AI event showcases education’s role in shaping the future of learning

From reflective teaching assistants to AI-powered research partners, Arizona State University’s  Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation faculty, students and staff are exploring how artificial intelligence can be used as a catalyst for creativity and collaboration in education.

To share their findings with others at ASU, members of the college’s AI in Education Learning Futures Collaborative recently organized the AI Carnival to showcase ways that educators and learning support teams can use artificial intelligence to strengthen teaching, enhance learning, support students and improve operational efficiency. The event featured more than 25 AI-inspired projects.

“These projects demonstrate that artificial intelligence has the capacity to transform learning and sharing of knowledge in powerful and deeply relevant ways, and that the more that we can understand how to use these approaches, both effectively and ethically,  the better prepared students can be to navigate their own futures,” said Janel White-Taylor, MLFC’s associate director of intelligent learning systems.

ASU was the first university to collaborate with OpenAI to integrate AI tools across academic and operational environments, and as of October, all students, faculty and staff have no-cost access to Chat GPT Edu with GPT-5.  The event was hosted by MLFC’s AI in Education LFC, the Learning Engineering Institute and the Learning Experience Design Team. 

Read about a few of the projects, and then visit the AI Carnival Presenter site to learn more:  

An AI-powered ICAP tutor
Building on the groundbreaking work of MLFC’s Michelene “Micki” Chi, the Adaptive ICAP Tutor is an AI-powered learning tool that helps educators apply Chi’s influential ICAP theory of Interactive, Constructive, Active and Passive learning to their teaching approaches. Through open-ended, contextualized question, the bot helps instructors prepare for transforming lower-engagement activities into deeper, more interactive learning experiences. The bot was conceptualized by Kurt VanLehn, with the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, and the project involves MLFC postdoctoral researcher Sameena Hossain.

AI that supports reflective decision-making
Enrique Borges, a program manager with ASU’s Principled Innovation®, created a bot with Farnaz Avarzamani, who is enrolled in MLFC’s Educational Policy and Evaluation, PhD program, that is based on the Principled Innovation framework. The framework, which was developed through MLFC, is now one of ASU’s Design Aspirations. The bot takes a reflective rather than directive approach to exploring solutions. Instead of offering answers, it asks guiding questions that help users think through ethical dilemmas and creative challenges — demonstrating how AI can prompt reasoning and collaboration, not just automation or speed. 

Meanwhile, MLFC faculty member Jim Dunnigan and ASU School of Social and Behavior Sciences faculty member Catheryn Reardon,  developed an educator-focused bot called Difficult Conversations aimed at guiding educator interactions with students, K-12 parents and colleagues over topics such as academic performance or behavioral concerns. The bot was also trained on the Principled Innovation framework.

AI mentors and personas
Steve Salik, an MLFC faculty member, has developed AI mentors. These digital partners are designed to enhance and personalize the student experience. They reflect the knowledge base of instructional experts and are intended to supplement instruction, not replace it, while challenging students in the Learning Design and Technologies, MEd program to better understand how such tools may be applied to the learning design environment.
 Watch a video about the project. 

Heather Lange-Bush, another MLFC faculty member, has been working on a project that involves instructional personas that guide students through lessons and assignments. Meanwhile, the students are building AI personas to conduct simulated interviews for a course assignment on educational partnerships, which eases logistical challenges by reducing the need to rely on live interview subjects.

Operational efficiency through AI
MLFC accounting specialist Dan Arellano, as part of the fiscal and business operations team, is involved in using AI to streamline procurement and grant management. Through a bot that helps automate workflows, Arellano is contributing to expediting processes — allowing staff and faculty to focus more on teaching and research. It’s a model of how AI can make systems more human by giving people back time for creative and intellectual work.  Arellanos is a graduate student with the ASU Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions.

AI Observation coding for early learning
MLFC’s Lauren van Huisstede is developing an AI agent that automatically codes preschool classroom observations, focusing on children’s engagement and participation during story time. Traditionally, this process is costly, time-consuming and prone to human bias. Her AI-driven system streamlines data collection and analysis, providing timely, consistent feedback for teachers and program evaluators. The project illustrates how AI can enhance early research by making observational assessment more efficient, reliable and scalable.

AI and research

Researchers such as MLFC’s Audrey Beardsley are examining how AI is reshaping scholarly publishing in education. They are exploring AI’s current and potential roles in peer review, editorial decision-making, editorial board development and journal policy formation, while offering critical and practical insights for developing ethical, inclusive and future-oriented editorial ecosystems.

Students from MLFC Professor Punya Mishra’s class, Education by Design: Synthesizing Learning Experiences with GenAI, also shared their AI-inspired class projects. The class includes high school students, undergraduates, masters students and doctoral students, working together to creatively explore AI’s potential. Some of the students developed social media short films, or ads, to bring to life the work of scholars and thought leaders from past generations. The students, who represent a range of disciplines from across the university, also designed a range of educational software tools through a process of no-code coding, which is also known as vibe-coding. Student work can be viewed at the DCI991 website, created by the students. 

“Our students are heading into a world where artificial intelligence is integrated into every field. Preparing them means not only giving them access to these tools, but helping them learn how to question, adapt and create with these tools responsibly as they co-design a human-centered future,” said Mishra, who is also director of Innovative Learning Futures at the ASU’s Learning Engineering Institute.