Dear Center for Academic Innovation Community,
Some of the most powerful learning occurs when students move from studying a problem to tackling it. Authentic challenges create opportunities to apply knowledge, develop new capabilities through practice, and produce visible evidence of what students can do.
We saw that in action this month through a competition for University of Michigan students hosted by Podium Education and sponsored by the Center for Academic Innovation and Epic Games. Students from across U-M used Epic Games’ Unreal Engine to explore the future of mobility, considering possibilities ranging from smarter vehicles and immersive customer experiences to entirely new ways of moving through the world.
Over five days, students developed solutions to a real-world challenge, learned directly from Epic Games experts, created portfolio-ready work, and received real-time feedback from professionals in the transportation and mobility industries.
Experiences like this illustrate an important part of how we think about academic innovation at Michigan. Students need opportunities to undertake authentic work, develop capabilities through practice, and produce credible evidence of what they can do. They also need opportunities to express those capabilities—to explain their thinking, present their work, and engage with people shaping the future of their fields. Partnerships with Podium Education and Epic Games help us bring experience, evidence, and expression together in meaningful ways.
The same principle shapes our work with faculty. Consequential changes in education are best navigated through structured experimentation, shared learning, and careful attention to evidence.
This fall, we are launching a new series of Generative AI Faculty Forums—faculty-led conversations focused on emerging practices, promising projects, and the challenges instructors are confronting as they consider AI in the classroom. The first forum, on October 28, will explore AI roleplay and simulation. Future conversations will focus on course design and redesign, tutoring and Socratic prompting, and AI-assisted grading and feedback.
These forums will bring together faculty with different experiences and perspectives. Some are already experimenting extensively with generative AI. Others are looking for practical ways to understand and use these tools in their teaching. Still others are asking important questions about where AI belongs in education—and where it does not. We need all of those perspectives.
Our goal is to help faculty examine emerging approaches together, test ideas thoughtfully, consider their implications, and determine what meaningfully advances learning.
We are also creating opportunities to turn promising ideas into structured experiments. The Faculty Forums are co-hosted by faculty who have previously received funding and support from the Center for Academic Innovation to explore the responsible use of AI in teaching and learning at Michigan. This month, we also launched a new call to support the next wave of faculty innovation.
Our AI Implementation Call for Proposals invites faculty from across the university to investigate responsible applications of AI in teaching and learning. Faculty might explore personalized learning, roleplay and simulation, scalable assessment and feedback, skills validation and career readiness, or approaches that strengthen critical thinking and AI literacy. Selected projects can receive up to $15,000 in funding, along with instructional design, project management, and technical support from the center. The priority proposal deadline is October 30, with a final deadline of January 15.
Taken together, these efforts reflect what academic innovation can look like across our university. Students engaging in authentic work with industry partners, faculty learning from one another as they navigate consequential changes, and promising ideas becoming carefully designed experiments that help us understand what works and where we can have the greatest impact.
The future of education will not be determined by technology alone. It will be shaped by the choices we make about how technology is used, what capabilities we help learners develop, and what we preserve or change about the human experience of learning. Our role is to create the conditions in which students and faculty can ask difficult questions, test new possibilities, and turn knowledge into meaningful impact.
I look forward to seeing what our community learns and builds next.
Go Blue!
James DeVaney
Associate Vice Provost for Academic Innovation
Founding Executive Director of the Center for Academic Innovation