CELT announces call for applications for Teaching Innovation Institute
LEXINGTON, Ky. (March 6, 2024) — Since ChatGPT emerged in late 2022, generative artificial intelligence (AI) has developed at a rapid pace, offering both possibilities and provocations for higher education. Academia is just beginning to imagine — and reimagine — the impact of generative AI tools on teaching and learning.
The dynamic and sometimes volatile nature of this technology’s evolution means that resources or training may quickly lose currency. Marc Watkins, Academic Innovation Fellow at the University of Mississippi, writes that “there is no static curriculum” when it comes to educational development around generative AI. And, as "Co-Intelligence" author Ethan Mollick argues, “too many people are waiting for an instruction manual, but none is forthcoming.”
At the Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching (CELT), we believe that the most effective way to learn about these tools, imagine their possibilities and meet their challenges is to experiment, play and engage as a community of inquiry with both the technology itself and the questions about education that it raises.
In this spirit, CELT is excited to invite applications for the 2024-25 Teaching Innovation Institute, which will focus on the evolving impact of generative AI in teaching and learning.
Launched in 2020, the CELT Teaching Innovation Institute is a responsive, interdisciplinary learning community that addresses emergent issues in higher education. The Institute draws faculty from across the disciplines into conversation and collaboration to address the opportunities and challenges in higher education. We invite and encourage reflection, inquiry and imagination as part of an opportunity to think big and broadly about how to intentionally welcome students into the learning process and accelerate their learning for a changing world.
The 2024-25 cohort will engage with ongoing questions about how to foster critical AI literacy, engage with ethical questions and explore possibilities for safe development and use. In addition, this group will work together to develop practical skills, research discipline-based implications and strategies, and enhance educational goals and outcomes through the use of generative AI.
As members of the faculty cohort explore those issues (and others), they will work collaboratively towards a goal of developing informed approaches to teaching with or in the context of generative AI and sharing those approaches with the wider University of Kentucky community. Given the revised focus of this forthcoming cohort, previous participants of the Teaching innovation Institute are welcome to apply.
Full-time faculty at UK interested in applying are encouraged to review the full call for applications. Questions can be sent to Jill Abney, CELT associate director, or Trey Conatser, CELT director. To learn more about past cohorts, see the Teaching Innovation Institute's webpage.
As the state’s flagship, land-grant institution, the University of Kentucky exists to advance the Commonwealth. We do that by preparing the next generation of leaders — placing students at the heart of everything we do — and transforming the lives of Kentuckians through education, research and creative work, service and health care. We pride ourselves on being a catalyst for breakthroughs and a force for healing, a place where ingenuity unfolds. It's all made possible by our people — visionaries, disruptors and pioneers — who make up 200 academic programs, a $476.5 million research and development enterprise and a world-class medical center, all on one campus.
In 2022, UK was ranked by Forbes as one of the “Best Employers for New Grads” and named a “Diversity Champion” by INSIGHT into Diversity, a testament to our commitment to advance Kentucky and create a community of belonging for everyone. While our mission looks different in many ways than it did in 1865, the vision of service to our Commonwealth and the world remains the same. We are the University for Kentucky.