The AI Assistant Pilot is an experimental community of practice for exploring the educational role of AI at Boston College.
Building custom AI assistants allows us to move beyond general-purpose chatbots and begin exploring what’s possible when we can customize what an AI tool does to serve particular purposes.
The goal is to develop a community of practice that helps educators work with AI hands on and learn from each other’s experiments.
Past Initiatives
Spring 2024 Pilot
During the spring semester of 2024, CDIL facilitated a chatbot pilot meant to help us learn about AI and begin growing a community of practice to help shape the role of AI at Boston College.
- Read about the vision for the pilot: “Learning with Course Chatbots: A Pilot.”
- Reflections on what we learned: Helping Chatbots Find their Purpose
2024-2025 Purposeful AI Working Group
This year-long working group invited faculty to take an active role in shaping AI’s impact on education at Boston College. Through hands-on experimentation and collaborative reflection, participants explored how AI might be purposefully integrated into their teaching in ways that align with their values and enhance student learning.
Participants built custom AI Assistants for their courses and reflected on what they learned, both about AI and their own teaching in the process.
Current Pilot: Areas of Experimentation
Prompt-Driven Assistants
We’re experimenting with educationally-oriented platforms, including Cogniti and Playlab, that make it possible to design AI experiences for students shaped by custom prompts and selected resources.
Content-Driven Assistants
We’re exploring the possibilities in NotebookLM’s “grounded” approach, where you create a curated space for students to engage with content in several different ways in the context of your course.
Learning Opportunities
If you’re new to AI or want spaces to experiment, we recommend one of the following hands-on workshop series to help develop your ideas.
A three-session workshop series meant to help you prototype a custom AI assistant to explore practical uses of AI in your context.
A three-session workshop series meant to help you explore how a content-grounded AI platform like NotebookLM might be useful for your teaching or research.
Interested in Joining the Pilot?
If you’re interested in exploring an idea for an AI Assistant, please fill out the application form so we can find the right path for you.
If you’ve already tried something or are in the middle of an experiment, it would still be helpful for you to submit it so we can meet you and build a list of use cases from around campus.
Questions?
Feel free to use this form to contact Tim Lindgren in CDIL with any questions.