CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Global Education and Training partnered with colleagues at the Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning (CITL) and hosted a week-long summer training program that explored AI-enabled and emerging educational technologies.
The in-person program was designed for faculty and staff from Universidad Autónoma de Occidente (UAO) in Columbia and took place from July 20 through July 24 on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus. Program sessions were held inside the University of Illinois Armory.
Throughout the week, CITL staff and faculty led sessions centered on how participants could deploy AI in their own classrooms realistically, teaching them essential skills they could use when designing, developing, and integrating AI teaching models, tools, and strategies.
The program also emphasized hands-on tool development, cohort-based learning, and sustained post-training support, that culminated in instructional innovation and a shared research agenda.
Although the workshop was a week long, the program itself is just beginning. Participants will continue in a hybrid support phase with weekly synchronous meetings to support implementation, reflection, and scholarly inquiry.
What made this program unique, however, was what the participants were expected to accomplish during their stay on Illinois’ campus.
The program was entirely immersive and hands-on. Participants not only listened to and learned from experts in the field, but they also documented the entire experience through notes, photos, reflections, screenshots, examples, and stimulating conversations.
That was the core purpose of the program—to balance expert-led seminars, collaborative workshops, and dedicated time for practice and give visiting faculty functional learning assets tailored to their unique disciplinary needs.
In the end, their experience was captured in their final presentations.
The final project was a two-part presentation. The first part was about their overall AI learning journey, which addressed concerns, questions, and assumptions they had before the institute, what they learned from the institute, and where they want to be by the end of the following semester.
During the second part of the presentation, participants explained how they expect to integrate AI into one of their courses back at UAO. Participants shared how they had to identify learning outcomes, evaluate potential impacts, and assess how students will demonstrate achievement based on those learning outcomes.
Participants also used AI tools to help create their final presentations, and the end goal was to demonstrate a thoughtful reflection, intentional course design, and meaningful AI application.
However, he said after his immersive experience with the program, he noted a change in his perspective that particularly resulted from the meaningful conversations he had with his peers and with the experts at CITL.
He explained that those exchanges helped encourage the shift in his initial perspective regarding AI because they identified how he could become a better professor and academic director with the help of AI instead of simply using AI as some other tool.
“I discovered new ways to improve my work as both an academic director and a professor, especially in course design, student engagement, assessment, and academic management,” he said. “I now feel confident that I can use AI practically in my daily work, support the learning process, and help students improve their academic and professional performance.”
Overall, Parra had an amazing experience with the program, and he said moving forward he plans to apply the new ideas and approaches to AI that he learned from the program to the redesign of the postgraduate program in marketing at UAO.
Specifically, he plans to use AI to review the curriculum, define learning outcomes, design new learning activities, and create assessment strategies that respond to the changes taking place in the marketing profession.
He also added that he wants to include practical applications of AI in areas such as market research, consumer behavior, content creation, analytics, customer experience, and strategic decision making.
“Another important goal is to prepare professors and students to use AI critically, ethically, and responsibly,” Parra said. “This redesign will allow the program to remain relevant and help students develop the knowledge and skills required for the future of marketing.”
Global Education and Training provides a gateway to expertise at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign through high-quality, customized training programs. To learn more about current or upcoming programs or to learn how to develop a custom program, visit the GET website.
Analicia Haynes is the Storytelling Coordinator at Illinois International. She can be reached at ahayn2@illinois.edu.