AI is becoming a part of everyday life, and teaching is no exception. For instructors, this can be a real advantage: AI tools can help spark ideas, clean up instructions, organize course materials, and make online content clearer and more accessible for students. One of the biggest advantages of AI is that it can take some of the busywork off your plate, so you can focus more on teaching and connecting with students. Regardless if you are building a brand new course or refining a course you previously taught, there are a lot of useful applications for AI in course design. AI helped me better organize my lesson plans, gave me a springboard for activities in class sessions and refined my grading rubrics for assessments. AI can be a legitimate time-saver for organizing and refining your course materials and getting feedback on specific aspects of your instructions, rubrics, or assignments.

It’s important to note that AI isn’t a substitute for your expertise. AI outputs are not perfect and should be reviewed for accuracy. During my trials and tribulations using AI, I prompted ChatGPT to create lecture slides for a course. These lecture slides were practically unusable because there were numerous errors, inaccurate facts and nonexistent articles that were cited. What I found most useful was having AI organize and structure the slides, lesson plans and activities. 

This teaching tip offers practical ways in which faculty can use AI to help design their courses and support learning ideas without substituting it for real instruction. It focuses on low-stakes prompts to integrate AI into your classroom, improving workflow and sparking new ideas so students’ best interests are at the center. 

Drafting and Revising Course Materials

AI is especially helpful when you’re staring at a blank page or trying to refresh older course content. It can:

• Draft or update syllabi, module overviews, announcements, and assignment descriptions.
• Rewrite text to make it clearer, more concise, or better suited for your students.
• Convert assignment descriptions into TILT-aligned instructions (Purpose → Task → Criteria).
• Turn long readings or lectures into summaries, outlines, or learning guides for Moodle.

Prompts to try

• “Rewrite my Week 3 assignment using TILT formatting and make the instructions clearer for online students.”
• “Create a concise module introduction for Week 3 based on this lecture outline.”
• “Turn this 50-minute lecture into an outline that works for an online module.”

Improving Clarity, Structure, and Accessibility

AI can be a great partner in helping make your course easier for students to navigate, especially in online or hybrid formats. It can:

• Suggest ways to break up or sequence content to reduce confusion.
• Translate dense, technical language into student-friendly wording.
• Generate alt text, figure descriptions, and transcript summaries for multimedia.
• Point out areas where instructions might be unclear or overwhelming.

Prompts to try

• “Write alt text and a brief figure description for this image following digital accessibility guidelines.”
• “Simplify this paragraph to a 10th-grade reading level without losing important ideas.”
• “Rewrite these instructions to be clearer for asynchronous students.”

Supporting Learner Variability

AI makes it easier to offer students multiple ways to access and practice course material, a course design approach offered through Universal Design for Learning (UDL). You can use AI to:

• Create summaries, outlines, visual representations, or scripts of complex content.
• Build low-stakes practice quizzes or study aids from readings and lectures.
• Scaffold assignments with examples, templates, or step-by-step support.
• Reword dense instructions to lower cognitive load and improve clarity.

Prompts to try

• “Create a 10-item self-check quiz from this reading that students can use to practice.”
• “Give me a summary, a visual outline, and key bullet points from this chapter.”
• “Provide two beginner-friendly examples to help students get started on this assignment.”

Generating Creative Activities and Engagement Strategies

If you’re looking to refresh your discussions or add variety to your online modules, AI can help you brainstorm ideas that fit your course. For example, it can help you design:

• Discussion prompts, case studies, or real-world scenarios.
• Activities like debates, role-plays, hot takes, or reflection prompts.
• Small group, or icebreaker ideas connected to weekly topics.
• Initial drafts of H5P activities or interactive elements.

Prompts to try

• “Give me three engaging discussion prompts for Week 4 that encourage deeper analysis.”
• “Create a short case study I can use to spark conversation in my online module.”
• “Suggest two interactive activities (role-play, simulation, or hot take) that fit this week’s topic.”

Closing Thoughts

AI won’t replace your teaching or your expertise, but it can help you work more efficiently, create clearer materials, and support a wider range of learners. Used well, AI can give faculty more time and space to focus on what matters most: teaching, connecting with students, and building meaningful learning experiences.

About the Author

Chad Bousley is a Senior Instructional Designer at e-LIS, who helps faculty with online course design, creating interactive activities, and implementing online teaching best practices. Outside of the classroom, Chad enjoys learning foreign languages and playing guitar.

Others may share and adapt under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC.

Receive Weekly Tips view all teaching tips Submit a Teaching Tip

Teaching in today’s classrooms can be complex due to the political and cultural landscape that surrounds students and influences their learning. It is up to us as teachers to address and embrace these complexities rather than give in to binary thinking or avoid these topics altogether. As schools are where young people learn how to interpret the world, it’s we teachers who shape this thinking to best prepare students for the real world- a world that is full of complexity.

Combining research with real-world scenarios, Oakland University writing professor Nick Sanders, with co-author Bethany Meadows illustrate how to reflect on ourselves as educators and respond to this complexity. By recognizing positionalities, interrogating worldviews, and embracing complexity, Sanders and Meadows highlight the ways we can reflect on our teaching practice and identities while creating more inclusive and engaging classrooms. 

To see the complete reflection questions, scenarios, analysis, and extra resources for personal use, visit the full “Embracing Complexity: A Three-Realm Approach to Engage Contemporary Political Landscapes” article published in MLA Profession. 

Recognizing Positionalities and Ecosystems

Everyone fits into a different kind of “norm” and has multiple identities that cannot be separated or reduced to simple thinking, which is often the norm in schools. These overlapping identities shape how students experience the classroom: how they interact with others, how they are treated, and how they respond to what this “normal” expectation is. 

Sanders and Meadows examine how classroom discussions can center on cultural, political, and social identities, rather than simplifying them down to “either-or” perspectives that have long been dominated. They encourage self-reflection that interrogates and examines how our identity shapes our teaching practices. 

Questions to consider:

• What are my identities and positionalities?
• How do my identities and positionalities shape my teaching values and practices?
• How does my educational institution reinforce certain values based on the institution’s history and positionalities?

Interrogating the Reproduction of Worldviews

Our identities and worldviews influence what we know, how we act, and how we interact with social systems. The term “literacy” is commonly associated with reading and writing. However, Sanders and Meadows examine how it is also seen as a “learned political market”. It harbors ideologies and reproduces worldviews, depending on what is taught, how it’s taught, and whether you are challenging a binary curriculum that only covers specific perspectives. This, in turn, positions teaching and learning as inherently social and political actions.

By facing the deeper commitments of teaching and learning, we can face complexity at the small scale. This can start within our classrooms. We can challenge the larger social and political structures at play by recognizing language hierarchies or questioning standardized testing structures. We can also reject heteronormativity and racism embedded in the curriculum, amongst many other binary-based decisions within the system. These actions can force us to examine our own values, how we act, and how we judge. Doing so, we can promote a more equitable environment for our students.

Questions to consider: 

• How did I come to adopt the worldviews I believe?
• Which of my beliefs do I prioritize?
• Do my priorities create exclusions?

Teaching to Embrace Complexity

Traditional education often prioritizes and centers binary, narrow-minded ways of thinking. The K-12 curriculum still focuses on simplistic opposition stories (example: good vs. bad, right vs wrong, etc.). Even when marginalized groups are included, they are still not seen as equally important to forward binary stories, and are not always fully integrated. They are only added to show representation but do not challenge the dominant narrative or change the overall perspective, nor are they studied thoroughly. 

However, students can and will understand this complexity against the binary curriculum if they are allowed to. Sanders and Meadows argue that if we intentionally ground our students’ work in intersectionality, social norms, and reflection, they will be able to unpack complex topics such as inequalities that mirror real-world problems. Combined with recognizing our students’ diverse backgrounds and self-reflecting on how we approach sensitive topics, educators can have meaningful class discussions and teach students to think critically and navigate complexity inside and outside of the classroom. 

Questions to consider:

• If I don’t say anything about the current complexities in this world, why don’t I?
• How can I acknowledge tragic events for students without bringing the events into debate?
• Have I set community norms and guidelines for my course collaboratively with students?

Looking Forward

As Sanders and Meadows state, this is not a “how-to” guide on how to easily incorporate these ideas into your everyday life. These concepts are dependent on the positionalities, places, and context. Change starts with self-reflecting and listening to understand, not to respond. Teaching environments must move beyond binary thinking to understand and include students of different cultures and politics. Making small improvements in our mindset can lead to the change needed to embrace complexity.

References and Resources

Sanders, N., & Meadows, B. (2025, Winter). Embracing Complexity: A Three-Realm Approach to Engage Contemporary Political Landscapes. MLA Profession. https://profession.mla.org/embracing-complexity-a-three-realm-approach-to-engage-contemporary-political-landscapes/

About the Authors

Reilly Bisoski is a writing intern at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. She is a senior with a major in creative writing and a minor in English. When she’s not writing, Reilly can be found at a local rock show or reading a good book.

Nick Sanders (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of Writing & Rhetoric. He is a queer scholar-practitioner committed to justice-centered institutional change through antiracist and queer approaches to writing pedagogy, campus leadership, and public and professional writing. Outside of work, he likes to make (and eat) sourdough bread.

Bethany Meadows (she/they) is the Inclusive Pedagogy Specialist for the Center for Teaching and Learning Innovation at Michigan State University. They have an interest in inclusive pedagogy as well as sexual violence policy and response.

Others may share and adapt under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC.

Receive Weekly Tips view all teaching tips Submit a Teaching Tip

Over the last 20 years we have seen a move toward increased and intentional student engagement in the college classroom, often in the form of active learning, student choice, and responsiveness to their learning and life needs. While these are good and necessary moves, they still make students the recipients of an instructor’s choices rather than collaborators in cultivating what the classroom experience should be. 

To truly empower students to shape the larger work of teaching and learning, colleges and universities across the U.S. and beyond have established student partner programs within their teaching and learning centers, often called Pedagogical Partners. Largely popularized by the 2014 book Engaging Students as Partners in Learning and Teaching (Cook-Sather, Bovill, & Felten), Pedagogical Partnerships bring together faculty and students to collaboratively enhance the teaching and learning experience. More than simply gathering student input, these partnerships assert “a pedagogy of mutual engagement [through] reflection and sustained dialogue, inquiry, and collaboration” (Thiessen, 2010). Mutuality and shared responsibility is at the heart of Pedagogical Partners, where both faculty and students agree to learn more about teaching and learning from one another. 

In its second year as of this writing, CETL’s own Pedagogical Partners program invites both faculty and students to join in this joint venture. Faculty can sign up to be paired with a student to begin a three-part dialogue, observation, and feedback process driven by the student and faculty involved.

Why Students as Pedagogical Partners

With the core principles of the program set, it helps to know what the partnership process looks like, what you can expect and--in the spirit of mutuality--what you stand to both give and receive.

Student Perspectives Beyond Your Students

We benefit from gathering our students’ feedback, especially before the end of the semester’s formal feedback surveys (i.e., course evaluations), but that feedback will always be formed by the power dynamics involved in the context of your classroom. A Student Partner not only provides feedback as a student outside of your class, but often outside of your discipline, offering a fresh, different perspective still centered on the student experience. 

Informed Student Insights

Before stepping into a classroom and engaging in conversation with faculty in a formal capacity, Student Partners receive training from the CETL staff and student leaders on core teaching and learning principles, particularly related to higher education. They practice using a validated observation protocol to inform their perceptions and structure their feedback. Undergirding these competencies, they learn to engage in dialogue to build mutual understanding and curiosity in a way that respects the context of each professor and classroom. Most of all, they respect that their work with any professor is confidential.

Generative Ideas Through Sustained Dialogue

More than filling out a form or checklist, the process centers around dialogue and conversation. Before and after a classroom observation, faculty and students engage in a conversation about goals, issues, questions, and ideas. This partnership can continue as ideas grow and you want to work off continual feedback, either through additional student meetings or working with a CETL Faculty Fellow or staff.

Flexible Feedback, For Your Needs and Your Use Only

This program is for student and faculty engagement, intended only to be a formative opportunity for insight, growth, and understanding. Any feedback provided remains strictly confidential, so it will not be used for evaluative purposes outside of participation in the program.

The baseline format for faculty-student partnering consists of three parts: pre-observation conversation, classroom observation, and post-observation conversation. Nevertheless, this essential structure can be customized to provide insight into an asynchronous course, review an assignment description, or look over a syllabus. 

Faculty and Student Experiences

Coming from both faculty and students, we find in these quotes the same spirit of mutual benefit and growth, with each party understanding the unique contribution they have to make to each partnership and the larger partnership each classroom requires.

From a faculty partner:

“As a new faculty here, I found this process very helpful, allowing me to reflect deeply on my values and practices. I have some concrete ideas for future courses given this experience… [The student partner] was just such a phenomenal partner and observer for my class. ... I appreciated her eye to the small moments that matter and her connections to how students might experience the complex social interactions in the classroom… her dispositions to asset-based observations and a human-centered approach to students as full people was very much appreciated!”

From student partners:

“Throughout my time working with the Pedagogical Partnerships, I have formed great relationships with my fellow classmates, as well as professors. It has been extremely gratifying to work collaboratively with professors to improve their ability to positively impact students in their classrooms with well-designed, engaging pedagogical practices.” 

“Being part of the Pedagogical Partnership program has been incredibly rewarding. I have been able to explore more of Oakland University’s campus and interact with professors who I otherwise would not in my degree plan. Seeing the intentionality behind certain decisions instructors make, and how it translates to the classroom, has been my favorite part.”

References and Resources

Students as Partners CETL webpage
Faculty Interest Form, and Student Interest Form
Inside CETL's Pedagogical Partnership: Enhancing Student Engagement at OaklandU

The work was largely republished as an open-access book: Pedagogical Partnerships: A How-To Guide for Faculty, Students, and Academic Developers in Higher Education (Cook-Sather, Bahti, & Ntem,  2019). For more than 15 years the journal Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education has disseminated the outcomes and possibilities of these partnership programs, a few key examples highlighted by leading voice Alison Cook-Sather.

Others may share and adapt under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC. View all CETL Weekly Teaching Tips. 

Receive Weekly Tips view all teaching tips Submit a Teaching Tip