Sam Deleon-Castillo, Communications Student Fellow

The thirst for knowledge and conversation around artificial intelligence technologies shows no signs of slowing down, whether in classrooms, online, at offices, or around kitchen tables. Patrick Barry, a clinical assistant professor of law at the Michigan Law School, has seen that first hand. 

Barry, who also serves as the director of digital academic initiatives for Michigan Law, partnered with the Center for Academic Innovation to develop a free online webinar series on artificial intelligence tools, attracting hundreds of learners from not just the United States but also dozens of other countries around the world. The three-part series, “AI Tips and Traps,” created a diverse, dynamic forum for exploring practical uses, sharing best practices, and expressing concerns about this rapidly changing technology. 

When Barry started having AI conversations with his U-M students a few years ago, he noticed two recurring themes. They wanted to know how to use AI effectively, and they wanted to explore the potential pitfalls when people begin to outsource some of their cognitive work to AI tools. With these themes in mind, Barry created two new AI courses at the law school along with a lunch-time series called “AI Tips and Traps.” Their success encouraged him to create a similar, more global set of live learning opportunities online. 

To bring this vision to life, Barry teamed up with the Center for Academic Innovation, with whom he had previously collaborated on four different online course series—Good with Words: Writing and Editing, Good with Words: Speaking and Presenting, Feedback Loops: How to Give and Receive High-Quality Feedback, and AI for Lawyers and Other Advocates. A major goal of the new initiative was to make the “AI Tips and Traps” webinar series as inclusive and interactive as possible. So Barry and the center began experimenting with different ways to engage learners using the chat function on Zoom. 

Their preparation paid off. Minutes into the first session in the series, which over 800 people attended, the chat was filled with lively responses to Barry’s initial questions. It was clear that people were not only hungry for information on AI but also excited to contribute their own thoughts.  

“When you have hundreds of people sharing their views in the chat, from places as different as Poland, Pakistan, and Peru, participants don’t just get the chance to learn from me,” he said. “They also get to learn from a dynamic, international collection of insights. That ensemble approach to education can be very valuable—and inspiring.”

Barry then spent a lot of time after each session reading through the chat log, looking for ways to incorporate people’s ideas into the next week’s lessons.  

“The chat can be a tremendous advantage,” Barry said. “When I teach in person, it’s highly unlikely that I will remember, word-for-word, all the great things students say during class. But when I teach online, I now get, through the chat, this wonderful archive of specific comments.” 

The interactive format of the webinars allowed him to get a better sense of the questions and concerns the participants had about AI, as well as the individual topics they wanted to explore. In this way, he was able to create a valuable exchange of information that goes beyond just what could be done in a classroom.

“This two-way exchange between the learners and me is what made the webinar series a huge success,” Barry said. “People were allowed to express themselves, and that created opportunities for other people to question their own assumptions about AI tools. One of my favorite things about doing these kinds of workshops is seeing, in real-time, folks change their views. That, to me, is one of the major hallmarks of a valuable learning experience.”

Given that AI continues to dominate conversations across many career fields, Barry and the Center for Academic Innovation have plans to offer more AI workshops during this coming academic year. He even hopes to take this online learning model and get his students involved to maximize the learning experience even further.