September 3, 2026

Vol. 1, Issue 4

Save time without sacrificing teaching quality

Adjunct faculty bring valuable expertise to the classroom, but teaching part-time often means balancing course preparation with other professional and personal responsibilities. Generative AI can help lighten the workload by serving as a brainstorming, drafting, and course-design partner—without replacing the instructor’s expertise or judgment.

Here are a few ways adjunct faculty can put AI to work:

✔️ Refresh a course. Teaching a course you inherited? Ask AI to review assignment instructions, identify potential areas of student confusion, or suggest clearer learning objectives and student checklists.

✔️  Speed up lesson preparation. Use AI to brainstorm examples, case studies, discussion questions, practice activities, or real-world scenarios related to your discipline. Start with an AI-generated draft, then customize it to fit your students and teaching goals.

✔️  Streamline feedback. AI can help create feedback templates, identify common errors, and organize comments around a rubric. Always review and personalize AI-generated feedback before sharing it with students.

✔️  Rethink assignments for the AI era. Ask AI to help identify where students might rely on AI inappropriately and suggest ways to emphasize application, reflection, problem-solving, and authentic learning.

Start small: ask AI to improve one assignment, generate a few examples for an upcoming class, create a feedback template, or help you rethink an assessment, then review the results through the lens only you bring to the course, your disciplinary expertise, your students, and your teaching goals.

Stanford Teaching Commons: AI Teaching Guide

University of Michigan: GenAI Resources for Instructors

Vanderbilt: Faculty AI Toolkit

EDUCAUSE: Teaching with Artificial Intelligence

The goal isn't to use AI everywhere. It's to use it where it can give you back valuable time.

What if we taught students to use AI to improve their research instead of doing the research for them?

As students increasingly use generative AI for coursework, UTA University Librarians are finding practical ways to incorporate AI into information literacy instruction while keeping the focus on critical thinking, research skills, and academic integrity.

One of the library’s most requested workshops combines AI and research to help students develop stronger search strategies. Alongside traditional skills such as using library databases and Boolean operators, students learn how an AI chatbot or large language model (LLM) can help them brainstorm keywords, synonyms, related terminology, and database search strings.

The goal isn’t to have AI find sources or write the paper. Instead, students use AI as a thinking partner, then evaluate and modify its suggestions before conducting their own searches.

The workshop also creates an opportunity to address a major challenge with AI: fabricated or inaccurate sources. Students learn why asking AI to “find scholarly articles” can produce citations to sources that don’t exist and why information must be independently verified. They also practice strategies such as examining abstracts for additional keywords and following references to explore the scholarly conversation.

Looking for a way to help students navigate AI while strengthening their research skills? Consider partnering with a University Librarian. Faculty can invite a University Librarian to provide an AI + research workshop when students are beginning a research project, developing a topic, or struggling to find scholarly sources. A workshop can be tailored to your course, assignment, and expectations for AI use.

The goal is simple: Help students move from asking AI for answers to using AI to ask better questions.

Alessia Cavazos, Content Design Librarian at UTA, provided this article.

“The future of learning design is to create curriculum content for AI (not humans).”
— Dr. George Siemens, UTA Visit, August 2025

During a recent UTA presentation on AI Agents and Agentic Workflows, George Siemens challenged higher education to move beyond simply adopting AI tools. He argued that AI is becoming embedded in the learning process itself, requiring universities to take a more intentional and strategic approach. Siemens expressed concern that higher education has largely been reacting to AI's rapid development rather than actively helping to shape its future.

While AI can streamline course design and support routine tasks, it cannot replace the human elements of teaching that students value most. Faculty mentorship, guidance, feedback, and encouragement remain essential to meaningful learning experiences. As AI continues to evolve, the future of teaching will likely involve greater collaboration between humans and technology, but it will still depend on educators who can inspire, challenge, and connect with learners.

AI and Course Design: Machines Can Help, but Only Humans Can Teach

If AI can increasingly generate content and provide explanations and provide "just-in-time" tutoring support for students, what aspects of teaching and learning from faculty become more important rather than less?

Looking for a creative way to boost student engagement and collaboration? The OLC microlearning course Designing Digital Escape Rooms introduces faculty to the exciting world of gamified learning experiences that challenge students to solve puzzles, think critically, and work together to achieve a goal. You will learn how to design escape room experiences aligned with course objectives, craft engaging narratives, create meaningful puzzles, and leverage tools such as Google Forms, Genially, H5P, and ThingLink. Whether you teach online, hybrid, or face-to-face, this course will help you transform learning into an interactive adventure that students won't soon forget.

Explore the OLC Microlearning Library for free! Our university license gives UTA faculty access at no cost.

Read the report: MIT AI and Education Report

"This is not an optional exercise." The authors of MIT's new AI and Education report argue that higher education must rethink teaching, learning, and assessment in response to generative AI. The report emphasizes human-centered education, and intentional teaching. 

At CRTLE, this message aligns closely with our initiatives such as the AI Course Redesign Institute, Technology Test Kitchens, and AI literacy programming. Faculty are encouraged to focus not just on AI tools, but on designing authentic learning experiences that strengthen critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and judgment. AI may change how we teach, but the human elements of learning remain at the center. 

Thursday, October 1, 2026

1:00 p.m.–2:00 p.m.

Trinity Hall, Room 105

FOCUS: Rethinking what counts as evidence of learning when AI can generate polished products in seconds.

This session creates an essential forum for faculty to move beyond a narrow focus on detection and discuss how assessment can make student thinking, decision-making, and growth more visible. Together, participants will consider approaches that preserve rigor while responding realistically to an AI-rich learning environment.