By Demian Hommel, CTL AI in Teaching and Learning Fellow in partnership with the AI Literacy Center
Whether you are a seasoned professor, a graduate teaching assistant (GTA) just starting your classroom journey, or a member of our broader global teaching community, we are glad you’re here.
The “Stories of AI at OSU” series was born out of a simple but urgent question: How do we maintain the human presence in higher education in an era of rapid technological disruption? We’ve all seen the headlines: some hailing AI as a pedagogical savior and others warning of the end of critical thinking. But here at Oregon State University, we’re finding that the most innovative work is happening somewhere in the middle.
Beyond the “cheat-bot” narrative
It is easy to get caught up in the cat-and-mouse game of academic integrity, but this series is about moving from an AI-resistant mindset to an AI-integrated one. As our colleagues in this series demonstrate, generative AI is less a replacement for our thought and expertise and more a suite of tools that can strategically improve our work.
Throughout the upcoming AI spotlights, you will meet OSU faculty members from across disciplines, from finance to biology and digital media, who are using AI to:
- Automating the “boilerplate”: Reclaiming instructional capacity by automating administrative grunt work like drafting slide deck outlines, rewriting quiz variables, analyzing large, complex datasets, or answering course-specific emails from students.
- Scaling high-impact feedback: Using modular chatbots and AI-driven oral evaluations to provide 24/7 support and Socratic dialogue that would be physically impossible for a lone instructor in a large enrollment course.
- Cultivating “productive failure”: Encouraging students to “break” the AI to identify hallucinations, which serves as a high-level learning opportunity to develop critical thinking and debugging skills.
Humanizing the machine
Perhaps the most important theme you’ll notice in these vignettes is the emphasis on human connection. As new media communications instructor Todd Kesterson beautifully puts it, we crave human emotional connection in education; if what we are doing can be easily replaced by AI, it pushes us to be more innovative and ask what truly differentiates us from a machine.
We invite you to read these stories not as technical reports, but as a series of experiments. Some of our featured faculty started as, and continue to be, skeptics. Others are currently deep in the “black box” of research, figuring it out alongside their students. All of them are committed to the idea that our foundational skills and experiences are more important than ever.
What’s next?
In the coming weeks, we will release AI spotlights featuring:
- Doug Rees, College of Agricultural Sciences, on using AI as a research assistant in acoustic ecology.
- Jonathan Leong, College of Business, on building “modular 24/7 TAs” for finance.
- Todd Kesterson, College of Liberal Arts, on distinguishing design intent from AI hype in spatial storytelling.
- Rachael Cate, College of Engineering, on maintaining grounded presence and ethical inquiry in engineering communication.
- Sanjai Tripathi, College of Business, on defeating “sloppy thinking” in entrepreneurship.
- Laurie Bridges, AI Literacy Center, on the vital necessity of critical AI literacy.
- Nate Kirk, College of Science, on helping biology students “fail productively.”
We hope these strategies spark ideas for your own learning. Feel free to brainstorm with the OSU Center for Teaching and Learning (it’s a terrific resource!) or reach out to us to share your own “Intentional AI” experiments.
Let’s make what we can out of this experimental phase together.
Looking for upcoming AI-related professional development opportunities? See AI+Events.
About the Author: Demian Hommel is a Professor of Geography and Environmental Science in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences and is an AI in Teaching and Learning Fellow with the OSU Center for Teaching and Learning. When he isn’t exploring the societal and environmental impacts of AI, you can find him DJing under the alias Dr. Gonzo or trying to graft citrus trees in his greenhouse.
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