Artificial intelligence adoption in higher education is often discussed through policy or technology strategy, but much of the real work is happening informally through experimentation, peer learning, and day-to-day problem solving across institutions. This session explores how AI Communities of Practice can help universities move from fragmented experimentation toward more thoughtful and coordinated approaches to AI governance. Drawing from experiences supporting AI initiatives in higher education, the session examines how faculty, staff, and administrators make decisions about AI use while institutional guidance and norms are still evolving. The conversation will focus on professional judgment, trust, ethical uncertainty, institutional culture, and the hidden labor involved in helping colleagues make sense of rapidly changing technologies. Rather than viewing governance only as a top-down policy process, this session considers how governance also develops socially through conversation, collaboration, and shared institutional learning.
The rapid integration of artificial intelligence into higher education has created an urgent and widespread need for course redesign, yet most institutions lack the time, funding, and staffing to support faculty at scale. This presentation introduces a structured, AI-assisted course redesign protocol developed at the Yale School of Public Health to address this gap. Designed to be completed in a single two-hour sitting, the protocol guides faculty through a ten-step process that audits learning objectives, assesses AI substitution risk at the assessment level, redesigns for process visibility, authentic student thinking, optional AI integration, and generates ready-to-use syllabus language — all without altering the fundamental nature or intent of the course. Early piloting with YSPH faculty has yielded consistently positive responses, with participants reporting renewed confidence and inspiration around assessment redesign. Attendees will leave with a replicable framework they can adapt and deploy at their own institutions.
