Georgian College receives $80, 000 grant to research AI in faculty development

An $80, 000 Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) grant will help Georgian College and five other organizations facilitate research on how Artificial Intelligence (AI) impacts faculty teaching journeys.

The grant aims to understand how faculty at Georgian are engaging with AI and to establish a responsible path forward that enhances both teaching and student support. Through participatory action research over the next two years, the study will explore faculty confidence levels, AI literacy, pedagogy and ethics, with the goal of developing practical policies and resources. Key questions the grant will aim to answer include how faculty are using AI, their perceptions of its role and strategies for ethical integration.

The work will be stewarded by team members from Georgian’s Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL) and Institutional Research and Strategic Insights (IRSI), who will work with core target groups to collect insights and data. These insights will be shared with the other grant recipients to cross-pollinate research to continue establishing a path forward with AI.

Yael Katz, Vice President Academic shared “This is a timely and important project that will help us understand how best to navigate and support innovation at the intersection of AI with teaching and learning contexts of the 21st century. I look forward to seeing this exciting research unfold.”

The Georgian research team consists of Courtney Duthie, Mark Ihnat, Samatha Sullivan Sauer and Tracy Mitchell-Ashley. The team chose to use Participatory Action Research (PAR) methodology, to learn from and honour the faculty experience. The project, Navigating the AI frontier: The faculty development journey with AI in postsecondary education, will help the team gain a deeper understanding of the reality of our faculty working with AI.

Learn more about the HEQCO project