AI on Campus

AI is already happening across CU Boulder - in labs, classrooms, and everyday campus operations - supported by a growing set of initiatives, events, and communities of practice. Together, these campus efforts help people learn from one another, develop shared practices, and expand responsible use in ways that fit CU Boulder’s needs and values. Whether you’re just getting started or already deep in the work, there’s a place for you to participate and contribute.

AI Strategic Steering Committee

This a campus-wide AI strategic steering committee has representation from research, teaching and learning, administrative and operational disciplines. Members assist with the creation of resources and guidance to campus users. Learn more about the recently updated AISS Committee.

Colorado AI Lab

The Colorado AI Lab is a hub for AI research and teaching at CU Boulder. Meet the faculty advancing the state of the art of the field, explore academic programs and courses, and learn how multidisciplinary AI research is shaping campus and beyond.

Visit the Colorado AI Lab

AI Literacy Foundations Course

The AI Literacy Foundations course, developed through a cross-campus collaboration between OIT, the Center for Teaching and Learning, and the Office of Academic Learning Innovation, is available to all CU Boulder faculty,staff and, as of March 2026, all students too!

The AI Literacy Foundations Canvas course is a self-paced course designed specifically for CU Boulder community members with little prior experience with artificial intelligence. The goal is to increase access to AI literacy resources across campus, empowering educators, learners, and administrators to confidently discern whether or not, and how, to use AI tools.

This one-hour course is accessible to all CU faculty, staff and students through CU Boulder’s instance of Canvas. You will be asked to authenticate into the Canvas LMS using your IdentiKey credentials. Once enrolled, learners can locate the course by clicking “Courses” in the left navigation panel of Canvas, then clicking into the “AI Literacy Foundations” course. Those who complete the course can be awarded a CU Boulder-issued digital recognition badge.

For questions or issues, please contact the IT Service Center.

Campus Events and Initiatives 

There are countless in-person and virtual events promoting the responsible adoption of AI on campus. Here is a short list of opportunities to get involved so check back here often for events such as AI showcases, workshops and recordings of those events. If you have an upcoming campus AI event, complete our AI contact form to have your event added below! 

There is a great need to think about how generative artificial intelligence (AI) integrates with and impacts teaching and learning in higher education.

The Center for Teaching & Learning (CTL) and Continuing Education (CE) each host their own AI Literacy Ambassador programs to bring together educators from colleges across campus and teaching modalities that represent diverse disciplines and who are moderately experienced to advanced thinkers around teaching, learning and AI. Cohort mentors and participants will:

  • Explore how departments, instructors, and students interact with, respond to, and accept, ignore, or reject uses of generative AI.
  • Create information sharing support structures (e.g. live cohort sessions, listservs, repositories) for participants to gain key skills and support each other's gen AI investigations and innovations.
  • Support one another in developing a discipline specific innovation associated with gen AI, which can focus on pedagogy and/or instigating related unit level dialogue about gen AI. 

Interested in joining a future cohort at either the CTL or CE cohort? Learn more about the AI Literacy Ambassador Program here.

AI Literacy Ambassador Spring Innovation Project Showcase

This event will provide you with the opportunity to hear first-hand how 2025-26 participants, including educators from diverse disciplines across our campus, are addressing and/or integrating AI Literacy into their classroom and their assignments. 

CE AI Literacy Ambassador Spring Innovation Project Showcase

CU Boulder’s AI Ambassador program sponsored by the Division of Continuing Education brought together CE faculty for a series of discussions and then they each designed an AI Innovation for their class. Attend this showcase to learn how participants redesigned their courses and assessments to meet the challenges and opportunities that GenAI tools have brought to the classroom.
 

Join Blair Young for an engaging session in the Teaching & Learning with AI Community of Practice (CoP). These events are designed for educators interested in exploring the evolving role of artificial intelligence in teaching and learning. Together, we’ll delve into practical applications, ethical considerations, and strategies for integrating AI tools effectively in the classroom.

Click on the links below to learn more:

Teaching Beginning Language Learners in the Age of AI: Principles and Practices for New Instructors
Friday, August 14 from 10:15-11:15am
CASE Building Room E351 (In-person only)
Speaker: Sandrine Vandermarliere, Associate Teaching Professor, French & Italian

Session Description: Designed for new world language instructors teaching in-person beginning-level courses, this interactive workshop will help you build a communicative, student-centered language classroom from the very first day. Through demonstrations of classroom activities and discussion, you will explore practical approaches to common challenges, including building community, reducing student anxiety, getting students talking in the target language from day one, and keeping learners actively engaged. We will also discuss how to help students use generative AI in ways that support language learning rather than replace it.

What is AI Literacy & Why Does It Matter? 
Friday, August 14 from 11:30-12:30pm
CASE Building Room E390 (In-person only)
Moderator: Blair Young, Innovation Catalyst, CTL
Panelists: Alpna Bhatia (CE & Economics), Mervenuer Cetin (CMDI), Chris Ostro (CE & English), Conor Waladay (OIT)

Session Description: Now, more than ever, AI Literacy matters. But what is AI Literacy, exactly? And why should it matter to you? While AI Literacy can be adapted to different departments and fields, as well as evolve over time, a common definition for this critical 21st century literacy is: Possessing the knowledge, skills, and attitudes required to understand, evaluate, and effectively interact with artificial intelligence systems. If you’d like to learn more about what AI Literacy looks like in practice and how it can be addressed and/or integrated into your course and cultivated among your students and colleagues, join panelists from across campus to learn about how they explore, practice, and teach AI Literacy in their disciplines. Leave this session with a deeper understanding of AI Literacy practices that you can implement now, and information about AI Literacy resources at CU Boulder.

Co-Creating an AI Use Policy with your Students (Teaching and Learning with AI Community of Practice)
Friday, August 14 from 3:15-4:15pm
https://cuboulder.zoom.us/j/95609196890 (Zoom only)
Presenter: Nicole Jobin, Senior Instructor, Stories and Societies Residential Academic Program  

Session Description: Students thrive when they have a clear understanding of course goals, objectives, and acceptable uses of technology. By initiating conversations about gen AI, we not only set expectations but also invite students to share their perspectives on this world-changing technology. Such conversations can set the stage for co-creating an AI Use policy with your students at the start of the semester. In this session, join Nicole Jobin (Stories & Societies RAP) to learn about her approach to engaging students in open dialogue about gen AI and building a transparent use policy alongside her students that addresses usage guidelines, academic integrity, and that ties gen AI use levels back to course learning outcomes.

Building Trust and Centering Student Learning in the Age of Generative AI
Tuesday, August 18, 3:15-4:15pm
https://cuboulder.zoom.us/j/98275507693 (Zoom only)
Speaker: Rebecca Lee, Course Developer, MSU Denver Center for Teaching, Learning, and Design

Session Description: Within higher ed, one of the most pervasive issues to stem from the advent of generative AI is a much more fragile sense of trust between students and their instructional teams.  This distrust can often originate from diverging perspectives and knowledge about generative AI: the contexts in which it is helpful and ethical to use, as well as the degree to which AI detectors are fair or useful. In this workshop, TAs, GPTIs, and faculty will build strategies for dialoguing openly with students about generative AI ethics and classroom policies, whether your own or those of a supervising instructor.  These strategies will help promote transparency in the classroom, center student learning, and ultimately, build more trust with students.

Master Gemini and NotebookLM with Google and OIT. Learn the P.A.R.T.S. prompting framework and CU Boulder security policies to safely streamline your workflows. Essential for faculty and staff. Register now for our May 11 workshop!

The Students as Partners program pairs equity-minded students with faculty or staff members who are interested in integrating a learner’s perspective into their teaching practice. Attend this showcase to learn more about the program and the unique qualities of each partnership from past and present participants of our fall 2025 and spring 2026 cohorts on Tuesday, April 14, from 3:30-5:00 pm in CTL E390. Walk through our gallery and talk to each pair about their projects - including those that focus on critical AI literacy and use of AI to meet learning objectives.  We hope you’ll drop in, grab a bite to eat, engage in dynamic conversations, and leave inspired. RSVP is not required but greatly appreciated.

  • Tuesday, April 14
  • 3:30 - 5:00 pm
  • The Center for Teaching & Learning workshop space (E390) in the CASE building
  • Learn more

The Division of Continuing Education’s Learning Design Group hosts a virtual Course Design Series on timely topics related to teaching and learning.

Spring 2026 Session Topics:

For full details, past session recordings, and resources, visit the Course Design Series page.

Explore the intersection of compliance and artificial intelligence in this session. This talk featuring Conor Waladay, OIT's AI Program Manager, will highlight emerging risks, responsibilities, and opportunities in the context of AI in higher education.

NAIRR Pilot Partner Series Webinar

Chameleon is a large-scale, reconfigurable experimental platform funded by NSF and built to support computer science systems research, education, and emerging applications including AI/ML. This webinar will provide an accessible introduction to Chameleon's capabilities for the NAIRR community. We will cover how to get started with Chameleon, including the project application process and available support for researchers, students, and classes. Attendees will learn about Chameleon's unique features — including bare metal access, advanced reservation systems, power monitoring, and edge computing resources — and see live demonstrations using the Chameleon web portal and programmatic tools like python-chi and Jupyter notebooks. We will also highlight real-world use cases from Chameleon's community, spanning AI and machine learning, reproducibility, energy-efficient computing, and systems research.

  • Thursday, May 7, 2026
  • 12 p.m.
  • The Zoom webinar registration link will be available ONE WEEK before the event and will be emailed to the address you provide in this form. 
AI Unlocked: Empowering Higher Education through Research and Discovery

This two-day event will provide a unique opportunity for researchers, educators, and students to learn how to integrate AI tools in research and classroom settings. Registration is free and the event is sponsored by ACCESS, the NAIRR Pilot and the University of Colorado Boulder. Space is limited to 150 participants.

How CU Boulder innovators are using AI to win major grants

The Research & Innovation Office (RIO) invites faculty, staff and students to a special virtual event showcasing how CU Boulder researchers are successfully using artificial intelligence to enhance proposal development and secure major grants.

This session will highlight practical, real-world strategies for integrating AI into idea generation, narrative framing and proposal refinement—offering attendees actionable insights they can use immediately. 

This working group is open to faculty from across disciplines to address salient gen AI topics that impact faculty, students, and teaching and learning. In Fall 2024, the working group developed new AI Use Syllabus Guidance which was released in January 2025. In Spring 2025, the working group will address honor code considerations including best practices for grading and gen AI (plagiarism detectors, student privacy, intellectual property) and communicating with students about classroom gen AI policies and practices as they relate to the honor code. The group meets online every other Friday from 12-1pm. Please email Shelly Miller, at shelly.miller@colorado.edu, to participate.

The CU Generative Futures Lab on campus is an informal and experimental space for faculty, staff and students to interact with generative text, voice, image, and knowledge-management and research tools. Hosted by CU faculty, the lab is open to the campus to learn more about the possibilities and considerations surrounding AI use.

If you have questions about the lab, email Diane at Diane.Sieber@colorado.edu.

When: 12-3 p.m., Monday - Friday
Where: Discovery Learning Center, Room 1B10

Please join the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Community of Practice for the AI @ CU Boulder Spring Showcase. The showcase will discuss the state of AI on campus today and highlight three unique ways that AI is being utilized within teaching, research and administration on campus.

Recording link; passcode: Ca9ZG$B+
(you must first log in to Zoom with your username@colorado.edu address and IdentiKey password)

This showcase highlighted three ways that AI is being utilized in teaching, research and administration on the CU Boulder campus. Here are the presenters and the topics they discussed:

Michael Klymkowsky, MCDB faculty 
AI in the classroom: Socratic tutor

Esther Rolf, Computer Science faculty 
AI in research: Using AI to analyze large data sets

Tim Crean, OIT staff  
AI in operations: Microsoft 365 Copilot & GenAI capabilities

Recording link; passcode: +.sVJwW4 
(you must first log in to Zoom with your username@colorado.edu address and IdentiKey password)

This session covered Microsoft Copilot foundations, prompt-crafting tips and tricks, and what Copilot offers compared to other Gen AI tools.

Recording link 
(you must log in with your CU Boulder username and IdentiKey password)

Join the AI Community of Practice

All CU Boulder faculty and staff can join the AI Community of Practice. This community uses Microsoft Teams as the hub for community and collaboration. To join, click the + AICoP Microsoft Team button below. A moderator will have to approve your request to ensure that you are a current CU Boulder faculty or staff member.

  Join AICoP Microsoft Team 

AI Use Case Repository

We are evaluating campus requests for AI functionality in order to best inform our future roadmap and possible tool pilots. Understanding how CU Boulder faculty, staff and researchers wish to incorporate AI tools and functions into their work can help determine campus focus and priorities. Share your request via the AI Use Case Repository request form.

  Fill Out AI Use Case Request 

AI Resources