AI Futures Keynote: Julie Schell

What happens when faculty move beyond debating AI’s role in education and begin designing, testing, and evaluating new approaches in their own courses – all without a playbook?

Schell will share case studies of faculty across disciplines who are building AI pedagogy from the ground up using Socratic AI tutors. Through examples of tutor prompts and instructions, she will show the pedagogical challenges faculty set out to address, the choices they made in designing their tutors, and what they learned from using them with students.

Drawing on a year of student–tutor interactions, she will also examine evidence of how students use faculty-built AI tutors to practice behaviors that can be difficult to foster and observe, including metacognition, error processing, and self-directed learning. The findings suggest a compelling possibility: Thoughtfully designed AI may create new opportunities for students to practice the difficult thinking that meaningful learning requires.

About Julie Schell

Dr. Julie Schell is the Assistant Vice Provost of Academic Technology and the Director of the Office of Academic Technology at The University of Texas at Austin. She is at the forefront of stewarding the changing landscape of higher education in the age of AI and is a member of Anthropic's Higher Education Advisory Board. Her current passion project is UT Sage, an adaptive AI tutoring system she conceived to drive innovative and responsible adoption of AI in the university classroom. Dr. Schell is also a Professor of Practice in the Departments of Design and Educational Leadership and Policy, teaching graduate and undergraduate courses. In her studios, Dr. Schell and her students partner with generative AI to prototype speculative objects and environments designed to improve teaching and learning. Dr. Schell has over 25 years of experience in higher education and has held positions at the nation's top research universities, including Stanford, Columbia, Harvard, and Yale. She completed her doctorate in Higher and Postsecondary Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and a four-year postdoctoral fellowship in the Mazur Group at Harvard University. She was recently named one of Ed Tech Magazine's 2026 Higher Education Influencers to Follow in the category of Digital Learning Pioneer.

About AI Futures Keynote Speaker Series

The Center for Academic Innovation is convening leading voices in academia to examine emerging applications of artificial intelligence in higher education. The AI Futures keynote speaker series is a critical examination of how artificial intelligence is reshaping teaching and learning as we consider the future of life changing education at Michigan.