GenAI 101, IU's free, self-paced course is already helping to transform AI from a curiosity into a core digital literacy. This course emphasizes three core roles for GenAI: prompt engineering as a skill, productivity amplifier for efficiency, and a through partner for creative and critical thinking. Over 30,000 IU learners (students, faculty, and staff) have started the course.
But access and training, while essential, are not sufficient. If generative AI merely automates tasks, we will have missed the larger opportunity. The real question is how AI can help us reimagine pedagogy, research, and service so that human expertise, judgment, and creativity remain at the center of learning. That is the challenge we intend to meet. Over the summer we had 200+ faculty participate in an AI tool comparison challenge, which included not only hands-on training but surfaced insights about the strengths of different AI platforms: ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini.
That summer program inspired the new Generative AI Faculty Fellows Program, which brings together 60 faculty members from across IU. Their charge is bold: learn to leverage and integrate AI effectively and ethically into their teaching, scholarship, and service. The program itself leverages gaming pedagogy, with fellows organized into teams and learning communities, playing their way through challenges in a friendly competition. The goal: to situate AI not as a shortcut, but as a catalyst for innovation. Fellows are experimenting with new assignments that make learning AI-resilient, designing research projects that harness AI responsibly, and rethinking how administrative work might be streamlined so faculty can focus more fully on students.
The use of games is deliberate. Play is one of the most powerful engines of learning. By approaching generative AI through challenge-based activities, our faculty fellows are modeling the spirit of exploration that higher education needs now more than ever. Generative AI will not wait for us to catch up. Its pace of change is relentless, and its implications touch every corner of the university. But IU is not standing still. By equipping our faculty with the tools, the skills, and the freedom to explore, we are charting a path forward—one where AI enhances, rather than diminishes, the work of teaching and discovery.
The future of higher education will be written by those willing to experiment, collaborate, and reimagine what learning can be. At Indiana University, that future has already begun.
