campus
Conduct your own informal “AI audit” every quarter. Set a calendar reminder every four months to spend 30 minutes exploring AI features in the campus systems that you and your students use the most. Document what you find in a simple spreadsheet with column labels such as: System Name, AI Feature, What It Does, Student Impact, and Privacy Concerns, etc.
Create a shared faculty resource. Work with like-minded colleagues across the campus to compile your audit findings into a shared document. Include screenshots of AI features and brief descriptions of their capabilities. Share this with your department chair, and your faculty senators, and ask upper administration for support to create easy-to-navigate AI guides and other resources that are open to everyone.
Carry this AI awareness into your course policies. Help guide your students in understanding which AI tools they will encounter in the LMS and other campus systems by clearly articulating what those features are in your course syllabus. Avoid posting course policies on your syllabus that take siloed positions that are unquestioningly pro- or anti-AI. Instead, focus on real advice about AI and set clear expectations when crafting syllabus policies or guidance for your students. Doing so will help spark conversations and normalize discussion about AI in your classroom.
2. Students are Power Users of Generative AI
The number of AI users across the globe has soared:
Students can now access premium AI for free
all offer free trials for college students
Grammarly’s AI Grader
Various AI Detection Tools/ Techniques
AI Detectors | Process Trackers | Stylometry | Watermarking | Humanize Detector |
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The Cat & Mouse Game of AI Detection
When Turnitin launched its AI-detection tool, there were many concerns that we had. This feature was enabled for Turnitin customers with less than 24-hour advance notice, no option at the time to disable the feature, and, most importantly, no insight into how it works. At the time of launch, Turnitin claimed that its detection tool had a 1% false positive rate (Chechitelli, 2023). To put that into context, Vanderbilt submitted 75,000 papers to Turnitin in 2022. If this AI detection tool was available then, around 750 student papers could have been incorrectly labeled as having some of it written by AI. Instances of false accusations of AI usage being leveled against students at other universities have been widely reported over the past few months, including multiple instances that involved Turnitin (Fowler, 2023; Klee, 2023). In addition to the false positive issue, AI detectors have been found to be more likely to label text written by non-native English speakers as AI-written (Myers, 2023).
The Influencers Selling AI to Students
Reading
3. Keeping Up To Date About AI: �GPT-5 is Here (and Free)
Old Version
New Version
GPT-5 and Reasoning
AI Agents
Generative AI Is Multimodal
Generative AI is more than text generation. Take this example of a single prompt with Google’s Gemini:
Generative AI Can Transcribe
My Notes Become Context
AI Transforms My Notes Into an Audio Overview
Generative AI can Code Practical Apps
Turning My Notes Into Digital Flashcards
Transforming My Notes Into Video
Google’s
Veo 3
AI Disclosure: This video was generated using Google’s Veo 3. The static image was taken from the UM homepage and uploaded using the prompt “make the fans cheer & sing the Hotty Toddy fight song”
TIME
A Two Lane Approach