The College of Arts and Sciences breaks new ground in course design to help faculty maintain successful student learning in the AI era.
The development of strong critical thinking skills is the core mission of higher education and a centerpiece to the advantage students experience in the College of Arts and Sciences. The widespread use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools creates new challenges for faculty in guiding students to successfully build their critical-thinking toolkit.
Liem Tran, associate dean for academic programs and professor in the Department of Geography and Sustainability, presented two workshops in preparation for the fall 2026 semester to help faculty strategize assignments and course design, titled “Beyond AI Detection: Designing Course Activities for Thinking and Learning in the Age of Generative AI.”
“Developing students’ capacity in thinking must remain central in our education mission,” said Tran. “Because AI has changed how thinking is expressed and accessed, we need to adapt to retain authentic cognitive engagement. It is about students genuinely thinking,not just producing correct-looking results.”
Faculty participants in the workshops discussed ways to rethink assessment methods and redesign course assignments to preserve this cognitive engagement rather than simply trying to police or ban the use of AI—converting AI from a threat to a pedagogical catalyst. The goal is to ensure that even if students use AI assistants, they still learn the needed cognitive skills and gain real knowledge through classroom assignments.
“It takes time for students to learn,” said Tran. “It is called a productive, or constructive struggle. Students need to spend time and struggle with those concepts and how to put things together. Through that process, they learn things correctly.”
Course-Design Strategies Keep Students Engaged and Learning
Through the workshops, Tran introduced IDEA (Instructional Design for AI Era Learning), a framework for analyzing and redesigning course activities and assessments to preserve meaningful thinking, reasoning, productive struggle, and authentic learning in AI-rich educational environments. Within the IDEA framework, the procedure for developing new course designs and assessing them is called CARE:
- Characterize goals for assignments: What kinds of thinking should students do? How would faculty know they authentically engaged?
- Assess AI’s impact on those goals: How could Al complete the task? What learning might students skip?
- Redesign assignments to address the impact: Change elements to make thinking more visible and protect the learning process.
- Evaluate the success of learning and cognitive engagement: Identify strengths, vulnerabilities, debates, and takeaways.
“CARE provides a standard process for evaluating and redesigning course assessment to resolve and enhance authentic cognitive engagement,” said Tran.
The workshops included group exercises in which faculty actively practiced the CARE approach by analyzing real assignments with an eye toward successfully retaining the productive struggle and cognitive engagement.
Faculty Members Appreciate Insight for Contending with AI
Faculty participants were enthusiastic in the shift from policing AI use as a “cheating control” to navigating ways of protecting thinking and learning.
“One of the most valuable take-home messages, for me, was that we can design meaningful assessments that both leverage AI and challenge students to demonstrate their learning instead of simply providing an output,” said Gladys Alexandre, Charles P. Postelle Distinguished Professor and interim divisional dean for natural sciences and mathematics. “The workshop gave me a lot to ponder about AI and how to deploy its use with students’ learning focus, which is ultimately how we can best prepare them for their future careers.”
Teaching Professor in English Anne Langendorfer found the workshop energizing as she rethinks teaching goals and practices while faced with students’ varied attitudes and experiences with generative AI use.
“I’m working to balance developing collective critical AI literacy with helping individual students build knowledge they can use in their future lives,” said Langendorfer. “Tran’s emphasis in the workshop on helping us create meaningful learning opportunities through careful assignment design was very reassuring.”
The workshops highlight the college’s focused environment of teaching expertise that maintains academic rigor for students—and adapting in thoughtful, strategic ways to challenges from ever-changing culture and technology.
“I really liked the detail and deep thought that went into the workshop,” said Professor of Anthropology Alex Bentley, director of the Center for the Dynamics of Social Complexity. “We so often just hear the same buzzwords about AI. This was different: Liem had a very detailed set of questions for us when thinking how to revise our syllabi in a way that makes AI the partner in teaching, not the adversary or panacea.”
by Randall Brown