Join us this year for AI Cross-Campus Communities of Practice, a professional development initiative funded by SUNY’s Innovative Instruction Technology Grants. Participating faculty will earn a $500 stipend to collaborate with colleagues from across the SUNY system, engage with AI tools, and update your teaching practices. You can choose to take part in one of our communities:

• AI and Accessibility: Explore how AI tools can support more accessible teaching and learning.

• AI and Writing Across the Disciplines: Update your approach to writing assignments after AI’s emergence.

• Build Your Own Chatbot: Create a custom AI chatbot for your course.

• Designing Assignments for Critical AI Literacy: Design a critical, active, and inclusive assignment to foster AI literacy in your discipline.

• Rethinking Assessment in the Age of AI: Develop or revise an assessment to leverage AI or to reinforce academic integrity.

Read on for more information about this opportunity. Apply by September 19.

Program Overview

We invite you to apply to participate in one of five virtual communities of practice related to AI in teaching and learning:

• Assessment
• Chatbots
• Assignments
• Accessibility
• Writing

Our communities are open to instructional faculty of all levels of experience with AI tools. Each participant will be awarded a stipend of $500 to create new course materials related to AI, to attend virtual monthly meetings with colleagues from across the SUNY system, and to participate in a virtual speaker session. At the end of the program, faculty will be invited to share the resources they’ve created on our public site, SUNY AI Community for Educators.

Apply to participate by September 19. Participation in each community is limited, so we ask that you rank your choices. To earn a stipend, task completion and attendance at six monthly meetings (October – May) and a speaker session is required.

Our Communities of Practice

AI and Accessibility

Explore how AI tools can support more accessible teaching and learning.

Led by Luis Colón and Stephanie Pritchard

How can AI tools help make your course materials more accessible for all students? Our community of practice will explore how AI tools can support accessibility efforts in teaching and learning. In this community of practice, you will:

• Explore different AI tools (both free and paid) to support different teaching and learning needs
• Share tools, ideas, and resources with other members
• Discuss challenges and roadblocks in using AI tools for accessibility (including for headings, captioning, alt-text, color contrast, text-to-speech, and more)
• Work in Brightspace to see how these tools can support accessible teaching and course development

You will create your own accessible materials and help develop a resource guide to advise others who are looking to make their courses more accessible and inclusive. This work supports instructors as campuses prepare to meet Title II accessibility compliance by the April 2026 deadline. For more details on Title II, visit the Stony Brook Title II Update – Frequently Asked Questions page.

AI and Writing Across the Disciplines

Update your approach to writing assignments after AI’s emergence.

Led by Matt Newcomb and Laura Pierie

Have you tried to pretend that students aren’t using AI on writing assignments? Are you asking students to write essays in class, in blue books, because they are using AI? There is a better way.

The AI and Writing Across the Disciplines community of practice will explore vital topics such as academic integrity in AI-assisted writing, the role of AI literacy in courses that include writing, fostering originality and critical thinking in the age of AI, designing AI-informed assignments, the impacts of AI on writing skills and practices, and resisting AI use where appropriate. You will develop at least one new or significantly revised writing assignment with appropriate lesson(s), and the group’s set of assignments will be used and shared at their campuses.

Build Your Own Chatbot

Create a custom AI chatbot for your course.

Led by John Kane and David Wolf

Would you like to create a chatbot to help improve the effectiveness of your course? Several platforms, including ChatGPT, support the design of chatbots that can be trained on user-provided data and can automate repetitive tasks. 

Not sure why you’d want to build a chatbot? Consider these common uses for AI chatbots in higher ed: 

• Course Socratic tutor chatbots can be trained on course-specific OER resources (when available). These can be used in multiple sections of a class.
• Section-specific class support chatbots can be trained on the course syllabus to address questions about course policies, due dates, and campus support resources. These may also be trained with OER materials (when available) as Socratic tutors. 
• Course design chatbots can help with the design of course rubrics, assignments, discussion prompts, and case studies.
• Course improvement chatbots can suggest enhancements in the design of educational materials, including tasks such as creating assignments that rely on the TILT framework, introducing more active learning activities, transforming a class (or a portion of a class) with the UDL framework, or evaluating course materials for inclusive examples and language.
• Chatbots can take digital input from classroom assessment techniques to summarize major themes in student responses and strategies for addressing these.

Join us to develop one or more chatbots for your courses. We will focus first on tutoring chatbots, with the option to build alternate or additional tools.

Designing Assignments for Critical AI Literacy

Design a critical, active, and inclusive assignment to foster AI literacy in your discipline.

Led by Racheal Fest

This community of practice will support faculty in developing assignments that engage students in critical, active, and inclusive approaches to AI. Each participant will create or revise an AI course policy and then design an assignment that helps students engage with and evaluate AI tools appropriate to your discipline. In addition to sharing various approaches to critical AI literacy, we will talk about how to select AI tools best suited to your course, how to align your AI assignment with course policies and learning objectives, and how to ensure your assignment is inclusive.

Rethinking Assessment in the Age of AI

Develop or revise an assessment to leverage AI or to reinforce academic integrity.

Led by Alexis Clifton, Deepa Deshpande, and Yi Zhang

Are you working to update your assessments in response to generative AI? Join us to explore the transformative potential of AI in grading, feedback, adaptive learning—and in how students themselves engage with AI as part of the learning process.

Together, we’ll:

• Experiment with AI-powered tools through hands-on tasks.
• Rethink traditional assessment by exploring how to design tasks that either integrate AI to support student learning (e.g., AI-assisted writing, problem solving, and revision) or are intentionally resistant to AI misuse.
• Engage in monthly virtual meetings and complete brief reflective tasks between sessions.
• Share resources and test emerging technologies.
• Discuss academic integrity, ethical implications, and ways to increase engagement in an AI-enabled environment.

You will design or redesign one or two assessments to either leverage AI for deeper, more personalized learning or to reinforce integrity and independent thinking. These redesigned assessments will be compiled into a cross-disciplinary resource library for broader faculty use.

Leadership Team

• Alexis Clifton, Director of the Teaching and Learning Center, SUNY Geneseo
• Luis Colón, Instructional Designer, Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching, Stony Brook University
• Deepa Deshpande, PhD, Associate Director, Center for Innovation and Teaching Excellence, SUNY Alfred
• Racheal Fest, PhD, Specialist in Pedagogy, Faculty Center for Teaching, Learning and Scholarship, SUNY Oneonta
• John Kane, PhD, Director, Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching, SUNY Oswego
• Matthew Newcomb, PhD, Director, Faculty Development Center, English Professor, SUNY New Paltz
• Laura Pierie, Associate Professor of Humanities, Division of Human Development and Society, SUNY Morrisville
• Stephanie Pritchard, MFA, Coordinator of the Writing Center, SUNY Oswego
• David Wolf, Director of Instructional Design and Online Learning, SUNY Schenectady
• Yi Zhang, PhD, Senior Instructional Designer, Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching, Stony Brook University