Program Helps Faculty Adapt Teaching for the AI Era

ChatGPT’s public debut in late 2022 elicited little more than a yawn from Dane Grossnickle, who was starting a new teaching job at the University of Maryland’s Institute of Applied Agriculture. Students might consult artificial intelligence (AI), he figured, only to round up info, similar to a Google search.

By early 2023, his attitude toward the technology had flipped from apathy to alarm as he increasingly noticed some students turning in work that bore the hallmarks of being written by a chatbot. Soon, he found himself frequently wondering what was student work and what was the result of a chatbot prompt.

Happily, the Grossnickle of 2025 has a far more balanced view of AI that includes constructively guiding his students in its proper uses, thanks in part to programming offered through the Teaching and Learning Transformation Center’s (TLTC) Teaching Academy. Its pathway in “GenAI-Informed Pedagogy” includes a series of trainings that help faculty understand effective ways to integrate AI technologies into their teaching—as well as when to leave it out of the lesson plan.

“At the end of the program, all of us who’d taken it understood AI is not going away,” said Grossnickle, agriculture business management lecturer and advisor at the institute. “What they taught us wasn’t that we have to accept and like AI, but that we have to understand it. In my classes, it’s become a valuable tool to enhance, not replace, learning.”

As educators grapple with the ways generative AI applications like chatbots, virtual assistants, and large language models generally have been transforming higher education, the TLTC has worked to help them explore their capacity and rethink what teaching and learning could look like as a result.

“Through our AI in Teaching programming, we've seen faculty across every college approach generative AI with both creativity and intentionality,” said Mary E. Warneka, TLTC’s director of teaching innovation. “They're teaching students to use these tools critically, to incorporate them into their learning process when appropriate and clearly articulating when they should not use them, and why.” ”

Through the Teaching Academy, instructors can earn micro-credentials for individual courses. Those like Grossnickle who complete three of the offerings, or a multi-session learning community plus a final application project, can earn the GenAI-Informed Pedagogy Practitioner meta-credential.

In just over a year, GenAI-Informed Pedagogy has become one of the Teaching Academy’s most popular offerings, with more than 600 micro-credentials awarded across its courses. The first course, “Harnessing AI for Teaching,” has been the most popular, drawing nearly 450 participants alone. In all, 60 faculty so far have earned the meta-credential.

One was Sayan Bhattacharya, an assistant professor in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. The pandemic had already driven an increase in students’ social media consumption, they said, impacting how students read texts and making teaching more challenging. Then generative AI, which can quickly summarize many assigned readings, became widely accessible in 2022 and barged into the classroom.

“I noticed that a lot of students were using ChatGPT for their assignments,” Bhattacharya said. “Rather than being punitive, I wanted to find ways to constructively integrate AI into my curriculum to ensure students get the most out of the class. TLTC's training certainly proved extremely useful.”

Through digital courses, interactive workshops, and learning communities, participants explore everything from enhancing course design to redesigning assignments to implications for research, and how they intersect with AI technology. 

As part of the pathway, TLTC is running two AI-focused learning communities for instructors this fall. The first, AI Playground, is an exploration of AI tools and teaching aimed at beginners. Using AI to Teach Undergraduate Research Skills, a collaboration between the TLTC and the Office of Undergraduate Research, is an advanced community for instructors.

“They call it a playground, but It was a really robust, really valuable course about developing course-specific guidelines and understanding of when and how to use these platforms,” said Grossnickle, who later joined the University System of Maryland’s Generative AI Pedagogy Fellows Program with encouragement from Mona Thompson, senior education development specialist at the TLTC.

The TLTC and the University Libraries have also created an AI and information literacy course module that faculty can use to help students learn more about AI-based tools, how they work and how to assess them for accuracy. To date, the module has been integrated into 337 courses, and a publicly available version has received 115,000 views.

Warneka cautions that during this time of rapid (and early) adoption, “AI integration into teaching isn't one-size-fits-all—its use has to be pedagogically purposeful and tailored to the unique needs of each discipline, each course, and even each assignment.”