Strategic Priorities for AI in Teaching & Learning
Six principles guide the TLC’s engagement with and support for AI-assisted learning and AI-enabled learning environments.
Equitable Access
The TLC strives to advance AI use that does not create or exacerbate disparities in student access to these tools, remove barriers faced by UCLA instructors and students in accessing AI tools appropriate for their disciplinary contexts, and enable the adoption of AI tools aligned with instructional needs. This requires working with campus partners to make a variety of tools available that enable pedagogical flexibility. Following this principle does not mean instructors or students must use AI, but it does prioritize the removal of barriers to those who choose to use AI.
Student Literacy
The TLC works to ensure that all UCLA students have the opportunity to learn about AI so they are prepared to use AI tools critically, ethically, responsibly, and collaboratively. Supporting AI fluency will enable all members of a classroom community to operate from a shared understanding of the technology and appropriately apply it to coursework. To support this effort, the TLC is developing a Bruin Learn module that an instructor may choose to add to any course to help their students improve their AI knowledge and skills.
Faculty Engagement and Support
The TLC offers UCLA instructors a range of professional learning opportunities and resources to support them in building learning environments that effectively integrate AI. Programming acknowledges the diverse dispositions toward AI, leverages the subject matter expertise of UCLA faculty in its design, and engages instructors through every phase of AI adoption from novice to expert AI-assisted learning practitioners. TLC programming in development includes on-demand, web-based resources (e.g., prompt engineering library), synchronous workshops, larger campus events like the AI Teaching Symposium (Adapting Instruction in the Age of AI), and an AI Faculty Fellows program.
Assessment Integrity
Academic misconduct concerns have emerged with the prevalence of AI usage both in and outside the classroom. This is why Assessment Integrity is an important consideration in the TLC’s efforts related to teaching and learning with AI. To address these concerns, the TLC urges instructors to be clear and fully transparent about their position regarding AI use in the classroom. One way to do this is to include an AI policy in the course syllabus. Support is also available for instructors who want to redesign assessments in ways that enable students to thoughtfully and critically use AI to augment — and not replace — their cognitive development.
Faculty-Driven Innovation
The TLC seeks to enable instructors to explore, experiment, and evaluate AI tools in classroom contexts. Together, we can assess the impacts of AI tools on student learning and engagement, connect instructors through communities of practice, and facilitate opportunities to scale AI-assisted instructional strategies if and when appropriate. The TLC Educational Innovation Grants provide an important funding source for this sustained investment in faculty-led pedagogical innovation.
Adoption Decisions Driven by Research
Ensuring our decision-making around AI use in the classroom is data-driven and research-based is foundational to the TLC’s approach. Research needs to be ongoing and rigorous, reproducible, inclusive of all disciplines and dispositions toward AI, and address a broad range of emerging educational challenges in AI-assisted learning environments. It is critical that AI integration into the curriculum be beneficial to the student experience and allow students to experience productive struggle when engaging in challenging cognitive tasks, build higher order cognitive skills, and mitigate the potential for “cognitive outsourcing”, or the over reliance on AI for content knowledge.