Dear Center for Academic Innovation Community,
Universities are at their best when they bring people together around important questions—especially when the answers are not yet clear. That feels particularly relevant as we begin another academic year at Michigan.
Artificial intelligence is changing how people work and learn. New technologies are creating possibilities for more personalized and accessible education. The skills students will need throughout their lives are evolving. Across higher education, we must think carefully about what these realities mean for the future of teaching and learning.
These questions are complicated, and no individual, discipline, company, or university has all the answers. That is exactly why we need to create more opportunities to learn from one another.
During the upcoming academic year, the Center for Academic Innovation will host more than a dozen events bringing together some of the brightest minds from across the University of Michigan and beyond. These gatherings reflect an important part of how I think about CAI’s role at Michigan.
Michigan’s size and intellectual breadth are extraordinary strengths. Across our schools and colleges, faculty and staff are experimenting with new technologies, testing new approaches to teaching and learning, and wrestling with many of the same questions about what comes next. Our opportunity is to help those ideas travel — to connect people who might otherwise be exploring similar questions independently, create opportunities to learn from one another, and turn individual experimentation into shared learning and institutional progress.
That means creating different kinds of opportunities for exchange. Sometimes we benefit from hearing a leading outside voice challenge our assumptions. Sometimes the most useful conversation is with a colleague who has tried something new and can speak candidly about what they learned. And sometimes innovation begins simply by bringing people from different parts of a large university into the same room and giving them space to discover that they are wrestling with similar questions.
Our programming this year is designed with those different forms of connection in mind.
Our new AI Futures keynote speaker series will bring nationally recognized leaders to Michigan whose work is shaping conversations about artificial intelligence and education, including Kelly Miller of Harvard University, Julie Schell of the University of Texas at Austin, and Isabelle Hau of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning.
Just as important is creating opportunities to learn from the extraordinary expertise already present at Michigan. Our peer-led Generative AI Faculty Forum series will enable faculty to learn directly from colleagues experimenting with AI roleplay and simulation, course design, tutoring, assessment, grading, and feedback. Innovation Blends will create informal opportunities for interdisciplinary exchange around responsible AI, data-informed decision-making, leadership, healthcare, advanced technology, communication, and the durable human skills people will need in a changing world.
We will also gather our community for the Online Learning Showcase, where faculty and staff can see how colleagues are creating open, non-credit, and for-credit learning experiences that extend the reach of a Michigan education — and imagine what they might build next.
Together, these gatherings are about more than sharing ideas. They are about strengthening the connections that allow ideas, insights, and promising practices to move across a university as large and intellectually diverse as Michigan.
Michigan’s size and decentralization allow extraordinary experimentation to happen simultaneously in many places. Our opportunity is to help those ideas travel. To create connections among people who might otherwise be solving similar problems independently, and to turn isolated experimentation into shared learning and institutional progress.
The future of education will not be determined by a single technology or decision. It will emerge through thousands of choices about how we teach, what we value, what we preserve, what we change, and how we prepare learners for lives and careers that will continue to evolve.
Those choices deserve more than individual reflection. They deserve conversation, experimentation, disagreement, and the opportunity to learn from one another.
I hope you will join us throughout the year—not simply to attend an event, but to participate in a larger conversation about the future of education and the role Michigan can play in shaping it.
Go blue!
James DeVaney
Associate Vice Provost for Academic Innovation
Founding Executive Director of the Center for Academic Innovation