AI Toolkit

Susanne and Helen are using AI to support research, curriculum building, and language acquisition for students in a German for the Professions course. Students in GERM 440 received access to Boodlebox to enhance their language learning and workforce readiness. Specifically, students used AI to revise and evaluate their work, and practice authentic language in German. Susanne is also using AI for curriculum design and productivity, including curating up-to-date information and in-class activities from outdated sources. Additionally, Susanne is using AI to gather and highlight key sources and articles for research.

Amber and Glori are reimagining course design and collaboration through AI. They built custom support bots within Boodlebox to help students navigate assignments, receive formative feedback, and build confidence. Students tested and reviewed these tools in a spring pilot, while Amber used AI to transform an in-person course into an engaging, fully online experience. Their work highlights how AI can make teaching more interactive and student-centered.

Obasesam and Matthew are using AI to create immersive, role-play simulations for Justice and Peace Studies students. Their projects model complex, multi-stakeholder environmental policy negotiations—allowing students to step into the perspectives of diverse actors and test solutions to real-world challenges. Through this approach, they're helping learners build empathy, negotiation skills, and systems-level thinking.

Suzy, in collaboration with Michael, designed a custom AI Writing Tutor powered by ChatGPT to guide students through the writing process. The tool provides individualized feedback as students draft issue papers, helping them strengthen their argumentation, organization, and tone. This project demonstrates how AI can extend one-on-one writing support beyond the classroom while preserving academic integrity and voice.

Jordan and Nancy are using AI to generate synthetic datasets for student assessments, allowing learners to work with realistic, privacy-safe data in their courses. Their approach provides flexible, hands-on opportunities to practice analysis and visualization while meeting ethical and confidentiality standards. These tools will be piloted in upcoming summer courses.

Karen and Scott provided general support for all Innovation Fellows projects, as well as research-specific input on things like AI tool selection, testing of faculty-developed AI applications, and prompt-engineering suggestions. They also developed and contributed to the AI Ideabook: their contribution was a chatbot designed to help students assess the quality of sources they find during research. This ChatGPT-driven tool uses a built-in information literacy knowledge base and incorporates assignment parameters supplied by the student to guide them through evaluating information sources and determining the appropriateness of those sources for their research assignments.