Designing Spaces for Critical AI Engagement: Teaching with HelpMe and GenAI
Rachel Horst’s teaching practice engages Generative AI openly and relationally, as a space for collaborative inquiry, critical reflection, and pedagogical experimentation. In her Master of Educational Technology courses, she invites students to work with AI systems such as HelpMe, a course-embedded, transparent, and configurable chatbot developed at UBC Okanagan that draws on curated course materials, as a way to engage with course learning objectives while interrogating AI-mediated knowledge production. Her approach emphasizes trust, dialogue, and process-oriented assessment design, encouraging students to evaluate AI outputs while cultivating agency and reflexivity as learners and thinkers. Through frameworks such as the entangled dimensions of AI literacy and computational sense-making, students develop language for interrogating the seductions of LLM fluency and the assumptions and authority embedded in these systems. Creativity is central to Horst’s work with AI, held in dialogue with its social, ethical, relational, and political dimensions in education.
Reimagining Learning about the Social Determinants of Health: Integrating Critical AI Literacy into Social Work Education
Kelly Allison thoughtfully redesigned a social work assignment to give students choice in leveraging Generative AI within a scaffolded approach that explores the social determinants of health (SDOH) in a social work context. By considering bias, ethics, and AI literacy, alongside explicit guidance and reflection on how and when AI should be used, students can decide whether to use AI in developing an assignment outline and case scenario. This scaffolded redesign supported students in developing more realistic, practice‑based scenarios and a deeper understanding of how the social determinants of health shape clinical work, while building critical AI literacy.
Building Automation Resilience: A Design-Based Approach to Integrating AI in Computer and Data Science Education
Led by Dr. Dongwook Yoon, the Automation Resilience project successfully integrated eight ‘AI modules’ as structured learning activities into the existing Computer Science curriculum. These modules empower students to achieve specific AI-related learning outcomes alongside traditional course content and ensure that students develop the technical resilience needed for an AI-integrated workforce.
For the 2026-2027 academic year, the project team aims to scale these modules across seven courses in Computer Science, Data Science and Statistics. To foster broader educational impact, all modules will be made publicly available through the “Automation Resilience Playbook” hosted on Pressbooks. Additionally, the project team will host a workshop in April 2027 to share their findings and pedagogical insights with the wider UBC teaching community. If you’re interested in applying Dr. Yoon’s “AI Integration Framework” to your current course, please contact him at yoon@cs.ubc.ca.
What Students Are Telling Us about GenAI Use in Classrooms: Key Findings from UBC Arts Students
We’re Only Human (WOH) is an Arts-based, TLEF-funded, initiative that explores new challenges and opportunities presented by generative AI in courses where writing plays a key role in students’ understanding of foundational, discipline-specific knowledge and practice.
To explore how students are using GenAI in their academic lives, at the end of Fall 2024 and Spring 2025, the WOH team surveyed UBC students enrolled in courses offered by the Faculty of Arts, and published a full report – Navigating AI in the Classroom: A Student Survey. In this article, we’ll share what we learned from this survey to support instructors and staff across UBC who are designing learning experiences in this new era.
Visit the We’re Only Human (WOH) project site for learning resources, including instructor-facing materials to guide teaching and student-facing content to foster understanding and responsible use of AI.
Developing Critical GenAI Literacy
In his WRDS 151 and WRDS 150 classes, Dr. Jonathan Otto works with students to develop critical Generative AI (GenAI) literacy. This includes introducing students to the technology’s social, political, economic, and environmental dimensions and expanding their understanding of its benefits and limitations for emerging academic writers. He invites—but does not require—students to use GenAI, offering a range of structured options for integrating it into their work.
Dr. Otto scaffolds his assignments so that students who choose to use GenAI learn to do so in ways that align with academic integrity expectations, ensure data security, and respect copyright. He also teaches students to craft prompts, using tools like ChatGPT-4o and Copilot, in ways that keep them in control of their writing process rather than fostering dependence on the technology.
BIOCBOT: A GenAI study buddy tool
BiocBot is a Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) biochemistry study buddy tool that acts as both a tutor (the mentor) and protégé (the mentee) to remove situational barriers and encourage more students to engage in the highly effective strategy of learning-by-teaching.
Enriching Spanish language teaching and learning with AI
Dr. Brianne Orr-Álvarez integrates Generative AI to support communicative and intercultural competence by helping students practise autonomously, experiment with expression and dialect, and reflect on how meaning is constructed across linguistic and cultural contexts. Her approach includes guided and scaffolded use of AI across core skills—reading, writing, listening, and speaking—and activities with clear instructions and sample prompts for pronunciation practice, as well as tasks that show diverse uses of AI to enhance collaboration in the classroom. All of this work is framed through discussions about integrity, ethics, and digital collaboration. core course skills.
She notes that integrating GenAI carefully takes much longer than expected and that students often find prompting and decision-making overwhelming. Her guidance for educators is to start early, start small, make integration predictable and consistent, and incorporate students’ perspectives and reflections throughout the process.
HelpMe: An AI-Enhanced Student Support System Hosted at UBC
Our group developed HelpMe, an AI-enhanced student support platform that unifies multiple help channels including an AI chatbot, asynchronous questions, and office hours into a single system. The tool was created to address the challenge of supporting (large) classes with limited instructional staff while ensuring that students receive timely, course-specific guidance. By embedding instructor validation into everyday workflows, HelpMe keeps AI answers accurate, trustworthy, and aligned with course expectations. Students have responded positively, valuing the system as a central place to seek help, while instructors have noted fewer repetitive email questions and the growth of a reusable knowledge base that strengthens the AI over time. The system has been deployed in courses such as COSC 304, INDG 100, and some education courses, with broader rollout planned for 2025. Since HelpMe is developed and hosted at UBC, it ensures privacy and institutional control while also enabling unique research into how students and instructors can most effectively use AI in education.
Boosting Engagement with GenAI: How Interview Practice Improves Learning
Dr. Angele Beausoleil, a UBC Sauder entrepreneurship educator, designs a Generative AI (GenAI) exercise to simulate empathy interviews before sending students to engage with real customers. The activity helped them explore target customer personas, practice open-ended interview techniques, and analyze responses for key themes. Students reported increased engagement, enjoyment, and appreciation for GenAI’s role in interview preparation and narrative analysis, with a few noting concerns about AI inaccuracies and biases. Overall, the activity demonstrated the potential of well-designed GenAI experiences to enhance qualitative research skills and student learning.
Enhancing Clinical Skills with GENRx: A Generative AI Approach to Pharmacy Education
A team from the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences shares what sparked their use of Generative AI in a teaching and learning activity—and key insights they’ve gained through this experience so far.
Transforming MTRL 251: student-partnered course redesign through digital integration and artificial intelligence
Dr. Amir Dehkhoda employed Generative AI to revamp a core engineering course, thermodynamics, to boost student engagement and comprehension. In collaboration with faculty, students, and GenAI specialists, Dr. Dehkhoda explores effective GenAI tools and strategies for question generation and the creation of digital aids, promising a significant impact on student participation and overall learning experience. This approach not only enhances learning experiences but also fosters a culture of innovation, suggesting significant potential for applying these methods across various courses. The initiative aims to refine pedagogical practices through strategic GenAI tool integration, highlighting the evolving role of technology in education. His work integrates GenAI models for educational content, employing advanced AI like GPT-3.5, 4, Gemini, DALL-E, Eduaide, and Llama 2. It fine-tunes GenAI settings for optimal performance and rigorously assesses the quality of generated content and images, revealing GenAI’s potential in creating relevant educational materials. However, challenges in accurate visual representation persist.
Designing a case-based activity and simulation using an AI chatbot
UBC Health is set to pilot a GenAI-powered chatbot into the Integrated Curriculum, a series of interprofessional workshops and online modules embedded in the core curricula of UBC’s health professional programs. These learning activities are specifically designed to support the development of competencies needed for collaborative practice. The GenAI-powered chatbot will be featured in a pilot activity using the academic electronic health record (aEHR) platform.
Student reflections on how GenAI supports learning in a Graduate Hydrology course
In EOSC 533, Advanced Groundwater Hydrology, Dr. Roger Beckie encouraged his 36 students to reflect on their experience with GenAI, specifically how students use AI to enhance their learning. He shared a blog post with his students by Sandrine Desforges, Research Associate at the Higher Education Strategy Associates (HESA) that highlights recent developments in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in post-secondary education, featuring new resources such as: The Levels of AI Assistance framework (student guide) and The revised AI Assessment Scale (on a scale that spans from No AI to AI Exploration)
Q&A – How Dr. Maryam Aliabadi uses Generative AI to automatically grade exams in her Cloud Computing course
Dr. Maryam Raiyat Aliabadi is a postdoctoral teaching and research fellow in the Faculty of Computer Science. In this Q&A, she explains how she and her team are using GenAI to automatically grade exams for her cloud computing course. Responses have been edited for clarity.
Firas Moosvi explores the ethics of generating course materials in his computer fluency class
Firas Moosvi, lecturer in the Department of Computer Science, explores the use of AI for generating his own class materials, and contemplates the ethics of such a choice, given that it draws from the hard work of other educators who have posted their materials on the Internet.
Jared Taylor is encouraging Microbiology 418 students to reflect, and take responsibility when using AI tools
In MICB 418: Industrial Microbiology, Jared Taylor allows students to use any available generative AI tools to research and develop their final group presentation about ethical and legal issues within the field of industrial microbiology. The caveat is that each group must take responsibility for any false information provided by these AI tools. They must also track and report on when and how they used these tools to develop their presentation materials.
Patrick Parra Penefather is infusing AI into creative Media Studies student exercises and assessments
In all courses facilitated by Dr. Patrick Parra Pennefather, assistant professor at UBC Theatre and Film, on creativity, sound, user experience, emerging technology development and collaborative co-creation, students are invited to use Generative AI tools in multiple creative ways for assignments, including text-image, text-video, image-image, image-video, video-video, as well as LLMs to develop scripts and text-speech AI to create voiceovers for videos as well. There is a critical approach to every use of any Generative AI. Students are also provided with resources.
Elisa Baniassad explores using ChatGPT to create Computer Science assessments and practice materials
Elisa Baniassad, associate professor of teaching in the Faculty of Computer Science, explores using ChatGPT to create not only quiz questions, but the associated practice questions.