This CORE-AI project is a scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) project which generates evidence of learning from multiple institutions.
By academic year 2023–2024, the need to understand and respond to generative AI (GenAI) in higher education had become urgent. Instructors were being asked to make rapid decisions about syllabus policies, assignment design, and learning outcomes in the face of powerful new tools, while institutions struggled to respond to this pedagogical upheaval. How could they move from ad hoc experimentation and piecemeal adoption of tools to coordinated, ethical, and scalable integration in ways that reflected the practical realities of diverse teaching and learning contexts?
Rather than rush to implement isolated workshops or compliance-oriented policies, three educational developers, Breana Bayraktar (George Mason University), Dayna Henry (James Madison University), and Jessica Taggart (University of Virginia), launched a statewide initiative focused on understanding how GenAI was already affecting teaching and learning, and how instructors and students were navigating these changes in real time. We proposed a statewide, cross-institutional model that leverages Centers for Teaching and Learning (CTLs) to foster a holistic response to pedagogical change and enable innovation at scale.
Through a three-stage process of shared inquiry, resource development, and strategic dissemination, our CTLs served not just as sites for pedagogical skill development, but also as incubators for distributed leadership in AI-informed teaching—fostering instructor agency, peer learning, and evidence-informed resource creation. These efforts emphasized inquiry-driven, evidence-informed, and equity-centered approaches to teaching improvement. The result is a replicable model for how institutions—or groups of institutions—can respond to disruptive technologies not with reactive policy, but with thoughtful, research-informed, and collectively shaped innovation.
Read more about MegaSoTL projects from Sara Nasrollahian Mojarad and Laura Cruz in To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development: “MegaSoTL: Supporting pedagogical research across multiple institutions”
Poster on the development of this project presented at the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL) International Conference in November 2025: