The Learning Technologies program at the University of Minnesota will be offering a new course this Spring.
CI 5330 (Spring 2025)
Special Topics in Learning Technologies: AI in Education
Instructor Dr. George Veletsianos (georgev |at| umn.edu)
Fully Online
Jan 21, 2025 – May 05, 2025
Short description: This graduate-level course offers an introductory and expansive investigation of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in education. It will enable learners to (1) investigate the foundations, possibilities, realities, and challenges of AI in education, and (2) gain practical experiences with using AI in education. Through practical and conceptual activities learners will grow their knowledge, skills, and experiences with GenAI in education, and become able to speak fluently about this technology’s proposed benefits (e.g., personalization) and challenges (e.g., biases) in education. The course will balance conceptual and practical experiences, and enable students to use AI tools more effectively and creatively. This course is relevant to numerous learning and teaching contexts, including K-12, higher education, adult education, professional settings, and informal settings.
Long description: This graduate-level course offers an introductory and expansive investigation of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in education. The course focuses on the foundations, possibilities, realities, limitations/challenges, and practical implementation of GenAI in education. Learners will critically examine literature and practice surrounding GenAI and consider both the benefits of this emerging technology (e.g., personalization) as well as its challenges (e.g., biases and environmental concerns). The course will balance conceptual, theoretical, and practical experiences and will emphasize both theory-to-practice and practice-to-theory through active engagement with AI tools. The course is relevant to multiple learning and teaching contexts and will encourage learners to apply concepts to their unique educational contexts, including K-12, higher education, adult education, professional training, and others.
All learners are expected to be active and ongoing participants in the learning process and foster a community of learning. Course activities will use various technologies to seek and share content; and class interactions will incorporate a variety of text-, audio-, and video-based tools. This is a completely online and asynchronous course and will require regular and active participation in class discussions as well as reflective, practical, and analytic work. The course will follow an engaging and flexible online format to include asynchronous activities that are convenient for working professionals and conducive to online learning for students who may be joining the course from across the country and abroad. This is not an independent study course, nor is it self-paced. Rather, the modules and learning activities are designed to promote and encourage social interactions and the development of a learning community as we learn together.
Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to:
- Define a variety of terms relating to GenAI (e.g., machine learning, large language models, etc)
- Identify conceptual, theoretical and practical issues relating to GenAI
- Expand your GenAI literacies
- Apply GenAI tools, processes, and technologies to education topics of interest
- Explain benefits and drawbacks of GenAI
- Formulate and articulate informed perspectives on key theories and issues relating to GenAI in education
- Discuss the role and practice of GenAI in different contexts
- Discuss contemporary research being conducted in GenAI and the major issues being studied
- Identify, synthesize, and critically evaluate major issues affecting GenAI in education
- Practice and develop prompt engineering techniques
- Use GenAI to develop an education micro application